Movie Review: The Big Country (1958)

Genre: Western

Director: William Wyler

Starring: Gregory Peck, Carroll Baker, Jean Simmons, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives, Chuck Connors, Charles Bickford

Running Time: 166 minutes

Synopsis: Former mariner James McKay (Gregory Peck) relocates from Baltimore to the west as he prepares to marry his fiancée Pat (Carroll Baker). Her father Henry "the Major" Terrill (Charles Bickford) owns a massive ranch, and his loyal foreman Steve Leech (Charlton Heston) desires Pat and resents James' presence. The Major is locked in a feud with nearby landowner Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives), as both are dependent on water from land owned by schoolteacher Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), who is romantically pursued by Rufus' loathsome son Buck (Chuck Connors). James attempts to peacefully de-escalate every situation, but his quiet dignity unsettles the locals.

What Works Well: An epic western, William Wyler's adaptation of the Donald Hamilton book explores multiple grand themes, from personal (a man's measure of self-worth) to societal (the slow evolution towards non-violence). Strong romance elements provide James McKay with two possible matches in Pat and Julie, and as illustrations of his character, McKay's treatment of women contrasts sharply with the more brutish Leech and Buck. The film's strength resides in multiple sturdy character arcs, veterans Charles Bickford and Burl Ives adding depth to the antagonism between The Major and Rufus, while the father-son tension between Rufus and Buck provides a powerful undercurrent. Expansive cinematography by Franz F. Planer complements a running "big country" reference, and the music score by Jerome Moross is one of the iconic western soundtracks.

What Does Not Work As Well: Given the breadth of storytelling, the ending deserved more reflective exposition.

Conclusion: Big narrative ambitions fulfilled on a big canvas.



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Movie Review: Sierra (1950)

A basic B-grade western, Sierra looks good but is an otherwise stiff and by-the-numbers adventure about family redemption.

Ring Hassard (Audie Murphy) lives with his father Jeff (Dean Jagger) in seclusion, deep in the Sierra mountains. They break wild horses for a living, and their only contact with the nearest town is through local drifter Lonesome (Burl Ives). Trouble starts when independent-minded tough girl Riley Martin (Wanda Hendrix) stumbles onto the Hassards, and uncovers the family secret: Jeff is a fugitive from justice, and Ring has been raised in isolation and never seen a woman up close. Nevertheless, Riley and Ring start to fall in love.

When Jeff hurts himself trying to tame a wild horse, Ring, Lonesome and Riley try to help by getting a doctor to his side, but their efforts only reveal the Hassard hideout to the local sheriff. Riley wants to be a lawyer and believes that she can help prove Jeff's innocence. But convincing a town full of angry folks that the long-wanted fugitive was wrongly convicted will be no easy task, especially when Riley's suitor Duke (Elliott Reid) decides that Ring is an inconvenient threat.

Directed by Alfred E. Green, Sierra has a few decent ideas scattered over its shortish 83 minutes of running time, but the movie is otherwise barely above the level of a television western episode. The characters are wooden, the action routine, the dialogue stilted and the set-pieces contrived. The film does look good thanks to rich colours, and the locations around the Hassard household evoke a sense of solitude and provide plenty of ambush opportunities.

Green occupies quite a few minutes with scenes of galloping wide horses, and appears particularly taken with the dominant black mare that leads the rest of the herd. The horses are supposed to represent the Hassards' embrace of freedom and their tenuous remaining connections to civilization, but the thundering hooves eventually just get boring.

The cast is interesting, but underperforms. Audie Murphy's idea of acting here is to stand rigidly and stare into the distance, oblivious that he is unable to convey neither intensity nor thoughtfulness. Burl Ives is saddled with an old guitar and a mule, and is forced to sing a few godawful songs. Dean Jagger is the only character with a backstory, but while Jeff Hassard spends most of the film on his back, his old tale of being wrongly accused of murder is underdeveloped.

And Wanda Hendrix (Mrs. Audie Murphy at the time) never gains traction as a credible person, and cannot be taken seriously whether she is pretending to be a woman lost in the wilderness, a lawyer, or the love interest. James Arness and Tony Curtis appear in small early roles as members of the Coulter family, also hiding out from the law.

The mountains are high and the colours vivid, but Sierra is just too meager to matter.

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Movie Review: Our Man In Havana (1959)

A cold war satirical drama, Our Man In Havana adapts the Graham Greene novel of spy intrigue in pre-revolution Cuba with an emphasis on the more humorous elements. Under the guidance of director Carol Reed, the film is a sharp condemnation of the great game by the foot soldiers pressed into fighting a shadow war.

Havana in the late 1950s. Hawthorne (Noël Coward) of the British Secret Intelligence Service recruits vacuum cleaner salesman James Wormold (Alec Guinness) to be the local operative. Wormold's daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) has expensive tastes, and so he accepts the assignment lured by the easy money and the prospect of joining the prestigious country club. Wormold is friends with Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives), a philosophical larger-than-life German, while Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs) is the pompous Havana police chief, keeping an eye on all the spooks in town and lusting after Milly.

Pressured by London into actually earning his money by nurturing local sources and uncovering enemy secrets, Wormold invents a fake network of agents reporting to him, and draws imaginative sketches of non-existent massive new weapons systems (inspired by vacuum cleaner parts) uncovered by his spies. Unfortunately his British superiors take it all very seriously, and dispatch Beatrice Severn (Maureen O'Hara) as a secretary to bolster Wormold's Havana station resources. Death threats and dead bodies soon sweep over Havana, with Wormold finding his life in danger as his light-hearted dabbling in the spy world turns deadly serious.

