It's a Wonderful Life: cold comforts

Grudging altruism, ceaseless compromise, half-measures, a natural talent for holding down the fort, unfulfilled longings that, more harrowingly, perhaps never really could have been fulfilled: all of these things, accumulating over half a lifetime, drove George Bailey to get stinko, drive into an old tree, then stumble toward that snow-caked bridge over which he planned to tumble into the oblivion of river below. Suicide is painless when you’ve never once tasted what you truly craved, when the walls close in. And, for the third time in the movie, George does fall into the water. (Am I the only one that sees Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart makes the plunge, over and over, first for his brother, then into the hidden pool, and then into the river?) Only it’s to save a man from drowning, not to drown himself—yet again, George is a slave to self-sacrifice. That the drowning man is really a trickster guardian angel who proves to George that he’s well-friended, even beloved, that his town would be a nastier place (though one with a far more bustling night life) without him, doesn’t entirely remove the ache of it all, the fact that George Bailey still never got the hell out of Bedford Falls. And I think this is one of the enduring things about It’s a Wonderful Life: the magical consolation that ends the movie is, in the long run, in the years we imagine to come, only marginally consoling. Life will probably not get much easier for George Bailey. But, like some poor soul from Beckett, he’ll go on.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that I’d never seen It’s a Wonderful Life until last night. Everyone I know has seen it on TV; I don’t watch TV. But anyway what’s especially interesting about the movie is the way it actually seems designed/destined to be watched long after its making. It was a box office disappointment in its day, won none of its Oscars, and only became a holiday broadcast staple in the 1970s. It’s a movie about everything that leads us up to our worst moments, the long march of our pasts and the hard work of accepting cold comforts. The movie was always meant to be a classic, which means to be loved sometime in the future, when everyone involved was dead or dying and nostalgia has wrapped itself tightly round the movie’s breast. The sad truth: apparently George Bailey really is worth more to us dead than alive. Though while the screen is alight, he is, somehow, alive. And, as it turns out, he’s in a pretty wonderful movie.

Giant Steps

The titles or authors I can’t recall, the content only barely, but the photos in my elementary school’s surprisingly bountiful selection of Bigfoot books spring back into memory as though only days, rather than decades, have passed. The thing lived on the peripheries of the visible, so naturally it was the images that really mattered. The elusiveness of the creature could not have seemed more carefully designed. The iconic, infinitely reproduced stills from the 1967 Roger Patterson film, sensuously grainy, as though the creature’s fur were mottled with blur, and that pose, looking back over its shoulder like a wounded lover bidding a dramatic farewell, fascinated me like it did millions of other kids, and, I guess, almost as many adults. Bigfoot was already so perfect, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to alter its allure by trying to prove its existence, or by, most appallingly, trying to hunt it down and kill it. Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, to use the more noble-sounding and proudly Canadian term—would only ever be Bigfoot so long as it remained in the shadows, off the grid, never quite seen by prying eyes.

Author Joshua Blu Buhs

Much to the chagrin of those determined to usher the creature into the annals of legitimate science, Bigfoot lends himself quite nicely to being placed within the universal myth of the wild man, a potent symbol of our primal conscience. If he does exist, would Bigfoot be the product of nature, or would be some manifestation of the collective unconscious, a shared desire to believe that something almost human could persevere uncorrupted by the domesticating and soul-deadening effects of civilization, a Frankenstein’s monster built not of disparate body parts but of fragments from our vast cultural swamp? Such questions, however ridiculous the subject matter might seem to some, can yield complex and revealing answers, and I can’t imagine anyone providing better ones that Joshua Blu Buhs does in his engrossing read Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (The University of Chicago Press, $34.95). The book is a biography of a figure whose existence is extremely dubious at best—and Buhs, while remaining respectful of true believers, makes clear from the outset that he’s not among them—and is thus in essence a biography of the conditions under which this figure was cultivated and came to thrive. Buhs tells a great story by weaving together a multitude of interrelated stories taking place over two continents and the better part of a century. There are countless terrific anecdotes: the man who shot Bigfoot and listened to him tell his life story as he lay dying; a guy being abducted by a Bigfoot and held captive in a cave with an entire Bigfoot family, the implication being that he was destined to become the boyfriend of Bigfoot’s daughter; Jimmy Stewart agreeing to smuggle a Yeti paw from Nepal to England. Bigfoot spawned a lot of things, among them great stories, heated arguments, and a hugely profitable industry. But along the way he also spawned a community of misfits, some passionate and articulate, some cynical, some cracked. The story of their formation is one of the book’s highlights.

