Monthly Archives: January 2017

  • The Big Country

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1958)

    The opening titles of The Big Country appear against alternating monochrome and colour shots of a moving stagecoach.   The black-and-white images show the coach relatively close up, focusing on the wheels, the horses and their hooves, the motion.   The colour shots place the vehicle in a vast landscape.   Both sets of images combine to establish emphatically what type of film this will be but William Wyler is also using his introduction to juxtapose the texture of early Westerns and the wide-screen possibilities that CinemaScope – or, in the case of this movie, Technirama – had made available to Hollywood film-makers in the 1950s.  The stagecoach’s passengers include a wealthy Easterner called James McKay (Gregory Peck).  His immediate purpose in travelling west is to be reunited with his fiancée Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker), whom he got to know when she was visiting Baltimore.  In the longer term, he’ll settle and they’ll live in her part of the world, or so Pat hopes.  McKay comes from a family of ship owners; having served as a sea captain, he’s familiar with wide open spaces but everyone out West keeps telling him ‘this is a big country’ – so predictably that Jim is soon making a joke of it.  Following the locals’ lead, Wyler and his cinematographer Franz F Planer keep showing off the immense terrain (the film was shot in various California locations, including the Mojave Desert) – they do this to good and varied dramatic effect.

    The moment Jim McKay alights from the stagecoach, his smart suit and especially his city slicker’s bowler hat set an audience of kids sniggering.  Later the same day, as he and Pat drive their gig into town, four young local men – the Hannassey brothers – decide to ‘give him a welcome’:  this progresses from snatching and fooling with his bowler hat to yanking McKay out of the gig and lassoing him.  Pat is astonished when McKay dusts himself down, declares no harm done, and to her disappointment, shows no sign of wanting to avenge his humiliation.  This fast-moving, startling scene sows the seeds for much of what’s to follow in The Big Country.  It’s an early indication that Jim and Pat may not be made for each other; and that Buck Hannassey (Chuck Connors) and his younger brothers, foolish and aggressive as they evidently are, aren’t the ‘trash, pure and simple’ of Pat’s description.  At the heart of the story, adapted from a novel by Donald Hamilton, is a long-standing feud between the patriarchs of the Terrill and Hannassey families.  Pat’s father Henry (Charles Bickford), known as ‘the Major’, and Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives) are both cattle ranchers but they and their offspring live in starkly different circumstances – in luxury and squalor respectively.  The feud centres on rights to water on a third ranch, the ‘Big Muddy’, owned by the unmarried schoolteacher Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons).  Julie allows both families to water their cattle and, in an attempt to keep a fragile peace, refuses to sell Big Muddy to Henry Terrill, who wants not just the ranch but to drive his enemies out of business.  This may be a big country but the Major is determined it ain’t big enough for the both of him and Rufus Hannassey.

    The spaciousness of the landscape is complemented by William Wyler’s clear, confident storytelling.  The narrative tempo tends to the leisurely but this is often time well spent:  in the uneasy pauses in McKay’s breakfast conversation with his prospective father-in-law, as the younger man thinks out and mentally checks that his words are sufficiently diplomatic before he voices them; in his attempts to master ‘Old Thunder’, a notorious unbroken horse on the Terrill ranch.  When the Major’s jealous foreman Steve Leech (Charlton Heston) offers Old Thunder as his mount, McKay quickly recognises this as another attempt to make him look a fool and declines the invitation.  His apparent cowardice troubles Pat but, when the Major, Leech and others have left to give the Hannassey boys a taste of their own medicine in revenge for what they did to him the previous day, McKay sets about breaking the horse, with the assistance of the Mexican ranch hand Ramón (Alfonso Bedoya).  By cross-cutting between what the Major’s posse does to the Hannasseys and McKay’s dogged efforts with Old Thunder, Wyler not only contrasts the characters’ different imperatives.  He also conveys how long it takes McKay to prevail – and so avoids making his success with the animal a mechanical foregone conclusion.

