Tag: Thomas Mitchell

Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD

Blu-ray/DVD: Olive Signature editions of ‘Johnny Guitar’ and ‘High Noon’

Written by Sean Axmaker October 4, 2016

Johnny Guitar: Olive Signature (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) – Joan Crawford’s Vienna is the most masculine of women western heroes. A former saloon girl who earned her way to owning her own gambling house, she’s a mature woman with a history and she’s not ashamed of what she did to carve out her claim for a future.

Directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as frontier entrepreneurs in a war of wills, the 1954 Johnny Guitar is one of the most unusual westerns of its era, or any era for that matter. It’s dense with psychological thickets and political reverberations (including a not-so-veiled allegory for the McCarthy witch-hunts in Hollywood), designed with color both expressive and explosive, and directed with the grace of a symphony and the drama of an opera.

Sterling Hayden plays the title character, a lanky, affable cowboy who wanders into Vienna’s saloon in the opening minutes and serves as witness to the dramas bubbling up in this frontier community in the hills. But his acts of heroism aside, he’s the equivalent of the stalwart girlfriend watching the showdown between Vienna and the Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). She’s the town banker and moral arbiter whose power is threatened by Vienna (her saloon is built on the site of the railway line) and whose shameful desire for a bad boy miner (Scott Brady) flares up into vengeance against Crawford, the object of his desire.

Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews

Blu-ray/DVD: Only Angels Have Wings

Written by Sean Axmaker April 16, 2016

Only Angels Have Wings (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD) – If you love movies, I mean really love the glory of Hollywood moviemaking and star power and the joys of wondrous stories, then you love Howard Hawks. And if you love Howard Hawks, then you must love Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the quintessential Hawks adventure of male bonding and tough love in a world where there may be no tomorrow. If you haven’t fallen for it yet, it may be that you simply have yet to discover it.

Cary Grant is Geoff Carter, the charismatic, uncompromising leader of a fledgling air mail service in a South American port town, a business run on rickety planes and the nerves of its pilots. They call him Papa. He lives out of a bar, never lays in a supply of anything, and never sends a man on a job he wouldn’t do himself. Jean Arthur is Bonnie, the spunky American showgirl with a “specialty act” who gets a crash course in flyboy philosophy when a pair of pilots (Allyn Joslyn and Noah Beery Jr.) swoop in as she steps off a ship docking for supplies. Her first contact with Geoff creates sparks, the kind you get when a runaway car scrapes the wall of an alley. He’s all arrogance and lust when he sends Beery off on a mail run and moves in on Bonnie with a smile like a fox finding a hole in the henhouse. She’s outraged and appalled. Of course they are meant for each other, which is news to Geoff, who’s only interested in the moment and has no use for romantic commitment.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Program note: Make Way for Tomorrow

Written by Richard T. Jameson April 4, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 33, July 1974]

[promotion for a July 13, 1974 Seattle Film Society showing]

LEO McCAREY (1898–1969) is primarily remembered as a director of comedies. He won his two directorial Oscars for The Awful Truth (1937) and Going My Way (1944), and he guided some of the onscreen shenanigans of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, and Eddie Cantor, as well as comic actors like Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Barry Fitzgerald, and Frank McHugh. If, like me, you are bothered by the idea that a man could win an Oscar for Best Direction with a film that opens with a stock shot (a tugboat putting across New York Harbor in The Awful Truth—and in the next year’s Holiday, directed by George Cukor), you may wonder what qualifies Leo McCarey as a tenant of the Far Side of Paradise in Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema. For it is not visual authority that distinguishes his work. (For that matter, how much great screen comedy makes you think of “visual style” at all?) But that work is distinguished, and it is distinguished as director’s cinema, not screenwriter’s cinema or—though the actors are frequently superb—actor’s cinema.

by Peter Hogue, Contributors, Directors, Essays, Film Reviews, Howard Hawks

How It Is

Written by Peter Hogue May 11, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]

Only Angels Have Wings is one of Hawks’s “male adventurer” films, but it is also one of his comedies—and is perhaps best understood as such. It’s comedy in the sense that it has its share of wisecracks and a hint of slapstick—but also, and more importantly, in that it gives humor a place as a value and subtly undercuts “masculine” toughness in a way that parallels the rug-pulling comedy in Bringing Up Baby, I Was a Male War Bride, and other more obviously comic Hawks films.