“What accounts for Bigfoot’s popularity?” Buhs asks. Perhaps it is that the possibility of its existence “was evidence that the world was not yet fully explored, that there was still room for man to test his mettle, to touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” This angle, of modern man—and we are talking mostly about males here—alienated by an intellectualized, feminized, materialistic or reductive culture lies at the heart of Buhs’ thesis. The men who made Bigfoot what he is were mostly white, working-class and rural, loggers, hunters, small town reporters, disgruntled scientists and more than a few outright con men, Patterson, as most reports attest, being one of them. Following the emergence of sensational Yeti reports in the Himalayas, sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and of Sasquatch in British Columbia, as well as reports of traces of the creature, such as hair, feces and, most famously, footprints, began to accumulate in the 1950s, leading to an explosion of Bigfoot related material in the 60s, the overwhelming majority of it turning up in magazines devoted to a blend of traditional masculine interests and the paranormal. As Buhs traces the development of Bigfoot iconography a compelling case is built around the creature fulfilling a deep need, becoming a figure of authenticity in a world where so much of what constitutes daily life is composed of the overtly phony, and mass produced.

Yet from almost the very beginning Bigfoot seemed ready to be co-opted. The creature represented a tireless resistance against consumerism within the very culture in which consumerism was born, yet this same creature was all too adaptable not only to the dictates of literature and movies, but to New Age ideologues and people trying to sell more Canadian Club and Kokanee—like a good many backwoodsmen, Bigfoot, it seems, is a heavy drinker. He would with time become safe, cuddly, a best friend to the Hendersons. He would be the poster monster for environmentalists, and a sort of prototype for the teachings of Iron John and Women Who Run With the Wolves. The creature has never been captured, but he has been stuffed with fire-repellant materials and can be frequently found enjoying a wild ride at Disneyland. By taking a closer look at the cultural history, Buhs suggests that with the demise of the primitive Bigfoot and the ascendance of the new, hip, fully tamed one, we can trace some sort of gradual surrender to the unstoppable juggernaut of modern artificiality. The stalwarts, meanwhile, have not given up their vigil. The creature may still be out there, immune to polluted streams and deforestation, smacking his feet into some soft earth as a way to say “I was here,” and laughing at us as he returns to his cave to watch free cable.

Anatomy of a master: Otto Preminger at the Cinematheque Ontario

Like so many of the émigré directors who thrived in postwar Hollywood, the Austrian-born Otto Preminger (1905-1986) crafted a body of work sufficiently diverse and studio-friendly as to quietly slip through the cracks in auteur theory (and right out of Andrew Sarris’ Pantheon). But a close look at the qualities that align his best films, which are substantial in number, reveals a highly individual filmmaker extraordinarily capable of balancing the dictates of classical storytelling and often immaculate craft with a highly nuanced predilection toward the incessant contradictions of his characters—and, maybe even more so, his actors—an artist drawn to subversion yet never satisfied with mere cynicism, with simply "exposing" perversity or injustice. His immersion in his characters’ dilemmas could be so total that lingering ambiguities about their choices seemed inevitable rather than just the product of a smug sophisticate seeking to arbitrarily elevate populist material. Preminger's best films don't look down on Hollywood conventions; they perfect them. 

The Cinematheque Ontario’s nearly complete retrospective, Fallen Angels: The Films of Otto Preminger, starts tomorrow, offering audiences an opportunity to survey the span of the director’s oeuvre, as well as a couple of films—Le Corbeau (43), Blow-up (66)—that helped inform it. It starts, appropriately enough, with Laura (44), the film Preminger himself considered his first worthy of note, a brilliant thriller at once so elegant and deeply tawdry it set the high water mark for Fox noir and, along with Preminger’s nearly as good Whirlpool (50), smoked out the fragility, pathos and sexuality buried beneath Gene Tierney’s wholesome beauty—not to mention contributing to the movies’ general mistrust of cultivated, effeminate and unattractive men. And just as Preminger could help render Tierney corrupt, even ordinary, he could make Joan Crawford touching in her resilience and indecision in Daisy Kenyon (47), a very noirish “woman’s picture” that defied the broader tendencies of such melodramas. It’s these 40s noirs that I was already familiar with, so in gearing up for the Cinematheque’s program I caught up with a trio of Preminger’s 50s films that I’d previously managed to neglect.

