Friday's Old Fashioned: Violent Saturday (1955)

The central event of “Violent Saturday” is a bank robbery, but Richard Fleischer’s crime thriller feels more like a disaster movie, really, with the heist serving as the catastrophe in place of an earthquake, hurricane, or volcano. We see the meticulous planning of the three thieves, Harper (Stephen McNally), Dill (Lee Marvin), and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish), but we spend just as much time with the residents of the small Arizona town where the bank is located, from colleagues at the local copper mine to a devout Amish family with the taciturn Stadt (Ernest Borgnine) for its patriarch. The manager of the bank under surveillance, Harry (Tommy Noonan), is a George McFly-ish peeping tom, Boyd (Richard Egan) suffers a philandering wife, likely from his own alcoholism, and Boyd’s associate at the local mine, Shelley (Victor Mature), discovers that his son is being bullied because his old man failed to serve and win honor in WWII. These are all issues of a decided masculine variety, and it is telling that the debt-riddled librarian, Elsie (Sylvia Sidney), has the most superfluous subplot of all.

Befitting “Violent Saturday’s” so-called sunshine noir genre, all these problems will be exposed to the harsh light, in a manner of speaking, when the robbery commences, a lengthy sequence of changing locations that Fleischer recounts in an almost documentary-like fashion. There is no accompanying music, nothing more, really, than some chirping birds on the soundtrack once the three thieves make haste from the bank to the Amish farm where they have tied up the family and Shelley, using the latter’s car in lieu of their own stowed getaway vehicle. This vérité sensation makes the gunshots that are fired sound all the more startling, and the deaths stemming from the bullets feel that much more shocking. If Shelley being able to free himself and the Amish clan from the barn loft where they are being held can feel like a bout of some all-too-convenient screenwriting stupidity courtesy of the character keeping watch, it still allows for him to ante up and be the hero he never got to be.

But that’s also the strange thing about “Violent Saturday.” The cold cruelty of the bank robbers would seem to refute the nature of violence just as the Amish patriarch being forced to kill one of the robbers would too. Whether he was coached, decided on his own, or some combination of the two, however, Borgnine plays the Amish patriarch not just with no inner-life but no life at all, reducing him to a cyborg in a straw hat, meaning the moment has no resonance. What’s more, the capping scene in which Shelley is greeted heroically not only by his son but by virtually every boy in his son’s school, like we are suddenly watching an afterschool special, suggests the exact opposite of his character’s half-hearted protestation that it would be better if such things didn’t happen in the first place. I mean, if not, how could you ever prove you were a real man?

Some Drivel On...The Contender

Released in the fall of 2000, meaning into a contentious American Presidential election in addition to the roiling wake of the Lewinsky scandal and Starr Report, writer/director Rod Lurie’s political thriller “The Contender” was designed to make waves even as it wound up engendering some unintentional waves too. Its eponymous character is Ohio Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), tapped by President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) to be his next Vice President after the death of the current one, though the Republican chair of the nominating committee, Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), plans not merely to oppose this but to “obliterate (her) life.” A smear campaign, in other words, and so perhaps it’s appropriate that “The Contender” not only divided the critics but became victim of something akin to a smear campaign itself. That occurred when co-star Oldman’s words in one publication were misconstrued in another, making it seem as if he insinuated that Lurie caved to his production company Dreamworks and its patron saint, Steven Spielberg, to make the movie more big-D Democrat-friendly. Afterwards, Oldman contended his issue was only with Lurie in so much as the filmmaker compromised “The Contender’s” ethical and moral ambiguity to render it a more straightforward story of heroes and villains. Frankly, Oldman is not wrong in his assessment. A genuine melodramatic entertainment, “The Contender” also seems to come bearing sharp fangs in depicting statecraft until they are revealed as nothing more than a set of costume teeth. 

