Ride With the Devil: "...how bad bad luck can be"

Ride With the Devil (1999) was dumped into the marketplace over a decade ago with only the most meager fanfare, a magisterial Civil War epic featuring several young rising stars that was somehow immediately rendered little more than a footnote of strictly cult interest in the careers of director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus. All this despite the fact that this celebrated collaborative team had previously enjoyed enormous acclaim with Sense and Sensibility (95) and The Ice Storm (97), and would soon enjoy massive commercial success with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (00). After hearing it praised every couple of years or so by the few people I knew who’d managed to see it, I finally experienced Ride With the Devil for myself last week, thanks to a fine new release from the Criterion Collection. The film’s neglect now seems even more astonishing to me, given that it is surely the equal of Lee and Schamus’ finest work. It is a rare Hollywood film that embraces both a broad canvas and rigorously iconoclastic approach to one of the great troubled subjects of US history. Photographed by Frederick Elmes, it’s beautiful in its bucolic visions yet largely eschews gloss and doesn’t linger unduly on the prettiness of its stars. Based on the novel Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, it holds moments of tenderness of an endearingly awkward sort, yet most of its key scenes revolve around acts of rampant savagery that recall the most brutal evocations of Cormac McCarthy. It is, of course, a western of sorts.

It begins, shrewdly enough, with a wedding, the calm before the storm. It initially seemed to me burdened with too much overtly ominous and exposition-laden dialogue, but this passage is brief, and after we’re settled in our seats we’re quickly shaken out of them once the central characters’ lives are swept up in their nation’s apocalyptic crisis. We meet two friends, Missouri boys who unthinkingly side with the secessionists, Jake “Dutchy” Roedel (Tobey Maguire), the teenage son of a German immigrant, and Jack Bull Charles (Skeet Ulrich), who’s a little older and at times needs to look after the less experienced Jake. Their friendship is mirrored by that of the aristocratic George Clyde (Simon Baker) and former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), one of many black men who, for all kinds of reasons best not simplified, fought alongside those who were fighting to keep them enslaved. The story unfolds in such a way that it’s not obvious from the start who our real protagonists will be—Wright doesn’t even speak until 45 minutes in—a little narrative slight-of-hand that pays off brilliantly as we see the merciless vagaries of war wreak havoc on conventional heroic trajectories.

Residing far from the war’s hot points, these guys fight not as enlisted men but as guerillas, a point that serves to emphasize the chaos and meaningless violence that filled the margins of the Civil War’s official campaigns. The guerillas keep their hair long and wear broad-brimmed hats, looking like prototypes for Lynard Skynard. They fight only seasonally, hiding out over the winter, like animals, for fear that the tracks of their horses’ hooves will sabotage their strategies. They’re not organized like a regular army but are every bit as capable of atrocity, something made grotesquely clear in the films’ depeiction of the 1863 Lawrence Massacre, in which the guerillas, some of them already drunk, descend on the Kansas town at dawn, unannounced, to slaughter each and every man they find, sometimes while they lay wounded under the weeping figures of their wives. It’s the major turning point in Ride With the Devil, not in the sense that our central characters become suddenly politically enlightened, but that the infernal inhumanity they bear witness to finally reaches a breaking point. Most of the people being killed, Jake observes, “are just a bunch of ordinary folks finding out just how bad bad luck can be.”

Jake might just be Maguire’s most interesting role, one that invites him to trust in the verity of his inherent, saucer-eyed innocence, rather than trying to comment on the part or ingratiate himself. Though he’s naturally good-humoured, Jake’s learning curve is tremendous and deeply pathetic. It’s a marvelous moment when toward the film’s end he had his haircut and is told by his impromptu barber (Tom Wilkinson) that he looks 21 again. Jake says, “I’m only 19.” His barber tells him, “You’ll never look 19.” There’s an amazing scene soon after that finds the virginal Jake about to make love to a beautiful woman. She repeatedly asks him if he’s ever had sex, but all he can answer, rather defensively, is that he’s killed 15 men. But the most affecting and elegantly wrought piece of acting in Ride With the Devil is easily that of Wright, who never overplays the colossal irony of his role, but uses a little characteristic sway of the head or suspicious glance here and there to make his presence more than felt. Wright’s Holt is a character of vast complexity that needs to be at least partly left to our imagination, though there is a nicely measured scene that makes the core of his journey explicit, one in which he realizes that the most devastating moment in his adult life is also precisely the moment in which he begins to truly feel like a free man. It’s a quiet scene in a film of grand spectacle, yet it constitutes the film’s unforgettable emotional climax.