River of No Return (54) is Preminger’s sole western, a genre he held no special interest in and delved in solely out of contractual obligation. Set and filmed in Banff and Jasper and featuring gorgeous landscapes—courtesy of Joseph LaShelle—it’s somewhat marred by an unavoidable dependence on rear projection during the protagonists’ tumultuous journeys over the titular rushing rapids, as well as woefully generic Indians assigned to the tired role of faceless background menace. Yet overwhelming these less appealing elements are surprisingly resonant stories of yearning, independence and brutal maturation. Matt Calder (Robert Mitchum) reunites with the nine-year-old son who never knew him and tries to start a new life as a farmer with a shady past. Kay Weston (Marilyn Monroe) is a showgirl tired of performing for camps of drunks who tries to start a new life with a gambler who’s sure he’s struck gold. How their paths become tangled is at certain points excessively artificial, but how these characters connect—through their sensitivity to the boy, through sheer desperation to survive, through the lovely performances from both leads—feels genuine and multiplies the story’s adventures to include the building of an accidental family.

Mitchum, busted for pot possession during the shoot, initially seems to be at his most mystically unshakable here—even when his house is being burned down he seems nonplussed. But the shifts in his temperament when dealing with his son and grappling with his violent past spurs him into riveting engagement. Monroe, who like many less confident actors suffered under the notoriously merciless and mercurial Preminger, exudes preternatural world-weariness here, a tough but warm woman all-too cognizant of her abundant sex appeal and seeking, if not entirely expecting to actually find, some sort of security. The scene where Mitchum sexually assaults her—only to be assaulted in turn by a mountain lion—speaks volumes about Hollywood’s sense of entitlement with their starlets. But the finale, which neatly closes a circle of retribution, is devastating in its way.

Bonjour Tristesse (58), which brought new texture to its Françoise Sagan source novel, is far more difficult to classify and more rewarding in its murky and audaciously unresolved emotional undercurrents. Any wonder it bombed? Chronicling the failed attempt at marriage by Raymond (David Niven), the aging Don Juan/bon vivant/permissive poppa of young Cécile (Preminger discovery Jean Seberg), the film renders the past “an invisible wall of memories,” something both tainted by tragedy and nostalgically hued—the flashbacks are in colour, the present-tense framing device in black and white. A coming-of-age story about the inability to come-of-age, it paints a portrait of father-daughter love that may or may not read as incestuous but most certainly conveys a morbid codependence that allows the elder participant to remain ostensibly youthful at the expense of the younger one, whose need for her father’s exclusive love is so strong that it sabotages the very change, embodied by love-struck clothing designer Anne (Deborah Kerr), both require to move on with their drifting, responsibility-free lives.

Derided in its time—despite her adorability in her hot water bottle beret—Seberg’s performance has aged amazingly well. Her childlike blankness at certain key points fits perfectly with Cécile’s increasingly internalized despair, weirdly emphasized by the echo of her voice-over, which sounds like it was recorded in somebody's windowless bathroom. Admittedly, there’s something really odd about having a French father and daughter played by a Brit and an American, but what counts, as in River, is how they connect with each other and unconsciously conspire to keep the rest of the world out of their arrangement. Preminger continually nurtures their intimacy through subtly indicative framing, and Raymond and Cécile’s stasis is nicely offset by the relative mobility of Elsa (Mylène Demongeot), Raymond’s bubbly blonde plaything who pours an awful lot of fun into this ultimately depressing tale while, à la Monroe in River, proves that seemingly less substantial characters can be complex and dynamic, too.

If I didn’t know what to expect from the above films, Anatomy of a Murder (59) was a film where my expectations were simply blown apart. I’d always meant to see it, mainly for Duke Ellington’s score and to catch a young Ben Gazzara in action, but was only mildly interested in what promised to be a solid courtroom drama. But, far more than, say, 12 Angry Men (57), the film probed the peripheries of due process to a place where truth and justice are blurred into an impenetrable haze. Fresh from drowning his familiar persona of decency in an abyss of necrophiliac obsession as Scotty in Vertigo (58), James Stewart plays rural Michigan lawyer Paul Biegler, like Scotty, a reclusive bachelor recently humbled by occupational failure. With his old alcoholic pal (Arthur O’Connell) as his legal assistant, Paul takes a seemingly hopeless case defending a moody-as-all-hell Korean War vet (Gazzara) who murdered a barkeep he says raped his flamboyantly flirtatious wife (Lee Remick).

