Suicide is Painless

Film: M*A*S*H
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I wasn’t that conscious of movies when I was two or three years old, which is how old I was when M*A*S*H was released. As a kid, the most relevant thing with that name was the television show, the one that ran for three times longer than the war upon which it was based. I spent a lot of evenings watching the show, and as I got older and the show was eventually retired, I watched a lot of reruns. What that means is that I have a particular view of M*A*S*H, and it’s a view that doesn’t really jibe with the film.

This isn’t to say that the film isn’t great, though, because it is. It’s a very unusual film, though, for a number of reasons. It’s also very much an Altman film in that the cast is freakin’ huge and there are tons of characters to keep track of during the course of the film. However, as a person who is so familiar with the television versions of many of these characters, it’s impossible for me to tell if the film is difficult to follow. I know almost all of the main characters, so in a real sense, I know what to expect of them.

Essentially, we have a group of doctors in a mobile Army surgical hospital (hence the initials) a few miles from the front in Korea. They patch up soldiers when they come in wounded, and otherwise spend their time trying to forget that they are in Korea. They drink, play pranks on each other, and chase nurses with reckless abandon.

The doctors that we become acquainted with first are Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerrit, almost unrecognizable without the trademark mustache). They are the new surgeons at the 4077th hospital, and the minute they arrive, they begin to turn the camp upside down, getting things running the way they like them. This task is made easier because their commander, Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), is a pushover. It’s made more difficult because their bunkmate, Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), is a by-the-book officer and deeply religious. Things are compounded in both directions with the arrival of Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), who sides with our degenerate doctor heroes, and a new head nurse named “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

Essentially, M*A*S*H is completely without a plot. There are events that happen, and we see the camp personnel deal with these issues. We deal with the issues of the doctors not being up to military muster, with the fact that the camp dentist, “Painless” Waldowski (immediately recognizable character actor John Schuck) wants to commit suicide because he believes he has turned gay, and a surprise trip for Trapper and Hawkeye to Japan. Everything eventually culminates in a football game with another military outfit, complemented on the 4077th’s side with a ringer—an ex-professional football player-turned-neurosurgeon named Oliver “Spearchucker” Jones (Fred Williamson), given that nickname not because of his skin color, but because he used to throw the javelin.

M*A*S*H isn’t about a story, or getting through a particular plot or series of events. Instead, it’s about surviving the insanity of war, and the irony of being a medical doctor in a place of death and destruction. In fact, one of the reasons that there is so much humor in the film is because it is a natural contrast to the pain and misery of war. The other reason is that extreme situations like war often bring this sort of behavior and attitude out in the people trapped in the middle of it. We laugh so that we are not sickened by it. This is also why a lot of the humor here is so dark and so cruel. That’s the only reason for the broadcasting of Frank’s tryst with Hot Lips, and why the shower is rigged to collapse when Hot Lips enters it.

The film also works because the operating room scenes are both brutal and banal. Men are on the table with horrible wounds, and while we don’t specifically see any body parts or grue (or at least not too much), there’s an ocean of blood, and the doctors and nurses are up to their elbows in it. At the same time, the doctors and nurses discuss average, everyday topics, almost as if they are fixing toasters.

Altman is a difficult director for me to get behind, often because there is so much to pay attention to in his films. There are often so many characters that it can be tough to keep everyone straight. M*A*S*H does not suffer from this though, although that may only be because I know these characters so well. This is a hell of a film, and one that has aged surprisingly well, a fact that may be due to the influence of television as well.

Why to watch M*A*S*H: It spawned a true American cultural landmark.
Why not to watch: There really isn’t much of a plot.

Manson Family Circus

Film: Last Chants for a Slow Dance
Format: VHS from Eastern Illinois University Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

Sometimes, we are presented with something that we simply can’t really understand. Last Chants for a Slow Dance is sort of like that. It’s an ultra-indie film, made on a budget of about $2,000 (albeit 1977 dollars, but still), and it looks like it. In fact, it looks quite a bit like home movies of the Manson Family, or the formative years of Ted Bundy.

