Old Yorker

  • High Noon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fred Zinnemann (1952)

    I’ve never had a good visual memory.  Only one image has always stayed with me from films seen in early childhood:  a rip high in the left-hand sleeve of Gary Cooper’s shirt in High Noon.  I’m not sure when the film was first shown or when I first watched it on the BBC.  I am sure I saw it a few times as a child and I think we watched it more than once as a family.  My parents and my brother were keen on Westerns generally but this one seemed to be regarded as somehow exceptional.  The conviction that we all got into it is thanks chiefly, though, to another firmly lodged recollection.  This amounted to confusion around the main female names in the cast.  I remember being taken with, yet worried by, the Mexican woman played by Katy Jurado.  Although Grace Kelly, as Gary Cooper’s sweetheart, didn’t make such a strong impression, I got it into my head that the actress playing the Mexican – or the dark woman, as she was to me at the time – was called Grace Lamoore.  Where did that come from?  My sister, I think:  she may have seen Road to … pictures, and mixed up Katy Jurado’s face with Dorothy Lamour’s (not hard to understand why).   One way and another, High Noon holds a special place in my memory – and everything led up to that torn shirt, the result of a bullet grazing Marshal Will Kane’s arm in his climactic shootout with the Miller gang.

    Fred Zinnemann’s film is famous for various reasons.  The story (more or less) observes the classical unities of time, place and action.  It runs eighty-five minutes, immediately before and just after the hour of the title.  It’s set in and on the outskirts of the (fictitious) frontier town of Hadleyville in New Mexico.  It’s concerned with Will Kane’s discharging what he sees as a moral obligation to confront Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), an outlaw whom Kane brought to justice but who is unexpectedly released from jail, and Miller’s partners in crime.  In Kane’s mind, the imperative is undiminished by the fact that he has, technically, already stepped down as town marshal (his successor in the job will arrive next day).  What’s more, Kane, at the start of the film, exchanges wedding vows with Amy Fowler and is about to leave town with his new bride.  While the narrative may be Aristotelian in structure and the central man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do theme seems quintessentially Western, High Noon‘s meaning has also been interpreted as urgently contemporary.  Carl Foreman’s screenplay was based on The Tin Star, a short story by John W Cunningham, but the dictates of Will Kane’s conscience and his desertion by men he thought were his friends, so that he faces his enemies alone, resonate with Foreman’s own recent experiences when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

    A former member of the Communist Party, Carl Foreman declined to identify fellow ex-members or suspected current members of the Party.  As a result, HUAC labelled him an ‘uncooperative witness’ and he was blacklisted by Hollywood studios.  The controversy also brought to an end his professional partnership with Stanley Kramer, the producer of High Noon.  The politically fervid atmosphere of early 1950s Hollywood helped ensure the film was highly contentious on its original release and, for some, that’s how it stayed.  In a 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne deplored High Noon as ‘the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life’.  This didn’t stop Wayne, the first in a series of actors to be offered and to turn down the lead role, from accepting the Best Actor Oscar on behalf of the absent Gary Cooper, his friend and fellow conservative.  Although termed a ‘friendly witness’ by HUAC, Cooper didn’t name names and later came out against blacklisting, in sharp contrast to Wayne.  In the aforementioned Playboy interview, he also said that he would ‘never regret having helped run [Foreman] out of the country’.

    Even though Foreman himself endorsed the allegorical school of thought[1] about High Noon, its story is also subversive of the traditional screen Western ethos.  Once he and Amy are married, Kane carefully removes his badge of office and hangs it on the wall.  He puts the badge back on when he learns that Frank Miller is arriving on the noon train.  After the shootout, as he and Amy prepare for a second time to leave Hadleyville, Kane looks with contempt at the gathering townspeople who, in his hour of need, were conspicuous by their absence:  the only citizens willing to stand alongside him were a fourteen-year-old boy and the town drunk (both offers responsibly declined).  Before he drives off with Amy, Kane throws his tin star to the dusty ground.  Adherents to orthodox Western models of male courage also deplored what they considered the emasculation of the protagonist.  According to Howard Hawks, in Joseph McBride’s Hawks on Hawks (1982), ‘I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him’.

    It’s the blend of valour and vulnerability that makes Will Kane a compelling character and Gary Cooper plays him memorably.  Cooper had just turned fifty, looks all of that and wasn’t in great health, suffering from back problems and an ulcer.  Though still handsome, he’d lost his former bloom and didn’t attempt to disguise this.  He wore no make-up but the lack of vanity in the performance goes deeper than that.  The actor’s self-exposure fuses affectingly with his character’s predicament, intensifying Kane’s fear and doubt.   In the early wedding scenes with Grace Kelly, Cooper has a charming mix of easy romantic intimacy and modesty.   Later on, as the story darkens, the combination of determination and tiredness in his face ensures there’s no hint of overblown rectitude in Kane’s lonely stand.  Thanks to what Manny Farber described as his ‘beautiful rolling gait’, Cooper’s movement achieves a similar effect.