Runyon’s ammunition for character assassination is explicit photos that emerge of what is purported to be a college-age Hanson engaging in lewd acts at a frat house. The Senator from the great state of Ohio not only does not confirm nor deny their legitimacy, but she also publicly refuses to even acknowledge them, much to the chagrin of White House Chief of Staff Kermit Newman (Sam Elliott). Newman even yearns to hit back at Runyon with some character assassination ammo of their own. “Come on, Kermit,” Hanson derides, “if we do that, we’re no better than he is.” “We are,” Newman replies with Elliott emphasizing the second word, “no better than he is,” a line that has been ringing in my head during this whole divisive midterm election season. Like it or not, Laine is judged in the venerable court of public opinion, even if that venerable court is shown to be influenced if not outright shaped by the media and by political actors goosing the media. When Runyon rhetorically asks why the American people will believe him, he says, “Because I will have a big microphone in front of me,” evocative of “The Contender’s” oft juicy dialogue. Politics, however, do not take place only in front of the camera, but off them, and in an astonishingly deft performance, Bridges creates one of our all-time great movie presidents. Evans is a chameleon who is skilled at operating in either environment, virtually glowing with affability in the presence of others while simultaneously maintaining an unmistakable assertiveness (the running gag of Evans procuring food in meetings from the White House chef is as funny it is telling) while coming across cunning and even savage behind the scenes.

Evans is practicing politics, in other words, in the true sense of the word, all their wheeling, dealing, and not so much persuading as bulldozing, demonstrating how even what might be noble ideals are always swimming in raw sewage-infested waters. Even noble ideals are in question, however, as President Evans wanting to install Hanson as VP is summarized as being less about what she stands for than POTUS’s own “swan song” while Runyon never even explicates a good reason why he wants to do her in. “She’s no good,” he tells his wife Maggie (Irene Ziegler) in the middle of the night in his pajamas and slippers while sipping milk, a shot that truly makes him look like nothing beyond a bitter old man. Yet, even if “The Contender” does a bang-up job demonstrating “politics as power, nothing more,” as the philosopher X once said, where the notions of character are immaterial in more ways than one, Lurie pulls his punch at the conclusion with two revelations that repaint the political arena as angels and devils and a place where character counts after all. Maybe he could have swung it had he stuck to the complicated portraits of these people that he seems to be generating, but the two climactic twists negate that possibility. And whether from narrative cowardice, or bleeding-heart intentions, Lurie inadvertently yet revealingly transforms “The Contender” into a manifestation of the most dangerous kind of politician: one that believes in their own bullshit. 

Pressure

There is a double meaning to the title of the new war movie “Pressure,” one glimpsed in the opening image of the clouds, referring not only to the inherent mental strain of the 1944 D-Day invasion but how that invasion was predicated on nothing less than an accurate weather report. That’s quite a task for director Anthony Maras and his co-screenwriter David Haig (who wrote the book on which it is based) to manage – rendering not only a movie with a foregone conclusion but a foregone conclusion hinging on feuding weathermen thrilling. They succeed by crafting an old-fashioned feeling kind of drama from performances and writing, making the meteorological details both palatable and dramatic, boiling everything down to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (Brendan Fraser) one key question: Do we go? And yet, as old-fashioned as “Pressure” feels, it also comes across modern in a funny kind of way by suggesting a wartime “Moneyball,” of all things, advancing the argument that when it comes to active combat, the data overrides wishful thinking.

“Pressure” is seen through the eyes of RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), leaving his pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski) at home, one of the many little details that gets neatly folded into the overarching drama, summoned by Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to provide an accurate forecast ahead of the proposed June 5th date for D-Day. After all, they can only launch with good weather. Stagg, though, clashes immediately with Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, Colonel Irving P. Krick, played by Chris Messina with great relish, making for an obvious if no less enjoyable antagonist, often evincing the air of a haughty student in a debate competition. Krick will be proven wrong, of course, and part of the fun is in seeing the antisocial, pragmatic Stagg figure out how to access his inner emotionalist to reach a roomful of uniformed men who fancy themselves pragmatists, too, without quite realizing just how much they are guided by feelings.

As Eisenhower, Fraser embodies both the Supreme Commander’s tact and temper and, even more than that, the figurative weight of the world on his shoulders, conveying in equal measure how the crucial decision gradually becomes inevitable while still feeling impossible. Kerry Condon, meanwhile, in playing the part of Eisenhower’s private secretary, First Lieutenant Kay Summersby, continues to prove she is one of our most exciting current actors by beathing life into what could have been a stock character, a cool, patient turn evoking the old phrase it takes an army. When Kay remarks “Men are too fond of that word” after Eisenhower says Stagg is known as a genius, Condon’s line reading brings the house down.