Tom (Tom Blair) is a drifter who appears to spend most of his time driving around Montana in his truck, allegedly looking for work. Back home he has a wife and two boys, and soon discovers that he has another child on the way. He claims to love his wife Darlene (Jessica St. John), but is unfaithful every chance he gets. He has no money, but has enough for gas to drive around and to hang out in bars and pick up women. He laughs almost constantly, like a nervous habit. Oh, and he’s also a stone-cold murderer who loots the bodies of those he slays, which might explain where his money comes from after all.

There isn’t a massive amount of narrative in this film. Generally, when we get a film that is lacking a basic plot and even a rudimentary story structure, it means that what’s left is a character study. I’m not sure this qualifies as a character study, either. It is, more or less, a slice of time out of this character’s life. We see him driving, we see him at home interacting with Darlene, we see him picking up women in bars and having sex with them, and ultimately, we see him pull over for a car in trouble and eventually shoot the driver and walk away smiling and singing.

Ostensibly, this film was based on Gary Gilmore, and I have no idea how accurate it is or how much came from the Gilmore case and how much came from writer/producer/director Jost. There is a chilling quality to it, though, a sense of a man simply “finding work” in a way that most of us would find repugnant. Tom doesn’t kill for pleasure or sport, but because he needs money. Once he has killed a victim, he’s not erotically satisfied or mentally sated. Instead, there is a sense of satisfaction, of having completed another job.

In that respect, Last Chants for a Slow Dance seems to presage a number of films. There is in some part a feeling of both Natural Born Killers and the Anton Chigurh character from No Country for Old Men in Tom’s almost nonchalance about murdering an innocent individual on the side of the road. For Tom, there is only the necessary goal of collecting enough money to keep going. Money in hand, he’s off to hunt women for sex and bars for alcohol until the cash runs out again and the cycle will repeat. He is, in a real sense, a predator of humans.

It’s difficult to tell if the film essentially looks like home movies (to the point of having sound unsynched with the visuals for the first few minutes) because Jost was going for that sort of look or because he simply couldn’t afford to do anything better. Certainly there is a homemade quality to the film, a sense of the amateur auteur. Jost frequently uses very long takes, planting his camera and simply filming what is in front of him for several minutes at a time. Often, particular scenes go on for much longer than it seems possible or advisable. But this works; it lulls the viewer initially into a sense of ease. At the end, the same lengthy takes of driving or of the roadside provide an opportunity to contemplate what has happened and what may happen next.

In short, this is a difficult film to take in. It is oddly powerful and strange, amateur without being amateurish. I am now very curious to see the other two films in what is loosely known as the Tom Blair Trilogy, but that is a project for another day.

(Note: While more films will be added next year and presumably every year, at this moment, I've hit the halfway point. 545 down, 544 to go.)

Why to watch Last Chants for a Slow Dance: The purest definition of indie ever made.
Why not to watch: Slight narrative and long takes of not much happening.

Family Gatherings Must Be Weird

Film: The Graduate
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Certain films slip under everyone’s radar. Every film geek and snob has a film or two that they haven’t yet seen for one reason or another. Me? I have a whole list of those films. One of the ones at the top was The Graduate until just now. For the generation before mine, the older section of the Baby Boomers specifically, this is a pivotal film in many ways. One could argue it as one of the most important films for that generation pre-Woodstock, and I don’t think that argument would be amiss.

Because it is such a pivotal and important film, it’s a difficult one for me to judge, because I my initial response to this film is to dislike it mildly rather than be completely enraptured by it the way I’m supposed to be. It’s kind of icky. It’s supposed to be a blend of comedy and drama, and I get that it could be seen that way, but so much of it is unpleasant that I have trouble seeing it that way. It’s not unpleasant in the way a number of films I’ve seen in the past two years is, but there is sort of an oily film over it.

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has just returned from college where he was quite the big man on campus. Now back, he is completely without direction, uninterested in getting a job and unequally uninterested in graduate school. He’s also very young—a college graduate and about a week from turning 21. At a party celebrating his return, he offers a ride home to Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who attempts to seduce him and tells him that she is “available” to him whenever he wishes. Just to make things jolly and fun, her husband (Murray Hamilton, immediately identifiable by his voice) is the law partner of Ben’s dad (William Daniels).

