Film review

  • The Lusty Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nicholas Ray (1952)

    The title is puzzling, even more so after you’ve watched the film.  You know who the lusty men are but the phrase suggests a different kind of movie – something either square and hearty or camp.  It would be a struggle to accuse Nicholas Ray’s contemporary Western of any of those things.  The source material is a 1946 Life magazine feature by Claude Stanush entitled ‘King of the Cowboys’.  That sounds more commercially appealing and usefully carries a hint of potential irony.

    According to an informative essay on The Lusty Men by Jonah Horwitz[1], Stanush’s piece was a profile of Bob Crosby – ‘”Wild Horse Bob”, a 26-year veteran and the greatest champion of the North American rodeo circuit’.  The Crosby-inspired figure in the film is Texan Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum), who decides to end his lengthy rodeo career when a bull throws and injures him.  He hitchhikes to his childhood home, now dilapidated and owned by an elderly man called Jeremiah (Burt Mustin).  Jeff’s arrival there and his immediately following conversation with Jeremiah are a highlight of the whole film.  The script hasn’t informed us where Jeff was heading but his approach to the ranch is accompanied by music that unequivocally announces Western homecoming (and turns out to be the main theme of Roy Webb’s score).  Robert Mitchum’s lack of sentimentality is invaluable here, deflating as it does the music’s nostalgic swell.  Entering the place, Jeff looks for a boyhood cache in the crawl space under the ranch house.  Ray’s camera (Lee Garmes was the cinematographer) follows him there imaginatively.

    The exchange between Jeff and Jeremiah, two differently solitary men, is ended by the appearance outside the house of a married couple.  In Jeremiah’s words:

    ‘That cowhand from the jackhammer ranch, him and his wife … Do it regular every Sunday… Come prowling around with calf eyes, saying how much they’d like to buy the place … Where’s a ranch hand going to get $5,000?’

    Jeff was about to resume his road journey – ‘to Abilene by sundown’ – but his plans change on meeting Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) and, especially, his wife Louise (Susan Hayward).  Their triangle of relationships is a major element of what follows.  The answer to Jeremiah’s question about the $5,000 is that Wes is secretly ambitious for a lucrative rodeo career and hopes that Jeff can help him towards it.

    The protracted reworking of the material detailed by Jonah Horwitz helps explain the five names on the screenplay credit, including Horace McCoy, author of the novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?   (The others are David Dortort, Alfred Hayes, Andrew Solt and the film’s co-producer, Jerry Wald.)   Watching The Lusty Men today brings the title of McCoy’s best-known work worryingly to mind.  One hopes none of the horses – or bulls – involved in the numerous rodeo sequences was seriously hurt but the arena thrills and spills (edited by triple Oscar-winner Ralph Dawson) are sometimes hair-raising, and the movie long pre-dates Hollywood’s no-animals-were-harmed assurances

    The dialogue is strong but, even if you take out the rodeo stuff, The Lusty Men is long (113 minutes all told), given what the story comprises.  Mitchum is convincingly part of the rodeo world and his laconic reserve repeatedly pays dividends, though this viewer (as usual) didn’t get a lot from him once the main dramatic focus was on Jeff’s relationship with Louise.  Susan Hayward is credibly hard-bitten and good in her character’s terse, sarcastic moments.  Hayward’s eagerness to do more and lack of nuance combine to ensure that Louise’s longer speeches work less well.

    It’s Arthur Kennedy’s Wes who’s consistently impressive.  Wes is far from young (Kennedy, in his late thirties at the time, was actually three years older than Mitchum) and doesn’t look physically cut out for action-man competition.  It’s not easy to suspend disbelief in Wes’s meteoric rise to the top of the rodeo game, as he wins contests across several states, but Kennedy conveys the man’s determination – and his own surprise at succeeding – strongly enough to sell it.  Wes is so keen to ingratiate himself with a big rodeo name that he’s blind for some time to the growing mutual attraction between Jeff and Louise; or perhaps (more interestingly) he’s so preoccupied with furthering his ambition that he’s unconsciously willing to take the risk of losing his wife to another.

    In the climax to The Lusty Men, in Pendleton, Oregon, Jeff makes an ill-fated rodeo comeback.  When he dies from his injuries, Wes, who’d been ready to abandon Louise and the purchase of Jeremiah’s ranch for the sake of more success and money in rodeo, comes to his senses.  The tension between Louise’s professed loyalty to her husband and her feelings for Jeff breaks effectively when the latter has what proves to be his fatal accident, and she rushes to his bedside.  Yet the prominence of Louise’s reaction to Jeff’s death makes for an ending that’s not only abrupt but rather bewildering.

    As Wes decides to quit rodeo and buy the ranch, Jeff’s old pal Booker Davis (Arthur Hunnicutt) – once a rodeo champion himself, now past it and poor – asks Wes if there’s any chance of a job at the ranch for him and his daughter Rusty (Carol Nugent).  Wes says yes.  ‘Rusty, me and you is going back to Texas’, Booker delightedly tells his daughter.  Wes and Louise leave the rodeo venue reunited; over the public address comes the announcement of the next competitor to enter the arena.  Nicholas Ray thus undercuts Booker’s heartwarming homecoming moment – rather as Robert Mitchum’s presence did Jeff’s earlier one.  In doing this, though, Ray in effect forgets about Louise – so that she seems to have got over Jeff’s death instantly.  In light of her grief a couple of screen minutes earlier, this is bizarre.  It upstages the dangerous-macho-show-must-go-on message that Ray seems to have intended as his film’s last word and parting shot.