Roaming the wilderness of cities, time, and the vagaries of the film industry: The Exiles on DVD

Homer (Homer Nish) leans against the storefront window, his large head with its meticulously greased-back pompadour literally haloed by liquor. He’s just received a letter from back home, which he opens to read. While the film is heavily reliant on voice-over, repeatedly juxtaposing the disparate internal and external lives of its characters, it’s among the film’s masterstrokes that no voice-over is used here, in the very moment we most expect it. Yet Homer’s letter is, in a purely cinematic sense, read to us. As he unfolds the pages we’re taken from this neon-lit strip in Bunker Hill to a sun-beaten pastoral scene in Valentine, Arizona, where Homer’s family gathers beneath a tree near the shack we presume to be their home. There’s singing and dialogue, but no subtitles. We’re momentarily immersed in the distant world Homer mentally revisits during a pit-stop along yet another night on the town, getting drunk, gambling, maybe looking for a fight. There’s nostalgia in Homer’s voice-over for a time when Native Americans were nomadic and lived off the land, and implicit in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) is the notion that this tradition continues in some bastardized form, where wandering is limited to the confines of a neighbourhood literally on the verge of being condemned, and the land being lived off is comprised of the disposable consumer fruits of modern mass production. Like the climactic scene in which Homer and his friends drive up to Hill X—today’s Dodger Stadium—to play drums, get wild, and keep drinking, the bar-hopping reads as a distorted updating of once revered traditions.

Kent Mackenzie in production on The Exiles

Nearly 50 years on, The Exiles, which never received theatrical release until last year, still feels singular, ahead of its time and ours, and not only because of its bold blurring of documentary and fiction, its use of non-professional actors to tell their own stories in staged—and gorgeously photographed—scenes. As Native American filmmaker Sherman Alexie emphasizes in the informative and hugely entertaining audio commentary, “I guarantee this was the first time in a motion picture you saw Indians in khakis, getting gas!” (Alexie also draws attention to such timeless items as the sense of mischief particular to Native American culture and the inexplicable persistence of “weak Indian moustaches.”) Fully integrated yet unmistakably Other, wearing the clothes and driving the cars and listening to the music of white Americans yet existing in a defiantly separate realm, the characters who inhabit The Exiles emerge from behind the veil of social invisibility and genre film stereotype, not for the purposes of liberal hand-wringing but to tell their own stories, or rather provide a complex and resolutely unresolved portrait of a problematic community. Thanks the Milestone’s superlative new two-disc package of The Exiles, which contains several additional works from Mackenzie, who died in the midst of a frustrated career in 1980, we can begin, however belatedly, to appreciate the themes that reside at the core of Mackenzie’s compressed oeuvre. His was a cinema of community. Above all, he seemed to cultivate a sense of place. And a sense of place is not complete until you convey a sense of how that place is shaped and made relevant by the people in it.

The Exiles follows three characters, each of them Native Americans relocated to Los Angeles after being raised on reserves, over a 12-hour period. Two of them—the men—go out for a night of revelry, the third—the beautiful, quiet and very pregnant Yvonne (Yvonne Williams)—out for a movie and, later, the company of a girlfriend. We glean something of their personal philosophies through the voice-over track that glides between them, but their portraits are only completed by Mackenzie’s ongoing movement between close-ups and wide shots of the city that looms over them. The evocation of Bunker Hill Mackenzie provided was sufficiently striking to be included in Thom Andersen’s monumental documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (03), excerpted on the Exiles set, in which Andersen paid tribute to Mackenzie conveyance of how “different social realities coexist without touching each other.” Mackenzie’s early short, the elegant and touching ‘Bunker Hill 1956’ (56), also included here, laid the groundwork for such urban commentary by collecting the testimonies of three residents of this once affluent enclave which gradually became a haven for the pensioners and visible minorities. By then Bunker Hill was already slated for demolition and Mackenzie’s short functioned as a form of protest, a demand for affordable housing instead of throwing residents into further exile and destroying a vast expanse of architectural history. In ‘A Skill for Molina’ (64), Mackenzie by contrast applauds a federally-funded skill development program that allowed this documentary’s titular WWII vet and father of nine to gain a trade as a welder. Yet here too Mackenzie’s deftness with ambiguous understatement can be found in a montage sequence that shows Molina cutting each of his children’s hair—he had earlier took courses in hairdressing, but had to stop when he ran out of money.

Other highlights in Milestone’s set include an episode of ‘Leonard Lopate’ featuring the Exiles’ official “presenters” Alexie and director Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep (77), while not directly influenced by The Exiles, was also successfully re-released by Milestone two years ago and now feels very much like a continuation of Mackenzie’s project. It begs the question: who’s continuing this work today?

