Major Dundee "Restored?"

(April 2005: Film Forum, New York City)

Major Dundee is still lost somewhere on the border between Texas and Mexico. A stunning endeavor to rescue him was mounted by Columbia Pictures recently, but despite fine work work and high-minded idealism, Sam Peckinpah's early film still verges upon the inaccessible and incomprehensible.
One thing is clear, Major Dundee may -- even in a mangled state -- be one of the finest attempts at portraying war in all it's dirt drenched, emotionally maladroit, morally untenable, politically muddled and ethically impossible reality. Where Kubrick's Paths of Glory pinpoints the damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma of the common soldier caught up in the ego-driven machinations of the highly placed perpetrators of World War I, what's left of Peckinpah's attempt to show something similar never quite focusses on enough tangibles to be either emotionally engaging or clearly provacative intellectually.

It is to the intellect, in fact, that this lengthened by 12 minutes version of Dundee seems to appeal the most. There are fine moments that start to take hold -- the Confederate soldier ordering a restrained, dignified black soldier to take off his boots -- but they never seem integrated into the sweep of the entire motion picture.

At this point in history, it becomes nearly impossible without major research and apologies to determine who or what's at fault. Sam Peckinpah's personal problems were well-known and as his drinking problems took hold, his grasp upon story and drama loosened. For my taste, his best films are Ride The High Country and The Wild Bunch: here the story is clear and everything hangs in its proper place along the tales told.

But it's hard to even determine to what Major Dundee aspired. There are three credited writers. If this were a comedy, having 9 writers would be more appropriate, even de rigeur. But on a drama, more than one writer spells trouble, especially when the writer listed in third place is the director himself. The echoes of ringing lines from "Ride The High Country" ("get the ball rolling" or Warren Oates refusing to bathe) attest to some desperation or lethargy in scripting.

The climax, however, has an unexpected emotional punch: not the battle itself, but rather the abrupt, inconclusive ending itelf. Having barely survived a vague sort of victory over the French, the tattered remains of Dundee's troops simply ride up a hill into Texas. There're no medals, no triumphant music, no romantic closeups of those "brave" few lucky enough to get away with their asses still attached. There's only a straight cut to the end title cast list. That's it. Chilling in the right sort of way, and a confirmation of an intention to show war in a dispassionate, raw way.

Brecht espoused a kind of intellectual distance between his plays and the audience. The "verfremdung" effect, he called it, the "alienation" effect. One was supposed to attend the theater, smoke, eat, chat, ponder while the play was going on. The better to absorb the political ideas that Brecht wanted you to learn.

It's hard to believe that Peckinpah set out to accomplish just that, but too much of the movie exists in the mind trying to fill in the missing parts: who was Dundee? what did he want? what was really going on inside of him? who were all these people anyway. Yes, they are all outcasts, misfits, criminals, but only the horse thief seemed to have any personality beyond stereotype.

Nonetheless, it's hard to not admire the attempt. At any time in Hollywood history, a production that has the balls to try something a little different is the clear exception to the rules. Even Heaven's Gate which is much more of a disaster than Major Dundee and undoubtedly has less at its heart and soul than Dundee does even in this purportedly restored, but still mangled version, needs to be given some credit for "chutzpah." But the proof of the pudding is that -- even at full length -- Heaven's Gate doesn't work and attests to spending money on sizzle (authentic 19th Century roller skates that no one in the audience can even see) instead of steak. Dundee has more meat on its bones, but the bones appear -- from the evidence at hand -- to be a bit rickety.

Orson Welles A One Man Band

What I most remember about meeting Orson Welles was that he was big and also smiling. I managed to go up to him after a talk he gave at the Director's Guild of America in Hollywood sometime in the very early 80's. He showed some black and white excerpts from "The Other Side of the Wind," and I remember that he said something to the effect that if you took the boxoffice grosses of all of his movies including Citizen Kane and added them together the total would barely come up to the budget of a modern film. That was 15 years ago. And he was right.

In 1975, I was working on a documentary about American Comic Book and Comic Strip artists and I wanted to include an interview with Orson Welles. According to Jerry Siegel, the original delineator of The Joker in Batman comic books and a neighbor of mine, the guys around the comic book offices back in the early 1940's were big comic book fans! This included people you've probably never heard of, but should have, like Will Eisner, and some you have heard of, who you probably should ignore, like Bob Kane. Anyway, these guys liked to go to the movies. And they especially liked real moody black and white cinematography of what came to be thought of as the Gregg Toland school of perhaps even "noir" later on. They'd go see a movie, then come back to the office and draw it into their comic books. If you want to bother to look at the very early Batman and Detective Comics, you'll see it all there: shadows, dutch angles, silhouettes, you name it.One day somebody came back from a certain movie and told everybody else and they all went to see it and they came back and verbally slavered over it and drew it into their comic books. It was Citizen Kane of course and you can see the influence of that, too, especially in Wil Eisner's work up to the present day: both graphic style and story-telling style. Check out Dropsey Avenue or A Message From God.