    Jim McKay buys Big Muddy from Julie Maragon.  The purchase is intended as a wedding present but Pat’s reaction to his determination to maintain the Hannasseys’ water rights to the land is the straw that breaks the couple’s engagement.  The moral schema of The Big Country is set out and the picture’s pious point of view, embodied in Gregory Peck’s thoughtful, firm-jawed rectitude, is clarified long before the end of its 165 minutes.  It’s fortunate that, in the extended climax, attention can switch from the protagonist to Rufus Hannassey and Steve Leech, both of whose loyalties are increasingly conflicted.  Wyler gives Burl Ives a splendid entrance, as Rufus gatecrashes a grand party at the Terrill residence to convey some bitter home truths to the Major and his guests.  At times, Ives is at risk of being upstaged by his false eyebrows but he’s powerful and poignant in his later scenes.  (His Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Big Country wasn’t undeserved although it may have helped that Ives’s memorable Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof came in the same year; in fact, the two films were released just a fortnight apart.)  Charlton Heston went straight on from this to make Ben-Hur with Wyler.  As Sam Leech, he’s too deliberate, in both his facial reactions and his line readings, for as long as Leech, who also carries a torch for Pat, considers McKay his rival and arch enemy.  Heston is unexpectedly moving, however, in the closing stages, when Steve Leech has come to see the error of Major Terrill’s ways.

    As was often the case, Gregory Peck’s stiff uprightness helps make him effective in his character’s more comical moments; as nearly always, Peck is excellent in his scenes with women.  The Big Country has two decent female roles – or, at least, two good female performances.   When Jim McKay and Julie Maragon first meet, he says she doesn’t look much like a schoolteacher (in response to her remark that he doesn’t look much like a sailor).  This is right enough:  Julie never actually does any teaching in the movie and you know she’s in it principally to become the eventual love of the hero’s life – but Jean Simmons plays her very well.   Her conveying of Julie’s inner thoughts as she weighs up McKay’s offer to buy her ranch may be the best bit of acting in the whole film.  The force of Julie’s contempt, verging on disgust, for the Hannasseys counters her feeling of moral obligation towards them; it’s a welcome, intelligent reminder that doing the right thing by someone isn’t always reinforced by the feelings one shows towards them.  The physical wholeheartedness of Pat’s early embraces of Jim is striking in a film, perhaps especially a Western, of the 1950s.  Carroll Baker gives this girl a convincing appetite and entitlement.  We get a strong sense that Pat’s apparent charms and alienating, selfish narrow-mindedness are two sides of the same coin.

    The turning point in the hostility between Jim McKay and Steve Leech comes in a nocturnal, bare-knuckle fist fight between them, which ends in an exhausted draw.  The outcome may be too simply morally instructive; a culminating clash of moralities, expressed in physical combat, is familiar in Western and other film genres; but William Wyler’s shooting of the contest is satisfyingly complex.  Echoing the scheme of the opening titles, he switches repeatedly between long shot and relative close-up.  Again, this seems to contrast ancient and modern approaches to a scene of this kind.  I’m no expert but I’d guess that most directors of Wyler’s and previous generations would have focused on the combatants; later film-makers would have stressed the smallness of the two figures in the landscape, the absurd insignificance of the human squabble.  Wyler does make the latter point but without detracting from interest in McKay and Leech as individuals.  In the mid-1920s, William Wyler was exclusively a maker of Western shorts (two-reelers lasting twenty-odd minutes and, less often, hour-long six-reelers [1] ).  Over the course of his whole directing career, he built a body of work that’s second to none in satisfying genre expectations and delivering human dramas at the same time:  Jezebel, The Best Years of Our Lives, Detective Story, Roman Holiday, The Collector and Funny Girl are among the examples.  The fist fight in The Big Country epitomises the extent of Wyler’s success in doing the trick with a Western too.  Jerome Moross’s famous, full-bodied score supports the enterprise admirably.