Easy riders and raging farm boys: Robinson and Davis glow as adult lovers in Kid Galahad, Bogart broods beautifully in Invisible Stripes, now on DVD

Nicky Donati (Edward G. Robinson) handles fighters, a vocation that allows him to pull the puppet’s strings with one hand while collecting the take with the other. They pass through cities, living out of hotels, shrugging off the coming and going of small fortunes, Nicky and his partner Fluff (Bette Davis), while Nicky’s beloved mother (Soledad Jiménez) and sister Marie (Jane Bryan) are cloistered in the countryside and the convent respectively, away from the mugs, bon vivants and hangers-on. From Fluff, too. So at the heart of Kid Galahad (1937) is a man with a double life, a more forgiving existence if you need to seriously bend your ethics and still be able to look ma in the eye.

“Did you ever see a bellhop that didn’t want to become a fighter?” Nicky asks, but it’s a rhetorical question. He discovers Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris, remarkable in a tricky role) when the kid is sent up by the hotel management to fix drinks for a party that genuinely looks like a gas, with Fluff working the room in a very sexy low-cut dress and Nicky actually getting a haircut from a proper barber in a proper barber’s chair while still holding court, surrounded by mostly plastered guests. Ward is a good-natured hulk from the sticks with an involuntary smile that has the ladies fawning. He just wants to save up to buy a farm, he sheepishly confesses. Nicky sees a perfect mark. Fluff sees an innocent in need of an education, and maybe a little protection from his new mentor. Thereafter dubbed Kid Galahad, Ward will, against Nicky’s plans, become the biggest thing that ever happened to Nicky, punching his way to the championship. He’s also the catalyst that will usher Nicky’s well-ordered life into chaos.

Now on DVD from Warner, Kid Galahad is a truly wonderful picture, directed by Michael Curtiz in elegant traveling shots and a selective use of close-ups in only the most emotionally pointed scenes. The script is credited to Seton I. Miller, and offsets the fairly familiar plot with an intriguing milieu thick with exploitation—the press, the management—and with immensely textured, very adult characters experiencing different kinds of love. A budding romance between Ward and Marie drives the action, but what makes the film so rich are the increasingly desperate Nicky, whom Robinson makes a feast of—and there’s a terrific scene with ma, rolling along in babbling, un-subtitled Italian—and, most especially, Fluff. Davis’ inhabiting of this sort of kept woman, with her sad, helplessly easygoing smiles, is so tender and touching, so knowing. The scene where she tells Nicky it’s time for them to part is underplayed and quietly heart-wrenching. These unmarried, not young lovers have had a good ride, a long history of hustling, bustling and merriment that has finally reached its terminus.

I haven’t mentioned Humphrey Bogart, who plays Turkey, Robinson’s rival, and another in a long line of heavies. Better to emphasize his terrific supporting role in Invisible Stripes (39), also newly on disc from Warner and, while not nearly as good a film, features plenty of interesting elements. We first meet Cliff (George Raft) and Chuck (Bogart) while they share their final shower in Sing Sing. After walking through the prison gates—guarded by a saintly old guy named Peter—they board a train and exchange their plans for their newly emancipated lives. Chuck fantasizes about a gorgeous blonde and the high life, while Cliff says he’s going home to his family and the straight and narrow. Chuck just laughs at this, telling Cliff he’ll never get anywhere because of general prejudice against ex-cons, because he’ll always be wearing those invisible stripes. Cliff’s the hero of the movie, full of good intentions; Chuck’s a gentleman in his way but a cynic—yet, as we’ll eventually see, it’s his worldview the movie agrees with completely.

Through the characters of Cliff’s little brother Tim (William Holden, so young here I didn’t even recognize him, which is to say so young he isn't yet 'William Holden') and his girl Peggy (Bryan), the film emphasizes the self-loathing of the working class and the impossibility to rise above one’s station without the aid of dirty money. Raft was not a good actor, but you could rarely accuse him of overdoing it, and his overriding serenity can just as easily be read as mounting resignation here. With no breaks coming his way and the cops breathing down his neck, Cliff eventually falls back into crime with Chuck and his cohorts—among them a pleasingly sneering Marc Lawrence—telling his folks that he’s selling tractors instead of robbing banks. The movie’s best line comes when Tim meets Chuck, well-heeled and driving a fine car, and asks him if he sells tractors, too. The way Bogart just says “Yeah” in response is a thing of bone-dry comic beauty.

Invisible Stripes seems like its building to a conventional, tidy moral statement, yet, perhaps unintentionally, it finally emerges as an exercise in brute determinism. Indeed, the noblest and wisest character turns out to be Chuck, who may be crooked but at least knows the score, and who’ll finally risk everything to protect his one true friend, right up to the final shootout. And Bogart’s so confident and subtle, measured and cool, playing a character so carefully shaded he’s almost out of place. Surely someone with smarts saw this and realized which one of these tough guys was the real star. It would be only two more years before High Sierra (41) and The Maltese Falcon (41).