Nothing in the performances, Wendell Mayes’ script or Preminger’s direction, ever does anything to convince Paul or us of Gazzara’s nobility or his claims of succumbing to “uncontrollable impulse,” but the smaller truths Paul collects along the way to a verdict, along with our collective agreement to talk at leisure about Remick’s soiled panties, bring us closer to feeling like we’re getting somewhere meaningful, even if the ending assures us Paul’s efforts were finally morally meaningless. Preminger is remarkably relaxed in his pacing and camerawork, again focusing on development of place and character, allowing us to sit back with Paul as he plays the piano with Duke (!) or eats hard-boiled eggs. The pay-off is enormous, a completely absorbing entertainment—replete with superb supporting work from George C. Scott and a dog that can operate a flashlight—and a troubling essay on how deceptively shrewd lawyers and great movie stars can pretty much talk us into anything.

Sweat, blood and explosions: Most masculine movies from Fuller and Daves discovered on DVD

I came to the so-called masculine movie genres not as a kid, which I guess is normally the case, but as an adult movie addict, mainly out of interest in the work of certain stars and directors who churned them out during the studio era. Maybe this explains the sort of child-like glee I now feel when DVD distributors lure a few more such titles out of the vaults. From my current vantage point, I can survey the films for their glints of complexity, their often impressive craftsmanship, but I also retain a sort of delayed, innocent awe for their particular brand of high adventure, rugged romance and male camaraderie.

Hell and High Water (1954) is  part of Fox’s ongoing DVD revival of the films of Sam Fuller, the American director whose wildly dynamic camera style and bold-faced studies of desperation and moral murk have helped to maintain his cult status. In keeping with Fuller’s yanked-from-the-headlines, eruptive style, Hell and High Water actually opens with an atomic detonation, the gaudy red credits splashed across a towering Technicolor mushroom cloud. “This is the story of that explosion,” the voiceover explains.

“That explosion” was actually produced in the Arctic in 1953 by then-unknown authors. Thus Hell and High Water is about an independent international group of scientists and politicos who arrange for a decorated WWII submarine captain (Richard Widmark) to lead a crew comprised of one male scientist, one female scientist (Bella Darvi) and a whole bunch of sweaty, shirtless, slobbering, chauvinist goofballs on a secret mission to find out who is behind the bomb, how they got it, and what their no-doubt devious plans are. But the film’s real highlights come from the details and bravura miniature set pieces: from sexual harassment to manual mutilation, from a China-centric rendition of “Don’t Fence Me In” to a brutal casualty suffered while interrogating a Chinese prisoner, Hell and High Water is well endowed in character, texture and audacity.

Widmark’s character this time out isn’t in keeping with the manic, hysterical losers he made his mark with in Kiss of Death (47) or Night and the City (50), but he’s cagey, conflicted and terrifically compelling in the film’s major turning points. The only significant supplement on the Hell and High Water disc is a typically hokey A&E Biography of Widmark, which shamelessly exploits his brother’s illness and death for cheap drama, but is fascinating nonetheless. Widmark is commonly known for being as clean-cut off-screen as he was deviant on, but it’s most curious to note that while still working as a schoolteacher in the Midwest, he took his summer holidays in Nazi Germany, trying to gather material for a documentary exposé on Hitler Youth camps.


I developed an admiration for the relatively forgotten director Delmer Daves after seeing Dark Passage (47), a brilliantly bizarre noir based on a David Goodis novel, full of hallucinatory subjective camerawork and featuring a killer cast of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorhead and Tom D’Andrea. I then discovered Daves’s enormously appealing 3:10 to Yuma (57), based on an Elmore Leonard western and featuring a very seductive Glenn Ford as the baddie. I can’t reasonably expect to find anything else in Daves’s filmography to match this pair, but I’m sufficiently motivated to check out his other films.

Broken Arrow (50), however, is neither another crown jewel nor a total disappointment. Set in 1870, it’s one of the very first westerns to attempt to come to terms with the genre’s racist tendencies, a self-consciously liberal-minded picture in which a gold-hunting loner (James Stewart) is drawn out of his neutrality in the hostilities between American expansionists and Cochise’s Apaches after having his life saved by an Apache teen—while still bearing witness to Apache torture methods in a chilling nocturnal tableau.

