An Anti-Western That Will Stay With You
Plus: A WWII bait and switch, and an early Bogart star turn
Winter continues! Thoughts on more classic movies I’m only finally seeing for the first time.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
An anti-western, and a powerful one. Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan (later of “M*A*S*H” fame) play drifters who feel compelled to sign on with a posse of men (and one woman) searching for the murderers of a local cattle rancher, and try to persuade the others not to hang the men they think are the guilty parties. Fonda had witnessed a lynching as a boy in Omaha, a searing experience that echoed in several performances of his, from “Young Mr. Lincoln” and “Ox-Bow” to “12 Angry Men.” He’s wonderful here – as is Dana Andrews, playing the leader of the accused men – but the film’s power comes from more than its fine performances, or Fonda’s speech about law and justice. From the beginning, you feel events outrunning the participants, and a queasy unease about what will happen soon metastasizes into dread. In the closing minutes, there’s a wonderful line from an unkempt, bloodthirsty member of the posse – it’s almost a throwaway – that adds a new dimension to that dread. I’ll say no more to avoid spoiling a must-see movie.
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Burt Lancaster! Montgomery Clift! Frank Sinatra! Donna Reed! Ernest Borgnine! Claude Akins! Even George Reeves! Everybody is in this movie – and they’re really good, particularly Sinatra, who brings a wiry, crazed energy to the role of hothead soldier Angelo Maggio. Maggio is a guy most of us know – the pugilistic bantamweight who’s charming until a bad temper and alcohol leads to disaster. What struck me as funny is that until the last 15 minutes “From Here to Eternity” is a soap opera, basically, and one that keeps coming back to a single, rather juvenile theme. (Its working title could have been “Our Madonna-Whore Complexes Have Complexes.”) Seriously, the performances are great, but I wonder how many dudes went to the theater in 1953 expecting a war movie and walked out feeling like they’d been tricked into watching something very different.
The Petrified Forest (1936)
An existentialist play turned (barely) into a film – the desert backdrop used in most scenes is so obviously fake I kept expecting to catch a prop tumbleweed bumping into it. But vistas aren’t the point of the production: this is the performance that made Humphrey Bogart a star, and justifiably so. Bogart had played fugitive Duke Mantee (whose arrival is as inevitable as an approaching storm) alongside Leslie Howard in the 1935 Broadway production, and Howard refused to appear in the movie adaptation without Bogart. Bogart’s performance is immediately iconic, a volatile mix of hangdog exhaustion and a sense of imminent danger. Before his arrival, you get some odd, philosophical back-and-forth between Howard, playing a shiftless failed novelist, and Bette Davis, a diner waitress dreaming of a life in France. Howard’s a pro and Davis is his match, but it’s the new guy who walks off with the picture.
(Extra credit for Star Wars fans: “The Petrified Forest” opens with a desert vista and music that I swear John Williams quoted for a similar desert scene in “A New Hope.”)