For as much as Maras prefers to emphasize plot and performance, however, he does make room for one true filmmaking flourish. It occurs on that fateful Sunday, June 4th, right after Eisenhower is convinced to postpone the invasion. The day begins in the bright sunshine with all the major characters attending Sunday mass, save for Stagg, pointedly outside the church when the wind picks up, the clouds roll in, and the rain pours. If the cinematography and soundtrack lay it on a little thick, I still liked it, the forceful way in which Maras mocks not only the notion of praying for good weather but that all the military might in the world doesn’t get first say over the weather gods. It’s so satisfying that yet one more brief recreation of D-Day in its aftermath cannot help but pale in comparison, drawing an otherwise solid movie to a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion, though, by that time, I was already satisfied.

Choose Your Agamemnon

Brad Pitt’s gloomy, self-serious performance as Achilles, waiting around for two-and-a-half hours to die, embodied Wolfgang Petersen’s foundering Iliad-adaptation “Troy” (2004), unless you want to argue it was Diane Krueger as Helen of Troy seemingly with no guidance about what she was supposed to be doing other than standing around and watching other people die. Then there was Brian Cox as Agamemnon. The character is cautioned at one point that he cannot have the whole world, which he takes as nothing less than a personal challenge, and which is also how Cox plays the part, as if he were biting into the whole planet earth like it was an apple. Cox, bless his heart, is willing to crash and burn by going over the top for the sake of our entertainment amid the otherwise somber goings-on. Indeed, while “Troy” mostly evaporated from my mind the minute it ended, Cox stayed, though I confess, I can’t calculate exactly how much of that was Cox himself and how much of that was Friend of the Blog Rory saying for months afterward in his finest Scottish brogue (Cox kept his accent), “Then every son of Troy shall die!” Even so, I would never would have expected that while watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, every time Agamemnon was mentioned, and even when Agamemnon was literally on the screen in front of me, albeit obscured by his Darth Vader-ish helmet (“Star Wars” is “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wizard of Oz” is The Odyssey), I kept picturing Brian Cox. If he could sometimes feel out of place in “Troy,” he really would feel out of place in “The Odyssey,” but I couldn’t help it, no matter what, Cox’s sneer just kept involuntarily flashing in my mind. And that, I suppose, is the test.

Kate Winslet is my Ophelia (duh), Angelina Jolie is my Cleopatra (even though she never made that movie), Anne Hathway is now my Penelope, and Brian Cox, it turns out, is my Agamemnon. We don’t choose these things; they choose us.

Songs of the Potential Siren(s)

On Monday, I lamented that in his version of Homer’s Odyssey, Christopher Nolan saw fit to figuratively put wax in the audience’s ears by not letting us hear the song of the sirens. Maybe that was a wise creative decision, sometimes what you don’t hear is more powerful than what you do, and I’m willing to be swayed, though I mostly meant it as an emblem of the director’s overall lack of imagination. But it also invites the question, who would I cast to sing the song of the sirens? True, that’s a little too close to Diane Sawyer once upon a time in an interview criticizing the erstwhile Dixie Chicks for criticizing President George W. Bush’s foreign policy without formulating a foreign policy, as ordinary citizens so often do, of their own. Reviewers need not be in the business of rewriting the movie they are reviewing. That’s not how it works. Still, the question was tantalizing, so much so that I worked through it, even if I am mostly considering a siren in the singular form rather than the plural. Hey, that’s the beauty of using your own imagination. 

My first thought was, Emmylou Harris. The ethereal nature of her voice fits the bill and even more, it would sound so eerily enticing drifting over water crashing against rocks, a lulling in spite of yourself. But then I remembered that The Coen Brothers had the same thought when they enlisted the singing voices of Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch to be their sirens in their own version of Homer’s Odyssey, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Geniuses and idiots think alike, I guess?

If we had access to a time machine, the haunted nature of, say, Billie Holiday would no doubt work since that voice knows more than all our 8 billion people put together, or even Edith Piaf. What was that moment with the phonograph ahead of “Saving Private Ryan’s” big final act if not a sort of song of the siren?