    22 January 2017

    [1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wyler#Filmography for details.

  • Jackie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pablo Larraín (2016)

    During the thirty-four months of John F Kennedy’s presidency, his wife Jackie was an unprecedented First Lady:  a consort of exceptional youth and beauty; a star on TV screens as well as on the pages of newspapers and society magazines.  She was both fashion icon and the perfect wife and mother, to the Kennedy’s young children, Caroline and John Jr.   Jackie’s demure charisma made her a kind of delightful counterweight to the reality and the paranoia of Cold War politics.  A necessary part of that role was being a featherweight counterweight (even though she suffered more than her fair share of maternal trauma:  after a miscarriage in 1955, she gave birth the following year to a stillborn daughter and, in August 1963, to a son who survived only two days).  In the hours and days that followed her husband’s assassination, however, the public perception of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy changed.  The medium that had made her a charming screen celebrity turned Jackie – through the courage and dignity that a worldwide television audience saw – into a substantial heroine.

    The timeframe of Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is the immediate aftermath to the assassination, with flashbacks to the events in Dallas and to the recording of and mock-up clips from the television special, A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F Kennedy, which CBS screened on Valentine’s Day 1962.  (The programme won Jackie Kennedy a special award at that year’s Emmys.)  The inclusion of the latter flashbacks is a clear indication that Larraín and the screenwriter Noah Oppenheim realise the need to remind their audience that the distraught, isolated woman who dominates the film was once this effortlessly chic, relatively carefree hostess.  In spite of this, Jackie is dramatically disappointing just because its central character is largely unvarying.  Behind closed doors, she doesn’t develop in a way that corresponds to the transformation of Jackie Kennedy’s public image.

    The device used to frame the narrative is an interview Jackie (Natalie Portman) gives to a journalist she’s invited to the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port one week after the assassination.  The actual interview, which appeared in Life magazine on 6 December 1963, was with Theodore H White whose non-fiction book The Making of the President had recently won a Pulitzer Prize and whom Jackie Kennedy respected.  Larraín and Oppenheim turn White into an unnamed Everyjournalist (Billy Crudup) and the purpose of his invitation seems to be to allow Jackie to vent her anger with what’s been written about her husband’s legacy in recent days.  She inveighs against the press before she even lets her visitor cross the threshold then insists on the right to decide what he can and can’t reproduce of their conversation.  (This turns out to mean editing not just the journalist’s draft article but also his handwritten notes!)  The effect of this is to present us immediately with a Jackie who is surprisingly but emphatically tough and authoritative.

    On the journey back from Dallas to Washington and the White House, Jackie is bewildered and occasionally incoherent but her distraction is understandable, to put it mildly:  it hardly suggests an inherently timid personality.  Back in the White House, the young widow (worth remembering she was only thirty-four) disconcerts, by her forthrightness and intransigence, people who are naturally inclined to dictate to her what should happen next in terms of funeral arrangements and protocol:  her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) and mother-in-law Rose (Georgie Glen), the new President (John Carroll Lynch) and Johnson’s right-hand man Jack Valenti (Max Casella).  Jackie’s being strong-willed from an early stage makes the continuing startled reaction of her elders artificial.  When Jackie says to Bobby Kennedy, ‘I know you think I’m just a silly little debutante’, the remark makes no sense.  Natalie Portman’s Jackie is anything but.

    If this seems to be confusing Portman’s characterisation with the strength of her presence and the power of her performance, I think that’s partly inevitable – and raises the question of whether she’s the wrong actress for the role.  She’s well cast to the extent that the Jackie Kennedy of Larraín’s film is a woman almost continuously in extremis.  Portman, as she showed in Black Swan, has an appetite and an aptitude for miserable intensity.  In Jackie, she expresses the heroine’s grief and fury impressively, especially in a sequence in which the weeping Jackie wipes bloodstains from her face in the washroom of the plane taking her husband’s body back from Dallas.  It’s no coincidence that she’s less persuasive in the White House tour bits, where you’re conscious of the strain of impersonation of Jackie in happier times.   Portman’s looks prompt another question:  is physical similarity between a biopic actor and the real-life person they’re incarnating especially important when the subject is an ‘icon’ – that is, someone memorable primarily as an image?   Not necessarily perhaps but it matters here, for all the expertise of Natalie Portman and her make-up people.  Her features are formally more flawless than Jackie Kennedy’s but her beauty is consequently not so elusive.  Portman is more imposing and less mysterious.