This goes on for awhile. Ben drifts aimlessly (and quite literally in the family swimming pool) and has copious amounts of sex with Mrs. Robinson. He discovers that he really has nothing in common with her. She’s essentially a bored housewife who drinks and smokes constantly and is looking for a little something more in her life, thus Benjamin. Ben, on the other hand, is pretty much disgusted with himself for sleeping with his father’s partner’s wife, but can’t break away because he doesn’t have anything else to do. This changes when he is forced to take the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross) out on a date. After a very rocky start, the two end up falling for each other, making one creepy and strange love/sex triangle. Like I said, there’s sort of a film of oil on this movie.

And yet, in a very real way, I understand exactly what all of the hoopla is about. Liking this movie is all about the “when.” This is a movie that needs to be seen at a particular point in life, at a particular time or age, and I’m well past it. It reminds me in many ways of The Catcher in the Rye. People who read that book at 15 or so love it and identify with Holden Caulfield for the rest of their lives. I read that book in my 20s and wondered what all of the fuss was about. Furthermore, I wanted to reach into the pages and bitchslap that little snot.

And that, for me, is The Graduate. I’m in my 40s now, and find nothing appealing or interesting about these characters. Benjamin Braddock is a creep, a jerk. He does little but feel sorry for himself and whine about it. The world essentially gets handed to him on a plate, and none of it is good enough or interesting enough to do anything for him. Elaine is a mush and a bit of a twit, a pretty face with nothing behind it. And Mrs. Robinson is, bluntly, a selfish bitch.

But here’s the thing: all of that is completely intentional. I get precisely what the point of this film is, I think, or at least a possible reading of everything in it that makes coherent sense. I’m not going to say that everybody else has it wrong, but I will say that the people who find Ben appealing and somehow laudable have it dead wrong. He’s a punk and he’s supposed to be a punk. Ben does nothing but screw up, and that’s exactly what he’s supposed to do here. The film isn’t about Ben “rescuing” Elaine or about the affair with Mrs. Robinson, or Oedipal issues. It’s about listless people adrift in the world doing things because they can’t think of anything else to do. Ben and Elaine and Mrs. Robinson are pitiful and pitiable because they can’t really be anything else.

And so, for that, this film is genius.

I don’t love this film, and I’m not sure at this point if I even like it. I do, however, respect the hell out of what Mike Nichols has accomplished with it. He has, for lack of a better word, tapped into that feeling of ennui, that complete lack of a point that everyone experiences at one time or another. Everyone is Ben Braddock at some point in life.

I’m not that guy anymore, although I’ve certainly been him in the past. I think if I had watched this film during those years of my life, I may well have placed this as one of my favorite movies ever. I’d see Ben Braddock as something of a hero, or at least as a sort of cinematic spirit guide. But I missed my chance. And so this will remain a film for which I will have a deep and abiding respect, but it’s platonic. Try as I might, I just can’t love it.

As a final note, almost all of the most famous moments from this film come in the first 20 minutes. It's kind of a letdown when everything you know of a film happens right away; it's almost like there's nothing to look forward to.

Why to watch The Graduate: Arguably the most iconic film of the 1960s, and everyone borrows from it.
Why not to watch: There’s something unappealing about the characters and especially the situation.

Post-Traumatic Stress

Film: The Best Years of Our Lives
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I talk about Old Hollywood a lot on this blog, in part because I know that I have a couple of occasional readers who are either devoted fans or who hate it passionately. I understand both sides. I have an appreciation for films of the ‘30s and ‘40s, but I understand precisely why some folks don’t like them. I feel it’s a duty to suggest when a film fits into that stereotype and should be avoided by the haters or when it transcends them and should be seen by everybody.

The Best Years of Our Lives is very much a film that transcends the stereotype of overacting, schmaltz, and pure escapism. This is a film that would have been very much at home following virtually any war. I could see this film being made about returning Vietnam veterans, or Gulf War veterans, or vets of Afghanistan. In short, while the details of this film have aged in many ways, the themes have not, and the story is still as fresh and real and vital as it was in 1946 in the days following World War II.