    In some other respects, High Noon now seems (perhaps always did seem) emotionally forced.  Nearly every one of the eighty-five minutes contains Dimitri Tiomkin’s famous theme music.  The matching theme song ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’ (formally ‘The Ballad of High Noon’), with music by Tiomkin and words by Ned Washington, is excessively in evidence too.  Sung by Tex Ritter, it plays over the opening sequence, as members of the Miller gang (Sheb Wooley, Robert J Wilke and, in his striking screen debut, Lee Van Cleef) head into town to await the arrival of their ringleader.  Washington’s lyrics are nothing if not explicit in setting out the moral dilemma that Will Kane will face.  They’re a bit clumsy and Tiomkin’s melody is a bit corny yet the music gets to you.  The chaste, resolute Amy and the seen-it-all, melancholy Helen Ramirez (Grace Lamoore) are the standout supporting characters, and not only because they’re just about the only women in the film.  As usual, Grace Kelly is limited but she’s quite vigorously virtuous.  The deliberate, eloquent Katy Jurado makes an impact even now.  Among the men, there’s good work from Lloyd Bridges, as Kane’s bitter, brittle deputy Harvey Pell, and Otto Kruger, as the judge who put Frank Miller behind bars and who now leaves town without delay.

    Even though Fred Zinnemann went on to better things (and very quickly:  The Member of the Wedding and From Here to Eternity both opened in the space of the next twelve months), his direction of High Noon is often unobtrusively impressive.  Repeated shots of clock faces and swinging pendulums add up to too many time checks but Zinnemann doesn’t rely entirely on these to build suspense.  Moving the action round the town, he creates a strong sense of place.  The camera is always at just the right distance from the characters to express the moral landscape too – with clarity but without grandiosity.  Floyd Crosby’s black-and-white photography doesn’t stint on shades of grey.   After Kane’s fistfight with Pell that sees them both sprawling in the dirt, Gary Cooper’s white shirt is eye-catchingly grubby.  Until, that is, the arrival of the upstaging gash in the sleeve.

    21 March 2019

    [1] ‘What it was about at the time was Hollywood … and no other place but Hollywood and about what was happening in Hollywood and nothing else but that’ (quoted in Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West (1976)).

  • Everybody Knows

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todos lo saben

    Asghar Farhadi (2018)

    With the help of his DP José Luis Alcaine and editor Hayedeh Safiyari, Asghar Farhadi draws us in from the start of Everybody Knows.  The opening sequence takes place inside a church clock tower, where pigeons flap and the ancient clock machinery creaks, both to unnerving effect.  We then watch someone – or, at least, the right hand and forearm of someone – cutting out newspaper articles about a girl’s kidnapping.  This introduction, suggesting that a traditional thriller-mystery is on the cards, gives way to a longer, more subtly unsettling episode.  Over the course of the next twenty minutes or so, Farhadi introduces the guests arriving for a wedding in a small town outside Madrid (it takes all that time and more to work out exactly who’s who).  During the wedding and its immediate aftermath, the camera seems to be peering at the action, as if trying to penetrate the surface social whirl and celebration.  The sometimes unexpectedly angled shots and the cutting help increase our sense of disquiet, even though nothing at this stage – except for one scene – is overtly ominous.

    For the grown-ups, the partying goes on into the night, when a power cut in the town deepens the darkness.  Shortly after the lights return, the intoxicated wedding guests are shocked back to their senses by the discovery that one of them, the teenager Irene (Carla Campra), has disappeared.  Newspaper cuttings left in the bedroom where she had been sleeping are familiar to us and so, alas, is much of what follows.  The very first sequences were, after all, a taste of things to come – though Everybody Knows turns out not to be a conventional thriller-mystery:  it doesn’t have enough incident or plot convolutions to qualify as that.  It is, rather, a predictable account of how a crisis gives new prominence to old secrets within a family and brings to light things that everybody knows (the phrase occurs repeatedly) but nobody says.