So, now. Somebody actually talked to Orson Welles around about that time and found out that he (and apparently Gregg Toland) loved comic books. That he had been an avid reader of Detective Comics and Batman and had deliberately made Citizen Kane look like that. !!!!

Peter Bogdanovich was nice enough to give me Orson's home phone number in Los Angeles, and said "Call him up. Either he'll answer the phone or he won't." So I did. And Orson never answered the phone.

This evening I watched a lovely documentary about Orson's "declining" years down at the Film Forum, and thankfully there were more than the 5 people there that a friend reported a few days ago. Most of the audience was young. They laughed at the jokes though, and they were attentive. Not as many as I laughed at. That's because I'm older and more jaded and have more tire marks from Hollywood across my back than they do, but perhaps I'm putting on airs.

When I went up to him 15 years ago, I think I wanted something to rub off. I didn't know just what to say, and I believe I shook hands with him. Maybe not, but I think I did. I was awed, and in retrospect I felt a little like the guy in the color excerpt from "Wind" who goes up to John Houston and says "I'm Joe Blow." And Houston replies, "Of course you are." I'm sure I identified with Welles. Maverick. So did all umpty hundred people in the audience at the interview shown in the film. Oddly, they all probably wanted to be him. I know I did. I haven't gotten close, but I've suffered some of the same indignities. It's just that the detritus of my life isn't quite as interesting as the detritius of his. And the biggest thing I ever did, is awful tiny compared to the smallest thing Welles pulled off.

New York City, December 23, 1996

Ryan's Daughter

David Lean can hardly be accused of pandering. He wrote once in a late 1940's essay that it went without saying that an important purpose of the cinema was to give a momentary dream to young people on Saturday night dates: for "her" that she was beautiful, exquisitely dressed and adored, for "him," that he was handsome and had conquered."her." And so they wrapped arms about one another and drifted away for two hours. There was no cynicism in it, however, or Brief Encounter certainly would not exist. And, of course, there is Dr. Zhivago, kind of an ultimate Saturday Night hug movie. And Ryan's Daughter.

Through the good graces of a good friend, I got to see a screening of a (relatively) uncut 35mm Anamorphic print of Ryan's Daughter just a few days ago.Before you put this down for fear of some ravings about techie things, I'll come back to it later. Romantic as it is, this film never sweeps you away like Zhivago. Instead, it has a kind of raw tragedy and raw sexuality that is both uncharacteristic of Lean and in many ways ahead of its time for mainstream movies.

So then, what's wrong with this picture. To begin with, it was filmed in 70mm. My recollection of seeing it at the Granada Theatre in Buffalo, NY in its uncut roadshow version projected through the original hand-ground Todd-AO prototype projection lenses, is of a truly stunning and glowing motion picture.

But to every one of my four companions in an almost deserted theatre during opening weekend, it was boring beyond belief. My girlfriend at the time was so bored, she wanted to leave and we had a terrible fight about it afterwards. I was, on the other hand, fascinated by it, and the glow of the film is almost unshakeable in my memories.

That is the first thing that is missing from a 35mm print: the incredible visual detail and the stunning play of light from a 65mm negative projected with the proper lenses on a slightly curved silvered screen from a 70mm release print. Every color is crisp. Every grain of sand is visible. Every mote of dust in every glory of sunshine. Wow.

The second thing is the sound. 70mm mag stripe had seven channel stereo (or perhaps it was six channel stereo, who's counting.) Five channels behind the screen so that the dialogue would move across the vast image with each character as they spoke. Then one (or was it two?) surround channels for scenes with huge waves crashing against the beach. Long since abandoned for the modern super surround systems where all dialogue is mixed to the center channel and the three front channels are basically used to have the sound of a car move from right to left and the surrounds for helicopters flying all over the place (pretty kewl actually), the original stereophonic systems were very focussed on human speech: where it was and who was saying it. Sometimes this got disconcerting when cutting between over the shoulder shots and having dialogue pop back and forth from right to left. That's why it was abandoned.

But in its glory, you couldn't beat it for dramatic scenes!

It's a pity, then, that this recent screening was of a 35mm print (and with no stereophonic sound either) because one of the big losses was of visual sensuality. It is like a different movie then, making you focus on the characters and dialogue and less on the image. A companion remarked that he had rediscovered the film on television, and I realized that it would probably work very well there with its big close ups and medium shot conversations.