We follow the fates of three men. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) was a bombardier in Europe. In the days before his deployment, he met and married Marie (Virginia Mayo). Now home, he has a wife he barely knows and no career. The only thing he’s capable of doing is working at his old job in a drugstore, spending part of his time behind the soda counter making floats and sundaes. His marriage never really got going and is now a shambles, in part because Marie was more in love with the uniform than with him, and in part because she isn’t content to stay home every night.

Al Stephenson (Fredric March) is the flipside of Fred. While Fred went from being poor in the real world to being a captain in the Air Force, Al went from a job as a loan officer in a bank to a mere Army sergeant (no disrespect meant to the sergeants of the world—this is strictly a rank issue. Sergeants, after all, make the military go ‘round). Now back with his wife Millie (Myrna Loy), daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), and son Rob (Michael Hall), Al is attempting to fit back in to his civilian life. He does this with the liberal use of alcohol, much to Millie’s silent suffering.

Finally, we have Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), a Navy man who had both of his arms blown off. He’s left with two hooks for hands, and can do almost anything with them, except, as one of our other main characters notes, hold his girl, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell). Homer’s story is in many ways the most tragic. For him, the loss of his hands means a loss of self-reliance. He wants only to be taken as the man he was, and sees any act of charity or assistance as pity, and he won’t have that. Moreover, he is unwilling to condemn Wilma to a life of looking after him because of his injuries.

What’s noteworthy about this film is that it doesn’t put a rosy spin on everything. Al’s drunkenness, for instance, is never really played for a laugh, but as a symptom of what he saw and experienced in the war. Called upon to give a speech at a gathering, Al continues to drink and Millie grimly ticks off the number of drinks he consumes. It’s tragic. Fred’s relationship with his wife turns sour the moment his back pay from the military runs out, and it never magically gets better because he deserves it or because that’s the way Hollywood movies work out. Their relationship enters a death spiral almost immediately and continues to circle until close to the end of the film. As for Homer, his anger and frustration are perhaps the most easily understood, but even here, we aren’t given a true Hollywood story. In the most poignant moment of the film, he brings Wilma into his bedroom and shows her the reality of his life without hands. It’s stark and painful and very, very real.

And this is precisely why this film is so good. It was created in a time when Hollywood directors and producers and studios sugar coated everything, a time when melodrama was king. But not here. These stories are real and visceral and human, which makes them compelling and worth watching. No one is spared the tragedy of these men returning from hell, least of all the audience.

It’s worth noting that Harold Russell really did lose both of his hands. He made only five movies in his lifetime, and this was his first. That he is less adept on screen than his costars is understandable. That he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role is equally understandable. While he is certainly not the greatest actor on this screen, he adds a real human touch to the film, and the presence of those twin hooks is so shocking and startling at first, the we almost ignore the man. By the end of the film, though, Homer Parrish the character is far more than the two metal hooks he wears, and that is a testament to any actor, as well as to a brilliant screenwriter.

This is a tremendous film, one of the great films of its decade and one of the great films of American film history. Just off years of making propaganda, pro-war films that boosted the morale of the home front, Hollywood managed to create one of the most powerful and moving post-war films ever conceived. The Deer Hunter works in much the same vein, but not with the same effect. The Best Years of Our Lives gives us no flashy situations, no violence or loss of life. What it does give us, though, is the sort of quiet human tragedy that any war creates. It is brilliant and sad and uplifting all at the same time, a true work of cinematic art.

As a final note, it’s been years since I saw this. The first time I did see it, I was a little kid. My father rented the film—on reels, no less—from the public library, and screened it on a fold-up movie screen in the living room. It was no less powerful now, 30+ years later.

Why to watch The Best Years of Our Lives: A film perfect for its own time, and continually relevant today.
Why not to watch: The title leads one to think it’s a film about happiness and fluffy bunnies…and it ain’t.