En Vogue could recalibrate the song of the sirens as one so smooth you suddenly just find yourself in the water without knowing you had jumped in.

Zola Jesus (i.e. Nika Roza Danilova) feels less like a siren, more like a witch, which I mean as a compliment, not unlike the ultra-iconic Stevie Nicks, though that goes without saying.

I was going to say Natalie Merchant, and I suppose I still am, yet, as soon as I thought it, I thought, hers is the voice of a mermaid, not a siren. 

The soprano of Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li is in the key of the siren, yet, paradoxically, her voice is so sad it would just make you fall down and cry rather than swim over to your doom.

I have a strong desire to cast Neneh Cherry in the role, not so much because her Swedish-West African heritage would tick off the right people but because her beguiling spoken-word style would break the song of the siren mold.

Hope Sandoval’s voice would lead you into temptation and inevitable doom, there is no doubt about it, and if you don’t think so, buddy, I triple dog dare you to eschew wax in your ears without tying yourself to the mast. Could Sandoval’s voice, though, infuse you with the knowledge of the whole world as do the sirens? Could anyone’s voice? Is it such a tall task that it’s insurmountable? Was Nolan right, after all, to leave it alone?

He wasn’t. Reader, have you heard the mighty alto of Neko Case, and have you heard it intertwined with her longtime harmony vocal compatriot Kelly Hogan? They will lead you into temptation while simultaneously impressing upon you the beauty and horror of the whole world, reconstituting the biggest branch on the tree of knowledge into a shiv so delicately you won’t even realize that it has already impaled you.

The Odyssey

“A time of apparent magic” explains the title card that opens Christopher Nolan’s two-hour-and-fifty-three-minute version of Homer’s Odyssey. You can practically hear the scoff just off camera. For all that’s been made about Nolan’s commitment to putting us there, the Bronze Age, that is, from practical effects, to lighting, to a score utilizing era-appropriate instruments, “The Odyssey” proves more modern, and not just because everybody is speaking in contemporary American accents. Nolan’s version of Odysseus (Matt Damon) is one conspicuously in the throes of PTSD brought on by a Trojan War unpacked as a traumatic event while the gods are minimized, underscored in a crack of thunder that may or may not represent Zeus, like a special effect in a middle school play, which I might take to be Nolan’s tongue in his cheek if I thought he ever laughed. Humorless, revisionist, just as every translation of Homer’s Odyssey adopts its own point of view, so does every adaptation, like this one, in which the fabled ancient Greek epic poem is transformed into, uh, well, what else: a Christopher Nolan movie.

Odysseus, King of Ithaca, has been away for 20 years, 10 spent fighting and winning the Trojan War, 10 wandering in his struggle to return home. This has left his kingdom in peril with suitors occupying his home, seeking to marry his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), while his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) looks on, wanting to help, but not sure how. Honoring both Homer and his own nonlinear propensities, Nolan has chosen to use the chunk of time Odysseus spends on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron) as his unconvincing framework. It’s not so much that in his version Nolan plays coy with why Odysseus is trapped there, and as if afraid to render his protagonist contemptible for stepping out on his wife eschews Calypso repeatedly taking him to bed, as it is an overriding air so morose as to beggar belief when she remarks on their having such a good time together. No, these scenes are just a flagrant vehicle for him to process his trauma, never dramatic in and of themselves, and with a staid air that weighs the whole enterprise down.

The Odyssey emerged from songs and spoken tales that preceded it and has in effect been influencing stories of all varieties in the centuries since, and so anyone that it takes it on is naturally going to see it in their own way. Still, there are times when it feels less like Nolan is interpreting The Odyssey so much as he is repurposing it for parts to construct a sort of spiritual summation of his whole oeuvre. You see it straight away in one of the movie’s first shots of the trojan horse half-buried in the sand, evoking the concluding image of “Planet of the Apes” and immediately impressing upon you the sense of destruction rather than victory, foreshadowing the war between the Greeks and Troy as nothing less than an ancient world atom bomb a la “Oppenheimer.” In wandering those 10 years afterwards, Odysseus has lived long enough to become a villain, cough, cough, at least in his own mind, not so much the complicated man of Emily Wilson’s famous 2017 translation, never mind the wily trickster of the original epic, as a one-note brooding stoic. If The Odyssey is in so many ways about homecomings, this might be where Nolan’s own identity, or at least, his predilections, most tellingly merge with Homer’s ultimate intent: of course, his King of Ithaca would become Batman.