Our Man In Havana distills the cold war to on-the-ground spies caught up in the absurdity of a conflict that rumbles on in distant capitals but insists on casting a long shadow towards every corner of the world. Wormold is more bemused than upset that his country needs him, and proceeds to milk the opportunity for pure personal gain and then for fun.

Greene, who wrote the script, does not hesitate to reveal the paranoia-driven idiocy of Hawthorne and his bosses in London (including Ralph Richardson as "C"), who can't tell a vacuum cleaner sketch from a real weapons threat. And the other side is not much better, intercepting and believing Wormold's grandiose transmittals and triggering a round of needless violence and bloodletting.

Filmed in Havana months after the communist revolution but set in the pre-revolutionary era, Our Man In Havana captures the sights and sounds of a bustling city full of life, lust, suspicion and chicanery. From bars to night spots, street corners to country clubs, apartments to police stations, Reed fills the screen with activity. Every shot has something going on in the background, adding to the sense of constant motion and potential eavesdropping.

Despite the stark black and white photography and the pervasive literal and metaphorical shadows dominating the city, Reed keeps the mood light and the plot humming along. The emphasis is on Wormold's sardonic view of the world as all those around him appear to be going off one edge or another. Hawthorne is fully invested in the craziness of the spy world, Hasselbacher is suspended between a murky past and a dwindling present, while Segura is prowling the streets of Havana looking for enemies and trying to endear himself to Milly.

It is in the character of Milly that the movie stumbles a bit, her out of control spending and tolerance of Segura never quite explained against her otherwise normal context. And Wormold does undergo an unlikely late transformation from make believe spy to a more professional recruit capable of outsmarting his seasoned foes.

But with Guinness, Kovacs and Ives delivering performances rich in texture and island scheming, Our Man In Havana succeeds thanks to the twinkle in its eye and a barbed attitude.

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Movie Review: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958)

The film adaptation of Tennessee Willliams' play is both compelling and enchanting, with stunningly multi-dimensional characters peeling away layers of civility in excruciatingly delicious slow motion. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof provided Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives the opportunity to deliver stellar and unforgettable career-defining roles.

The extended Pollitt family is gathering to celebrate the birthday of rich patriarch Big Daddy (Ives), who owns a plantation and hundreds of acres of land. Big Daddy's health is beginning to fail, shining the spotlight on issues of inheritance. His son Brick (Newman) is depressed, drinking heavily, and has just managed to break his ankle in a drunken attempt to run a midnight steeplechase at the local high school track.

Brick's wife Maggie (Taylor), nicknamed Cat, is at least partially the cause of her husband's angst, but Maggie also sees Brick's brother Cooper (Jack Carson) trying to nudge Brick out of the inheritance picture, with Cooper's wife and baby factory Mae (Madeleine Sherwood) giving her husband plenty of encouragement to shove Brick and Maggie aside. In a series of difficult and tense confrontations over the course of a stormy evening, Maggie, Brick and Big Daddy gradually come to terms with difficult past issues still dictating present behaviour.

Director Richard Brooks co-wrote the screenplay with an eye to achieving modest break-outs from the theatrical trappings of the original material. He succeeds in moving the action from room to room relatively seamlessly, but there is no doubting Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is a stage-bound adaptation of a play. The characters are the dominant element of the experience; the settings are interesting but very much secondary.

To comply with the censorship codes and public tolerances of the day, the movie adaptation only hints at the homosexual sub-texts in the story. The MGM studio was perhaps marginally behind the times in pushing boundaries, but the screen version does provide space for Maggie to emerge as a forerunner of the coming sexual and feminist revolutions. Maggie starts the day unloved by her husband and being eased out of Big Daddy's fortune; she ends the evening as a dazzling example of what an empowered woman is capable of.

Elizabeth Taylor is a magnetic presence as Maggie "the Cat", with an unnerving ability to dominate any frame, even on the rare occasions when she is the secondary observer on the edge of the drama. Taylor pulls off a masterful performance combining guilt, ambition and tenacity to fight for her marriage and ensure her husband secures his rightful share of Big Daddy's inheritance. More than just a cat on hit tin roof, Maggie is also a cat walking through a minefield of complex familial relations and tragic legacies. Taylor's performance is all the more remarkable as she started filming three weeks after the death of her husband Mike Todd when his plane crashed, killing all on-board. Taylor was supposed to have been on the plane.

Paul Newman spends the first two thirds of the movie brooding and drinking, but comes alive in the final act, breaking through years of crusty barriers to confront the pain inflicted on him by his wife and father, and most painfully, the agony he has imposed upon himself. For an actor whose career was built on cool detachment, Brick's emotional breakthrough represents some of Newman's most animated screen moments.

Big Daddy: What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it. It smells like death.

Burl Ives acted in movies for five decades, but his Big Daddy easily ranks among his most memorable roles. With subtle twitches of the mouth and eyebrows, Ives, who was reprising his role from the Broadway stage production, conveys various degrees of irritation with his mostly insufferable family, while inexorably moving towards a mammoth confrontation with Brick. Both men will at least recognize their devastating weaknesses without necessarily rectifying them.

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof celebrates the consequences of soul-baring, as hot days, tin roofs and agitated cats combine for cleansing outcomes.

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