Rule Britannia

Film: The Queen
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

When the world suffers a traumatic event, one question that gets asked frequently is “Where were you when you found out about _____?” When it comes to the death of Princess Diana, my answer is quite a bit different than most. Sue and I had just purchased a little vacation home (emphasis on little) and were spending that weekend working on it. We were completely out of touch with the world—no television, no radio, no newspaper. We didn’t find out for a good 48 hours. So I found out while eating lunch in a little townie bar on a Sunday.

The Queen is not about Diana, but at the same time, it is about her. The film covers the few days about and around the death of Diana in Paris and the week leading up to her funeral. So, while Diana herself appears in this film only as newsreel and interview footage, she is very much at the heart of the narrative. However, the film is truly about the royal family and how they dealt with Diana’s death and the aftermath. Central to this narrative is the head of the family, Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren).

What this film does is create a real sense of the royal family not as figureheads or monarchs or titular heads of the British Empire, but as actual people with lives and emotions. And, they have a number of specific concerns that virtually no one else in the world can appreciate. As the royal family, there are hundreds of years of precedent and protocol that must be followed at all times regardless of the reality of the situation. For them, the death of Diana was a singular and unique event.

Why? Well, strictly because they are royals. Diana had divorced Charles (played here by Alex Jennings) and was no longer a part of the royal family (an ex-HRH in the parlance of the film). Being a royal allowed for particular rights and privileges that now, based strictly on protocol, needed to be denied. And those rights and privileges were precisely what the rest of the world wanted Diana to have. The film depicts crowds of British citizens irate to the point of vehement anger that there was no flag flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. It didn’t matter to them, nor to the rest of the world, that the flag never flies at half-mast there. In fact the flag flies only to show the residency of a monarch. But that is what the people wanted, and its lack infuriated them. Precedent and protocol, a thousand years of tradition, no longer seemed to matter.

What this film does is, as I mentioned already, allow Elizabeth to become for the rest of the world a real person. Upon Diana’s death, her first instinct is to do what many of us would do; she looked to protect her family and attempted to keep the tragedy as a private affair within the walls of the family itself. She wanted the ability to deal with things on her own, to deal with her grandchildren not as royal scions, but as children.

The four members of the royal family who are actual characters in this film come off fairly unevenly. Both Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) come across poorly. Both appear hidebound and reduced to following tradition as a matter of course rather than for any good reason. Both seem almost devoid of sympathy or pity, wishing only for things to go back to the way they were before Diana’s fatal accident. Prince Charles comes across far more favorably, although by no means perfectly. There is a sense that he wishes to modernize the country and is willing to go along with the throngs of British citizens. There is also a sense that he is ferociously paranoid and fears assassination. The Queen herself comes off as a woman worn down by her duty and desperate to stave it off, but unable to do so. She is shown to us as a paragon of that long-gone past history when the monarch’s job was to face stoically whatever threatened her or her people.

But is it good? I’m happy to report that it is. Frears has managed to catch something on film that is almost completely unique. Elizabeth has always been a popular monarch, but this crises damaged her significantly. Frears sugar coats nothing, hides nothing, and exposes anything he can. As a result, Elizabeth becomes more approachable—more of a human being. In my opinion, she comes out of the film looking like a tough woman who doesn’t get to make many of her own choices, and who holds up as well as she can.

The film also deals with the election of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), a Labour Party candidate. Evidently, the Labour Party contains the anti-royalist element of England, but as the film progresses, Blair begins to take pity on Elizabeth just as we do. His wife, Cherie (Helen McCrory), comes out as sort of the other side of the coin from Prince Phillip. She’s opposite, but still just as insensitive and uncaring.

I’m surprised that I liked this film as much as I did. But I did. The fact that Elizabeth favors corgis doesn’t hurt, either.

Why to watch The Queen: A fair and honest portrayal of one of the major figures in the world.
Why not to watch: Extensive reliving of the death of Diana.