    25 June 2019

    [1] At http://cinema.wisc.edu/blog/2015/10/29/lusty-men-never-cowboy-couldnt-be-throwed.  Although Wikipedia reckons the Stanush piece was called ‘The King of the Cowpokes’, Horwitz says otherwise.  He also traces the several name changes that the project went through.

  • Jazz Boat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Hughes (1960)

    Between their collaboration on the television play Sammy (1958) and its big-screen expansion, The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963), Ken Hughes and Anthony Newley worked together on two linked films that arrived in cinemas within a few months of each other in the first half of 1960.  Wikipedia and IMDb both describe Jazz Boat, the first of the pair, as a musical comedy – a classification that hardly does justice to the farrago it actually is, in terms of both the tenor of the action and, especially, the musical content.

    Under the opening credits, the titular boat seems to be at Tower Bridge but its destination is apparently Margate, in close proximity to Dreamland there.  A gang of Teddy Boys led by Spider (James Booth) plan a jewel heist.  They’re inexperienced and prove to be inept thieves but, though they’re played cartoonishly, their lawlessness isn’t entirely light-hearted:  the flick-knives are real enough.  The musical numbers are mostly by Joe (‘Mr Piano’) Henderson.  After the title song accompanying the credits, the first of these is ‘I Wanna Jive Tonight’.  It’s performed in a supposedly hot (though cool) jazz club setting but the look of most of the grooving cats goes with the song – making strenuous efforts to be to be hip, coming across as wholesomely square.  The house band is headed by a very different sort of Ted – big band leader Ted Heath.  His beaming, avuncular presence isn’t as incongruous as it should be.

    Bert Harris (Newley) dances with ‘the Doll’ (Anne Aubrey), Spider’s girlfriend, and asks, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doin’ in a dive like this?’  ‘Easy,’ she replies, ‘I’m not a nice girl’, though her delivery makes it instantly clear that she is or, at least, that the very pretty Anne Aubrey isn’t an actress.  Yet when Ken Hughes then cuts away from the dance floor to show Bert and her in the shadows, the effect is briefly quite tense and edgy – because the sequence depends for atmosphere mostly on what the camera picks up from Anthony Newley’s face.  (By the way, Nicolas Roeg is credited as assistant cameraman, to Ted Moore.)

    Bert is an electrician; the main plot takes off from his shooting a line to Spider et al that he’s a professional burglar.  He soon regrets the empty boast but it’s too late to prevent the gang recruiting him to help with their robbery.  The second half of the film divides its time between Bert’s desperate, comical attempts to escape the attentions of the gang – dressing up as a girl, and so on – and the efforts of the drily jaundiced Sergeant Thompson (Lionel Jeffries) to bring them to justice.  This culminates in a violent confrontation between Thompson and Spider that, compared with most of what’s gone before, looks worryingly authentic.  The story ends with the gang arrested and Thompson letting Bert off with a warning not to be a silly boy in future.

    This picture was made just as Anthony Newley’s success as a solo artist in the British singles charts was reaching its peak.  After two Top Ten hits in 1959 (‘I’ve Waited So Long’, and ‘Personality’), he had his first number one with ‘Why’ (a cover of the Frankie Avalon original) in the same month that Jazz Boat was released.  ‘Do You Mind?’, which Newley wrote with Lionel Bart, topped the charts a few weeks later.  With a screenplay by Ken Hughes, John Antrobus and Rex Rienits, the film is conceived largely as a Newley vehicle so there’s a lame in-joke – ‘I’m number one in the hit parade – they’re going to hit me’, Bert tells his girlfriend Rene (Joyce Blair) as he hurriedly exits through a window with the gang in pursuit – and a solo number for the star.  This is ‘Someone to Love’, which Newley performs wandering around a beach deserted except for a passing tramp and a friendly dog.  Although it’s by Joe Henderson, ‘Someone to Love’, as a plaintive whine, is a mild anticipation of ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’, the Bricusse-Newley power ballad in Stop the World – I Want to Get Off.

    I don’t like Newley’s singing but you have to say at the end of Jazz Boat that he merited a vehicle – and something better than this leaky craft.  He doesn’t exactly unify its tonal contradictions but he carries the film and manages the transitions of mood with remarkable ease.  For the most part, he doesn’t overwork his natural little-guy underdog charm, which, as in The Small World of Sammy Lee, is allied to an interestingly strong expression of sex drive.  The gang members also include David Lodge, as a weird character known as Holy Mike, and Bernie Winters, who plays ‘the Jinx’.  Winters is meant to provide light relief but he’s so limited and tiresome he makes you doubly grateful for Newley’s versatility.   That was reflected too in the second of the brace of 1960 Ken Hughes films – a prison comedy called In the Nick, in which most of the main actors in Jazz Boat reappear, usually playing the same character.  James Booth’s Spider and Bernie Winters’s Jinx are now serving time in a ‘minimum security’ jail.  Anne Aubrey’s Doll is a Soho stripper.  Anthony Newley, however, is Dr Newcombe, a prison psychiatrist …

    25 June 2019

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