    There’s a hefty clue this is the direction in which Farhadi, who also wrote the screenplay, is heading in the above-mentioned exceptional scene, which occurs midway through what’s otherwise the strongest section of the film.   This takes the form of a return visit to the clock tower.  While the wedding service is taking place in the church below, Irene goes up there, accompanied by a young man called Felipe (Sergio Castellanos).  Irene is the daughter of Laura (Penélope Cruz), one of the older sisters of the bride Ana (Inma Cuesta).  Laura, Irene and the latter’s younger brother Diego (Iván Chavero) have travelled from their home in Buenos Aires for the wedding.  Felipe is the nephew of family friend Paco (Javier Bardem), who, with his wife Bea (Bárbara Lennie), runs a successful vineyard in the area:  they too are wedding guests.  In the clock tower, Irene tries to flirt with Felipe, who tells her that Laura and Paco, years ago, were lovers:  the evidence is there in their initials carved on the walls of the tower, which is also a belfry.  The bells were due to peal at the end of the wedding service but Irene and Felipe set them off prematurely, taking the bride, her groom Joan (Roger Casamajor) and the rest of the congregation by surprise.  It’s a resoundingly significant moment:  Asghar Farhadi drops a clangour.

    Reviews describing Everybody Knows as a ‘channelling’ of Agatha Christie et al are understandable, even though Farhadi stints on the entertainments of an orthodox whodunnit.  Laura’s and Ana’s elder sister Mariana (Elvira Mínguez) and her husband Fernando (Eduard Fernández) run a hotel in the town.  It’s not doing great business so is easily able to accommodate the other dramatis personae for the duration:  the hotel becomes the equivalent of a country house mystery setting.  Attempts to save the girl whose abduction story is told in the newspaper cuttings ended badly because her family, against the kidnappers’ instructions, involved the police.  The need for the principals to keep Irene’s disappearance to themselves and to rely on their own resources to get her back works as a reasonably credible plotline and as a means of reinforcing the story’s central theme of family secrets.  When these are exposed, however, they’re a letdown.

    Laura’s husband Alejandro is conspicuous by his absence from the wedding.  As soon as we hear that work commitments have kept him away, we know this is a cover for something else.  Once Irene has vanished, Alejandro (Ricardo Darín) comes over to Spain:  it’s soon revealed that he’s unemployed and has a history of depression.  We gather that Laura broke Paco’s heart by forsaking him and Spain for Alejandro and Argentina but what she saw in the (much older) man she married is a puzzle – she appears to feel little for Alejandro now.   It turns out that Laura’s father Antonio (Ramón Barea) once owned the land that is the site of Paco’s vineyard;  he bought it for a song – something the family have silently and increasingly resented with the passage of time.  Their own financial circumstances have worsened while Paco’s and Bea’s business has thrived.  The most important, and least surprising, revelation is that Irene’s biological father is Paco, not Alejandro – a fact, it emerges, always known by the latter but not known to the former until now.  I wasn’t clear if Irene’s paternity was something other members of Laura’s family were already aware of.  Even if they weren’t, I didn’t get why, in view of their resentment of Paco’s profiting from land they once owned, he’d been invited to the wedding.

    This isn’t the first Farhadi piece to centre on a sudden disappearance but it’s very different from its predecessor About Elly (2009).  There’s never much mystery about what’s happened to Irene or, thanks to a series of guilty looks from Mariana’s and Fernando’s daughter Rocío (Sara Sálamo), who within the family enabled it to happen.  What’s more, Irene, unlike Elly, reappears – delivered to Paco after he pays the ransom money, before Laura and Alejandro arrive on the scene to take over from him.  Irene is asthmatic and has been without medication during the time she’s been held prisoner.  She’s not in good shape, there’s talk of getting her to a hospital without delay and we wonder how her condition will be explained to a doctor.  Not only does Farhadi ignore that last point; he also gives Irene nothing to say subsequently about her ordeal, identifying her kidnappers, etc.  All she does is to ask Alejandro why it was Paco, rather than he, who came to find her.  If she gets an answer from the man she’s always assumed to be her biological father, she gets it off-screen.  By now, Farhadi, though continuing to ram home the same point, is exasperatingly evasive.  In the closing scene, Mariana, who’s sussed out Rocío, sits Fernando down and says they need to talk.  We don’t get to hear the conversation about their daughter but it’s fair to assume this will remain a well-kept secret between them.

    Asghar Farhadi’s next film after his international breakthrough with A Separation (2011) was, like Everybody Knows, located in Europe.  The Past (2013), set in Paris, featured a few Iranian but mostly French actors.  This new movie is inferior to The Past but Farhadi once again impresses with his handling of a cast speaking in a language that he doesn’t himself speak.  The way he allows or encourages the telegraphing of Rocío’s feelings is a rare lapse:  otherwise, the high quality acting not only holds your interest but often has the effect of distracting you from the script’s manifold weaknesses.  Everybody Knows is disappointing – but disappointing in large part because Farhadi’s previous work has set our expectations high.  And although this is finally a poor film, it features, especially in the narrative that precedes Irene’s kidnap, some very good filmmaking.

    21 March 2019

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