Tag: John Ryan

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Dillinger

Written by Richard T. Jameson May 29, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 24, July-August 1973]

That our final glimpse of John Dillinger should be out of focus is appropriate. Dillinger promised to be an exciting directorial debut for John Milius—promised especially hard in the first quarter of an hour—and the role of Dillinger himself presented Warren Oates with the perfect opportunity to etch one of the great characterizations of the American screen, as well as to win widespread recognition at long last. That Oates has failed to achieve either scarcely seems his fault since, whenever he is given screen time, he hovers on the verge of discovering a dangerous and original persona—and, it must be added, he looks historically perfect, unsettlingly so. But Dillinger and anyone else resembling a character are essentially lost sight of, except as gunmen and targets, from about the midpoint of the film onward—that is, starting with the Mason City, Iowa, massacre. The mayhem is powerfully filmed and individual shots are often vividly visualized, but Milius fails completely to give sequences or whole sections of the film any cohesion or sense of purpose beyond slam slam slam.

Review: The Missouri Breaks

Written by Rick Hermann April 24, 2012

[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976]

More than a fair share of iridescent, long-shadowed mornings and ghostly blue, otherworldly evenings mark the twilight of an era in The Missouri Breaks, Arthur Penn’s end-of-the-West Western. Penn’s Little Big Man was also an elegy of sorts, an iconoclastic and morally allegorical taking-apart of a corner of Western legend that has turned into (as in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) an artifact consigned to a past made all the more poignant and irredeemable when contrasted to the poverty of a present trying to understand it. In Missouri Breaks, though, Penn and Thomas McGuane seem to be dealing their hands from within the form of the Western, letting the conventions subvert themselves, allowing a marked dissipation of generic coherence (a quality central to Penn’s Night Moves), to leave Penn’s world almost uninhabitable for the people left to muddle out the riddles of life within it. Missouri Breaks unfolds in a country that seems just at the peak of ripeness, ready to go to rot, thick with the flora of a virgin country and yet violated within minutes of its unveiling by a rather nasty hanging that seems a grim but nearly extraneous afterthought to a throng of onlookers gathered socially out in this green world, singing “Oh Susanna” and arguing politely about who ought to kick the horse out from underneath the condemned man. It’s a voracious landscape, even if Samuel Johnson does claim that a blade of grass is just a blade of grass.

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by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews, Westerns

Review: The Missouri Breaks

Written by Robert C. Cumbow December 14, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

I was prepared—by Tom McGuane’s insipid earlier scripts and by Brando’s increasingly self-indulgent performances in recent years—to dislike The Missouri Breaks, and so was considerably surprised to find myself enjoying it. Now I’m just as surprised to find that I am relatively alone in having liked the film. Even people who liked Rancho Deluxe don’t seem to have found much to redeem The Missouri Breaks, which is basically the same story minus the comic touch, the contemporary setting, and the intemperate amoralism of McGuane’s essentially adolescent fantasy. In The Missouri Breaks, McGuane is still in the pat-on-the-ass world of male friendships and lockerroom values; but director Arthur Penn appears to have provided a mitigating, steadying influence on McGuane’s unsure hand where Frank Perry—of an adolescent temperament himself—could not. Penn seems to me more and more not an auteur himself but a skilled craftsman whose strength lies in the intelligent direction of other people’s exceptional scripts. Gore Vidal’s The Left-Handed Gun, Horton Foote’s The Chase, William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, Newman and Benton’s Bonnie and Clyde, and even Alan Sharp’s postproduction-altered Night Moves are all literate scripts by good, careful writers; and most of Penn’s movies seem to depend as much on the writing that preceded the film (add Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man to that) as on directorial influence and the cinematic process. But if Penn’s films tend to showcase their writing (and, incidentally, consistently fine acting), this does not minimize his personal skill as a creative director. For me, Penn is approaching the stature of William Wyler—a capable director whose personality and vision are subjugated by the dedication of the disciplined craftsman to make the idea at hand into the best film it can be. Sometimes, as with Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man, that’s none too good; but more often, the results have been more than satisfactory.

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