The film carries a balance of respectful anthropological detail mixed with the usual awkward casting of whites in the major Apache roles. Stewart is as convincing as always playing the stubborn moral authority, and the film never succumbs to any overly whitewashed characterizations of the other side. In fact, the final shoot out between some whites and Geronimo’s renegade warriors ends quite brutally. Founded in a spirit of colonial apologetics that now feels a bit quaint, it’s very much a film of its time—but not one without a few teeth, and more than a few incredible vistas. 

Some thoughts on Jimmy Stewart, perverts, the mysteries of arm acting, and what, should it need repeating, is still one of the all time greats

The name of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel upon which Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was based is D’entre les morts. As splendid as Hitchcock’s title was, an accurate description of the condition which afflicts both the film’s protagonist and its unsuspecting audience, Boileau and Narcejac’s evoking of the charnel house with the best-whispered words From Among the Dead so exquisitely capture the tone of what must be one of the most genuinely morbid movies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Curiously, Vertigo is also arguably among the best movies ever made, period, its goulishness absolutely matched by a sublime level of craftsmanship on display. From Saul Bass’ incisive opening credit sequence, text slashing across a looming eye like some sly wink to Buñuel's surgery in Un chien andalou (29), through the desperate, white knuckled roof-jumping prelude, through the unfolding of the haunted attraction of acrophobic detective ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (James Stewart) to doomed beauty Madeline Elster (Kim Novak) and the helpless, headlong tumble into psychological and moral collapse that follows, Hitchcock and company place us under a long, fevered trance, incited by Robert Burks’ pulsating Technicolor photography and guided by Bernard Hermann’s score, a thrilling, complex work of art in its own right, punctuated by those tremendous foghorn blasts from the netherworld.

This Sunday, the kind folks at Edmonton's Metro Cinema will screen Vertigo along with Hitchcock’s other most revered collaboration with Stewart, Rear Window (54), a movie that when placed in virtually any other double feature would be considered the residing masterpiece. A murder mystery involving a wheelchair-bound photographer spying on his neighbours, it is in fact more fun than Vertigo while still playfully incorporating similarly obscure impulses into its narrative, this time casting Stewart as a voyeur rather than a necrophile.

For all the praise rightfully heaped on both of these films, it’s often been suggested that Stewart was a poor choice for such shadowy, morose material. This proposal has been articulated most recently by Devin McKinney in the current issue of The Believer, where he argues that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie, for a variety of reasons both attributed to his talents and his tragic personal life. Yet watching his performances you get the sense that Hitchcock found something irresistibly delicious in subverting Stewart’s iconic wholesomeness and peculiarly American optimism into a weary façade disguising a catalogue of repressed perversions. Indeed, there are moments in Vertigo where Stewart's relative blankness of expression appears to me not as an actor's resignation to material beyond his abilities, but as a sort of mask, a defense against a mounting inner horror. Whether or not this was Stewart's intention finally matters little -the effect is striking, even with repeated viewing.

(Admittedly, while his face gives me no problems, I have always wondered about the weird way Stewart's arms always seem to be dangling limply in Vertigo, always functioning primarily from the elbow down. There should be a special study done on the arm acting of American movie stars, and it should begin by analyzing the bizarre poses Bogart holds every time he gets up in The Petrified Forest (33). He holds his arms stiffly, elbows-out, like he's in traction or something. Don't get me wrong, I adore Bogey in the film, but really, what the hell is with that?)

Likewise, Novak is admittedly not of the same elevated stature of many of Hitchcock’s stars. Yet (and I say this with, you know, respect) the whiff of trashiness that lingers around her persona, especially -and purposefully- apparent in Vertigo’s second half, is so utterly perfect for conveying the banal horror inherent in the story, the pathos of Scottie's need to project his fantasy upon her, that I can’t imagine anyone else in the role, especially the lovely and elegant Grace Kelly, Stewart’s love interest in Rear Window.

When regarding films as rich and obsessed over as these, film-lovers can of course debate the balance of merits, deficiencies and accidents endlessly. What’s absolutely essential is that you see these films, especially on the big screen, where the spell they cast takes full effect. Don’t miss your chance.