    The star’s assertive quality is reinforced through Peter Sarsgaard’s weak interpretation of Robert Kennedy.  Sarsgaard, in an unusually off-key performance, makes Bobby less shocked and bereft than petulant and neurasthenic.  Caspar Phillipson has been cast as JFK for facial similarity but he’s much shorter than the six-foot original.  This is made almost comically obvious in an eleventh-hour flashback to Jack and Jackie dancing gaily at a White House ball.  (Peter Sarsgaard, far from a giant, towers over Phillipson.)  Not for the first time (The Right Stuff, The Butler), LBJ is presented, puzzlingly, as a clod.  In this kind of piece, the actors playing less well-known historical personages tend to be at less of a disadvantage.  As Nancy Tuckerman, the White House social secretary during the Kennedy administration, Greta Gerwig seems at first to be hiding beneath her wig but she comes through:  an exchange between her and Natalie Portman provides one of the few moments in the film where the emotions expressed seem natural and are affecting.   About halfway through, Pablo Larraín introduces the character of the Catholic priest (John Hurt) who will officiate at JFK’s interment at Arlington Cemetery.  (It wasn’t clear to me when this was meant to be taking place relative to the funeral service and procession.)   From this point onwards, Jackie’s conversation with the priest virtually competes with her conversation with the journalist as a framing device.  This is odd but the mixture of weakly consoling and more thoughtful, troubling things the priest says is believable.  John Hurt plays him well.

    In this picture, emotional relentlessness and monotony are two sides of the same coin.  While Natalie Portman’s playing compels your attention, the script’s conception of Jackie Kennedy doesn’t supply much in the way of new insight into her personality, once you’ve registered the initial surprise of seeing a harsh, uncompromising aspect.  Because Jackie herself isn’t complex, you’re more aware than you might otherwise be of the tabloid, what-really-went-on-behind-the-scenes strand of the movie.  And Jackie, exceeding the call of morbid duty, verges on the tasteless in conveying – in images and words – the horror of the physical details of John Kennedy’s assassination.  Pablo Larraín may feel it’s important not to shy away from the blood and brains but he achieves a more edifying impact when John Jr suddenly and briefly sobs.  (The moment is strong because the tears aren’t caused specifically by the child’s missing his father but make you think how many more inconsolable tears must have followed in the months and years ahead.)    While the black-and-white tour-of-the-White-House material is visually convincing, the melding of Larraín’s reconstruction of the funeral scenes with occasional news film inserts isn’t as texturally seamless as you might expect from the director of No.

    The Life interview was the source of the Camelot myth of the Kennedy White House.  Jackie Kennedy explained to Theodore White that her husband’s favourite late-evening choice for the turntable was the original Broadway cast recording of Camelot and that JFK particularly liked the lyrics in the title song ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’.  Larraín works this a bit too hard:  we get the song on a bedside record player; then, in the closing stages, Jackie tragically intoning the key lyrics (adding ‘There won’t be another Camelot, not another Camelot’); then Richard Burton’s voice reprising them.   This overkill is less of a problem, though, than Mica Levi’s resoundingly sombre music for Jackie.  Levi wrote a fine score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin a couple of years ago and her music here is undeniably powerful – too powerful:  it’s often competitive with what’s on the screen.  I wonder what Adam Mars-Jones will make of it … [1]

    20 January 2017

    [1]  Afternote:  The answer is in his review in the TLS (27 January 2017) – http://www.the-tls.co.uk/.

     

     

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