Robert Pattinson, at least, is not brooding as Antinous, the foremost suitor of Penelope (along with Corey Hawkins as Polybus), giving some real president of Alpha Beta fraternity energy. In a weird way, Pattinson might be having too much fun, in so much as his malevolent sniveling invites a bloodlust in the denouement that inadvertently runs counter to the lessons that we are supposed to have learned along the way. Antinous meets his match, however, not in Telemachus, whose arc can feel perfunctory with all that’s going on, but Penelope. Along with Samantha Morton giving life to Circe’s righteous anger, Hathaway’s performance is “The Odyssey’s” best, both honoring Nolan’s modern vision while still effusing grand melodramatic flourish. And though Nolan generally prefers medium shots to close-ups that would befit these larger-than-life characters, in a reverse shot over Holland’s shoulder, Hathway suddenly lunges forward in the frame, fashioning a close-up all on her own. 

She fares better than Zendaya, anyway, who is ostensibly playing Athena, though like Theron, seems to intentionally downplay, thinking the performance will be made in the camera, only to be stranded in diminishing, dull frames unworthy of a Greek goddess. (She has resembled a Greek goddess on the red carpet for the movie’s promotion more than in the movie itself.) Then again, Nolan sees Athena less in terms of mythology than psychology, turning her into nothing less than an Imaginary Friend, providing a form of recurring consultation for Odysseus so that when she ultimately disappears, we know he is now emotionally and mentally healed, the hoariest trope in the screenwriting manual. It is emblematic of how Nolan sees the gods in more abstract terms, evoked in Odysseus’s struggle to believe in them at all, which on some level makes it both his most audacious and most cautious revision in so much as it feels like he is taking this 3,000-year-old story of polytheism and revising it for vacation Bible school.

The presentation of Athena, however, ties back to the presentation of Calypso, both of which relate to “The Odyssey’s” biggest problem, Nolan’s filmmaking style, or a lack of one, more accurately, meaning that no matter how spectacular the scenery and sets, there is a pervasive stodginess. He filmed on 70mm IMAX cameras, the first feature film ever to do so, and yet, it feels like a crutch for his own lack of visual imagination. He essentially transcribes what is on the page to screen rather than bringing it to life, like Penelope’s burial shroud, or Odysseus’s faithful dog Argis, but two plot points that Nolan injects with no real feeling. Would it have been impossible to render the song of the sirens as bewitching as the poem says? Perhaps, but isn’t that why you go into filmmaking, to envision and make perceptible that which seems impossible on the page? Isn’t that the dream of filming The Odyssey, not just to rework the text for our own times but to animate one of our world’s foundational stories? You’d think, but in the end, Nolan’s Odyssey lives its title card a little too much: a movie of apparent magic.

Project Greenlight

There are two Onion articles that are never far from my mind. One I referenced just this week: Harsh Light Of Morning Falls On One-Night Stand’s DVD Collection. That one was from 2003, the other was originally published in 2007 and also involves movies: All You Had To Say Was ‘Owen Wilson Befriends A Dolphin’ And I Was Sold. That one was written from the perspective of a fictional Hollywood producer, Howie Sandberg, receiving a pitch and being utterly satisfied with nothing more than half a sentence.

Listen—stop talking. I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! “Owen Wilson befriends a dolphin and…” And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!

As it happened, that article also came back to me this week not so much when I read about Anna Kendrick’s new streaming series for MGM+, “Embassy,” but when I saw the accompanying photo announcing the streaming series. It was a photo of Anna Kendrick and her co-star Sam Heughan in an air duct. And I immediately thought, I don’t need to know the rest. That photo is genius! Anna Kendrick in an air duct and... And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!

Well, on second thought, maybe one “and.” Anna Kendrick in an air duct and it’s a movie, not a streaming series, a hundred minutes, tops.