That, in fact, is what is so uncharacteristic about Ryan, and why, I think, it don't all hang together. Compared to Brief Encounter or to Odd Man Out or The Rising of the Moon there is virtually no intimacy in the film, and the only characters who are shown in intimate settings are Sara Miles and Robert Mitchum. Nothing is ever revealed about the private lives of anyone else! And it is all played out against the most gorgeous landscapes ever revealed on the screen!

It is a thin story on a huge, huge, huge, huge set. Trevor Howard's is virtually the only character written with both the size and the subtlety to match the huge rocks, crashing waves, and desolate countryside. Setting a romatic tragedy against emptiness cries out for some internal life in the characters. And stunning art direction won't fill that hole.

Imagine that Rose was brilliant as well as beautiful and think what a tragedy that would have been. Instead, we have a woman craving, unknowingly, for a good fuck, for the big "O." Albeit that a woman's sexual life was ignored and to some extent consciously repressed those many years ago, that the story takes place in Ireland (home of the Irish Sex Manual -- filled with 200 blank pages) amongst Irish Catholics, it strikes me that it is not tragic enough that she simply be deprived of physical fulfillment. There is not enough history to the characters to make this compelling: who was Rose's mother really? where did her Dad come from? is it enough only to know that the British won't let the young people work and that all they have to do is to hang out on the main street and look at each other lustfully and make fun of the town fool? It seems to me that these are characters that are conceived of as monolithically and simplistically as the rocks on the seashore.

But, Lean and Bolt manage to pull this out of the fire somehow. Having seen this film now around 4 or 5 times in various incarnations and butcherings, I've never fallen asleep, nor have I ever felt like I was wasting my time. This is not damning with faint praise. Even Lean is entitled to come a cropper. And bad Lean is pretty good. Nonetheless, I think that the only way to appreciate what they meant to do is in the original 70mm format with sound intact. Then all the pieces are in place. It's all very well and good to see the strengths of the story as they reveal themselves (at proper scale) in the P&S TV version, but Lean set out to tell a mythic story with mythic sized characters on a now mythical sized screen with technical systems that seem sadly to be lost in time. Let's bring it all back in IMAX with all its visual and aural beauty and all of its dramatic blemishes.

New York City, December 20, 1996

Theatre Epilogue Epilogue

It's only a week later, but as I walked home from the final Freeman Dyson lecture, The Amsterdam Theatre had changed again. Each letter of the name A M S T E R D A M was finished. They blinked on in turn, first A, then M until the whole name was spelled out. There are little frills of lights around the letters that blink, too. Beneath the marquee, little yellow bulbs run in a loop that disappears into the infinity of a correctly placed mirror inside the still unfinished lobby, each flickering yellow glow chasing the next around and around and around.

What new restoration wonder will come next?

Wednesday, March 5, 1997, New York City

A New Hope: A Movie Theatre Epilogue

In the wonderful novel "Time and Again," Jack Finney's hero "thinks" and "emotes" himself from the still unchanged Dakota Hotel into the Central Park of the 19th Century. It is a feat of time travel unmatched in the high tech realms of modern movie science fiction. It is a feat of time travel that we all do quietly in our souls late at night or when we are sure that no one else is looking. We find those memories in our hearts that are brought back by the sight of a knick knack in a store window, or the scent of mustard on a steamed hot dog, and we are transported instantly and totally to another time, another place and we live there fully until the barking car horns bring us back in time before we are run over. We blush and blink it off and hope that no one saw that "look" on our face when it happened and then keep walking uptown or down taking little tastes of the still warm dream while it lasts.

On Wednesday, February 19, I attended a lecture by Freeman Dyson the noted, revered, and wondrous mathematician cum physicist, at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.

Afterwards, head full of the history of science, the pacifism of Tolstoy, and the vagaries of Napoleonic educational methods, I wandered West on 42nd Street.

It was after 8 and it was dark as I walked through the desolation of the blocks between Sixth Avenue and Broadway.

I drifted back to my childhood and college days and the afternoons and nights spent in the myriad dirty piss-smelling movie theatres that lined 42nd Street watching movies and movies and cowboys and more movies. The memories shimmered hazily in the empty lots and little stores that live inside the shells of the old 10 cent movie houses.

Then I crossed Seventh Avenue and it was there.

Someone had brought back The Amsterdam Theatre. We all know it was Disney and we all know that our Mayor gave it to them on a silver tray, but there it was, glowing out of the shuttered strip between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. It was clean and lit up and looked for all the world like you could hand them a quarter and walk in and see a movie. It looked like the marble halls and marble men's rooms would smell like opening night. That the screen would no longer be torn, that the cherubim would have their gold leaf smiles buffed up once again. I peeked in past the gates and the inside was still unfinished, but the boxoffices were there and the marble floor was fairly clean and the marquee itself had every light bulb back in place only waiting to blink in some mystical snake-chasing-its-tail sequence.