Buckle and Swash

Film: Captain Blood
Format: DVD from Mt. Morris Public Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There is always a bit of melodrama in old Hollywood films. The heroes are always as close to purely good as possible and the bad guys have nothing of the good about them. The good guys always come out triumphant in the end, the bad guys come to an appropriately bad end, and the people we’re supposed to like live happily ever after. There are plenty of people who dislike movies before a certain point, and honestly, I can understand that. It’s one of the reasons I tend to really like film noir. While, thanks to the Hays Code, the bad guys always got what was coming to them in film noir, they at least had motivations that weren’t entirely evil.

Captain Blood is not such a film. Dr. Peter Blood (Errol Flynn) is as perfect a movie hero as one could find. We learn right away that he is a) a medical doctor, b) willing to put himself at risk to save the life of a fellow man, c) has a history of sailing and adventure, and d) devilishly handsome. Called to the aid of a friend wounded in a rebellion, Blood is arrested as a traitor for giving aid to a traitor. Rather than being hanged, he is sent off to the West Indies by the auspices of the foppish and arrogant King James where he will become a slave.

It is here that Dr. Peter Blood is purchased by Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland), niece of the local military commander, Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill). And I don’t almost need to say what happens next, do I? The pretty and idealistic Arabella does what she can for the benefit of the sexy, equally idealistic, proud and manly Tasmanian stud, who publically is displeased by this but secretly appreciates it. Romance blooms slowly. She helps out by allowing him to treat the gout problem of the local governor (George Hassell).

Of course, this doesn’t stop Blood from trying to escape, and escape he does when the Spanish raid the West Indies settlement. He becomes a pirate, soon developing a reputation and a huge fortune. It’s evident that the governor can’t handle the pirates and he is replaced in favor of Bishop, who does all he can to quell the pirates. In the ensuing chaos, Arabella is returned to England. Oh, but she’ll be back, of course. There’s no reason she wouldn’t be, since all adventure-y, swashbuckling films of this era need a strong element of romance. And it wouldn’t be too much of a shock to tell you precisely how it ends, since you likely have an idea already, but I won’t spoil it completely. It does, however, end precisely as you think it will. Actually, it probably ends quite a bit more positively than you might think possible.

It’s worth mentioning that the great Basil Rathbone appears here as a villain as well—he’s initially an ally of Blood but takes to piracy to easily and too thoroughly to be considered a good guy. It’s just as well, because Basil Rathbone plays a pretty good villain. Of course, this ends with a massive sword duel, one of the better ones of the early cinema.

This movie rises and falls on the talents of its two main leads, Flynn and de Havilland. Fortunately for the film, they are both excellent in their roles even if their roles aren’t at all believable. Really, no one is as pure-hearted as Peter Blood (and certainly not the real-life Errol Flynn), but that’s okay. It’s all a part of the mystique of the film and of the era it comes from. It would not be at all a stretch to suggest that this film is a big part of the pirate mystique, too. In fact, I might go so far as to suggest that in many ways, Captain Blood is a big part of the reason that pirate films are what they are, and why pirates—traditionally about as evil as one could get in the real world—have a romantic image in the public consciousness. Yeah, Pirates of the Caribbean doesn’t hurt either, but Captain Blood came first by 70 years and influenced everything that came after it.

It’s hard not to like this film on some level. It’s not believable, and the characters are certainly idealized versions that are nothing like real people, but there is a real charm here. Olivia de Havilland was an absolute charmer, and Flynn, well, he was a movie star in every sense of the word, at least in this early part of his career. For the early years of adventure films, they don’t get a lot better than this one.

Why to watch Captain Blood: It’s a hell of a swashbuckling adventure.
Why not to watch: If you don’t like old Hollywood, you won’t like this one.

Month 23 Status Report

Another month come and gone, with some interesting results. I don't honestly have a ton to say about what I watched in November except to say that my goal was to watch a lot of more rare and unusual films and didn't see as many as I intended. After all, these films are rare, and difficult to find, and so finding a lot of them all at once is even more difficult. I did manage a few, though, and have a real rarity lined up for the next few days, possibly as soon as tomorrow.

As for December, I expect that the next couple of weeks will be slow (end of term nuttiness) followed by a massive number of films to round out the end of the year.

The real news is that I'm now a mere five films away from half--540 watched, 549 to go. It will be an interesting feeling to be on the back half of this experience.