And the best part was that as I walked down into the subway, it didn't disappear. It's still there, and even though it won't be used for movies, it promises to re-open in June and I can't wait.

Monday, March 3, 1997, New York City

Something There Is That Doesn't Like A Movie Theatre

Unlike Prufrock and his coffee spoons, I measure my life in the demise of movie theatres.

When I first moved to New York's Upper West Side, there were eleven separate sand-alone movie houses.

There was one tiny one at 72nd Street that showed art films (and I've forgotten the name, Embassy 72, perhaps), the Loew's 84th Street (a movie palace in the Grand tradition replete with balcony), The New Yorker at 89th Street, The Symphony, The Thalia, two now nameless full size United Artist Theatres between 96th and 97th Street (former and badly faded movie palaces with work lights visible through the screen during the entire show), The Metro, a nameless theatre that showed mostly Mexican films with Cantinflas and others, the Edison (the oldest movie theatre in New York and actually built by Edison), and the Olympia.

The 72nd Street Theatre made way for a furniture store, the New Yorker was trashed for an apartment building, the two United Artists theatres became another housing complex, the site of the Mexican theatre sells discount hand towels, and The Edison has become a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Tom and D.W. Griffith would have been thrilled.

Of the rest, the gorgeous, gold-leafed, velvet curtained Loew's was torn down completely and rebuilt next door and now houses six shoebox theatres (the Loew's SexPlex as we in the know call it), these days The Symphony Space (nee The Symphony) shows films once a week, the Thalia passes into and out of private hands for several months at a time and has recently shown very fine African films before it went bust one mo' time, The Metro is twinnned, and so is the Olympia. So, if we count generously, there are now twelve movie theatres where once there were only eleven.

Clearly, clearly, clearly, it ain't the same.

I walk through the neighborhood seeing their ghostly marquees beckoning me. The upper West Side -- not Times Square -- was the heart of movie theatres and even of production in the 1920's and 30's. The tattered remains of the theatres call out to you if you look closely beneath the supermarket signs: the decorated arches that once soared over marquees, the wall-mounted hooks where the supports for the marquees were once attached are all still there. The huge inside spaces got divided up for groceries.

One foolish day Robert Frost visited me at my typewriter (when I still had a typewrite) and wrote this down for me.

Something there is that doesn't love a movie theatre
, That sends a wrecking crew onto it,
And spills the marquee onto the street;
And makes the aisles into sidewalks.
The work of moviegoers is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have not left one seat without gum,
And they would spill coke on every cushion,
As they cheer the heroes on.
It is the wreckers I mean,
No one sees them come or hears plans made,
but at Summer Holiday Movie time,
we find them there.
I let my friend know across the park;
And on a day we met to watch the sweating crews
And see the heavy cranes smash in the walls.
We stand across the street as we watch
To see the rubble that once held in magic
And kept out distorting light and noise.
We have to use a spell to watch the destruction without tears.
"Stay as you were when our backs are turned!"
We wear out our minds with calling back the dreams.
Oh, just another kind of nostalgic game,
Over on our side of the street.
It comes to little more.
There where it is, the contractor doesn't need an antique theatre.
He is all progress and higher rents.
Our memories of lush adventures will barely survive
Enhanced by popcorn and thirsty throats.
My friend says, "Good theatres made good neighbors."
A scent of Spring is still in me, and I wonder If we could put a notion in builders' hearts.
Didn't good theatres make good neighbors?" I'd ask them.
"Weren't they a wondrous palace to lure us from lonely rooms?
Before I built a high rise, I'd ask to know
What hand-painted ceiling I was tearing down and throwing out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a movie theatre,
That wants it down."
I could say "greed" to the builders,
But it's not greed exactly, and I'd rather
They said it to themselves.
I see them there
A blueprint and sales prospectus grasped firmly
One in each hand like an old stone savage armed.
The builders move in darkness as it seems to me,
But not one of celluloid visions and the sounds of wonder.
My friend will not be consoled.
He is sad still to think the thought.
He asks again, "Didn't good theatre's make good neighbors?"

Monday, March 3, 1997 New York City (poem circa 1980, New York City)

Movie Comments

I don't write movie reviews. And I keep telling that to all the magazine editors who keep asking me to do it, and I keep telling that to all the publicists who invite me to screenings so that I can write nice reviews of their movies for them. I do, sometimes, write articles about movies. It will be an interview, or a recollection, or some other damn nonsense that occurs to me at the moment. Life, however, is much too short to spend more time on a bad movie (I guess there are some) beyond viewing it in the first place. So I only write about movies that interest me. Notice that I didn't say "movies I like." Movies that interest me

1/18/97