Screenshot for the Week of 24 August 2020: "RIO BRAVO" (1959)

Dude (Dean Martin) firing his six-gun at the Burdette henchman in the rafters as John T. (John Wayne, in tan leather jacket) and others look on in Rio Bravo (1959)

Ever heard of Russell Harlan?  No?  He was the Director of Photography for this movie.  He was the one who chose this camera position to film Dude (Dean Martin) shooting the man in the rafters.  Another DoP probably would've set the camera up behind the line of Burdette's men, filming Dude from ground level.  Harlan's choice allowed me to take this screenshot.

I'll bet you've seen or at least heard of some of the other movies for which he served as DoP or Cinematographer: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); Witness for the Prosecution (1957); Red River (1948); The Blackboard Jungle (1955); Run Silent, Run Deep (1958); Hatari! (1962), Pollyanna (1960); Operation Petticoat (1959); Sunrise at Campobello (1960); and Lust for Life (1956), among others.

(By the way, hundreds of movies have been made—from good to great—with brilliant camerawork that gets little or no notice from the audience and none from the Motion Picture Academy.)

Be on the lookout for the following cinematographers from the Golden Age:

• Gregg Toland
• Jack Cardiff
• Karl Struss
• James Wong Howe
• Karl Freund
• Leon Shamroy
• Arthur C. Miller
• Joseph Ruttenburg
• Russell Harlan
• Arthur Edeson
• Robert Burks
• Robert Surtees
• Rudolph Maté
• Sol Polito

Be on the lookout for the following cinematographers from the Modern Era.

• Gordon Willis
• Freddie Young
• Haskell Wexler
• Conrad Hall
• Vittorio Storaro
• Geoffrey Unsworth
• Janusz Kaminiski
• Roger Deakins
• Robert Richardson
• Robert Yeoman
• Darius Khondji
• Emmanuel Lubezki

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It is ironic that John Wayne appeared for Gary Cooper at the 1953 Academy Awards to accept Cooper's Best Actor Oscar for his performance in High Noon (1952).  Wayne hated High Noon.  He hated the character Cooper played, Will Kane.  He probably didn't think much of Cooper either.

Rio Bravo (1959) was Howard Hawks's and John Wayne's reply to High Noon, a movie they both hated. They felt that no self-respecting lawman of the old west would have asked for the townspeople's help under any circumstances, including Kane's.  Wayne called the final scene in High Noon "un-American," erroneously asserting that Kane had stepped on his badge after having thrown it on the ground.  Cooper, in turn, thought Rio Bravo was "so phony, nobody believes in it."

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Howard Hawks has the most eclectic filmography of any director that I'm aware of.  Look at some of the movies he's made besides Rio Bravo: Bringing Up Baby (1938); Sergeant York (1941); Scarface (1932); Ball of Fire (1941); To Have and Have Not (1944); Red River (1948); and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).

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Sight & Sound magazine in the UK has published a poll ranking the "Greatest Films of All-Time" once a decade for eight decades (1952-2022 so far).  The magazine polls a worldwide array of hundreds of film professionals—critics, directors, producers, distributors.  Film professionals, as do we all, come and go the way of all flesh, and so the mix of specific people is different each time.  But Roger Ebert said this poll is "by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies—the only one most serious movie people take seriously."

So why would I write this under a screenshot from Rio Bravo?  Because Rio Bravo made the list. Sight & Sound publishes a list of the top 250 vote-getters, and Rio Bravo made that list at number 63.  It tied with Sunset Blvd. (1950) and Modern Times (1936).  Casablanca (1942) came in at number 84.  Lawrence of Arabia (1962), number 81.  Chinatown (1974), number 78.  The Third Man (1949), Grand Illusion (1937), and Nashville (1975), tied at 73.  Go figure.

U.S. movies don't translate well into foreign languages and cultures if they are dialogue-heavy.  I think that explains most of the apparent discrepancies in the list.  Not that Rio Bravo doesn't deserve its day in the sun or that it didn't deserve to make the 2012 and 2022 lists.  It is worth noting, however, that Dr. Strangelove (1964) and The Conversation (1974) didn't make the list.  Neither did Network (1976), Shane (1953), High Noon (1952), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Pulp Fiction (1994), Schindler's List (1993), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

DoP: Russell Harlan. D: Howard Hawks.

 

Screenshot for the Week of 05 July 2020: "HIGH NOON" (1952)

Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane in High Noon (1952)

The Year 1952 was rife with paradox, irony, and fear in the movie industry.  That year yielded seven great films, none of which won the Oscar for Best Picture.  It was the year of High Noon; The Bad and the Beautiful; Viva Zapata!; The Quiet Man; Come Back, Little Sheba; Forbidden Games; and Singin' in the Rain.  The Oscar for Best Picture of 1952 went to a good but not great film, The Greatest Show on Earth.

Carl Foreman's script for High Noon is a classic.  It was nominated for an Oscar but lost to The Bad and the Beautiful.  I think Foreman's script was better, but the loss wasn't a miscarriage of justice.  After all, The Bad and the Beautiful won 5 Oscars, more than any other film that year.

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High Noon is an allegory for the "red scare" in postwar America and for the way Hollywood—actors, producers, writers, directors, studio bosses—failed to rise up, stand united, and protect their own in the face of Congressional bullying.  In trying to find and root out Communists and Communist influence in Hollywood, the House Committee on Un-American Activities menaced witnesses who did not unabashedly and unhesitatingly cooperate and "name names"—i. e., expose members of the film industry that had even a remote connection to Communism.

If it were discovered that you had taken a leaflet from someone on the street that turned out to be Communist propaganda—even if you had immediately shoved it into your pocket without looking at it and thrown it away when you got home—you would be labeled a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.  If you had eaten a meal one time in a restaurant that was later identified as a Communist hangout; if a distant relative had been labeled a Communist or sympathizer; if you had gone to a party where Communists or sympathizers had been present, you would be labeled a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.  In or out of Hollywood you would lose your job.  Friends and colleagues would shun and avoid you.

The film industry was complicit in the bullying by way of its off-the-record "blacklist."  The "Hollywood Blacklist" was a poorly-kept secret that, for decades, Hollywood insiders denied ever existed.  But too many memoirs and first-person accounts of the blacklist have put that canard in its grave.  Indeed there was a blacklist and it was enforced.

It was the age of widespread fear.  It was the age of the second "red scare" of the 20th century.  It was the age of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Whitaker Chambers, the "atom bomb" and the soul-killing fear of "World War III."  It was the age of Joseph R. McCarthy, his henchman Roy Cohn, and Congressman Richard Nixon.  Few dared to stand up to the bullying.  Carl Foreman was one who did, and in return he was blacklisted from working in Hollywood.  But before he was blacklisted, he wrote High Noon.

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Floyd Crosby (father of rocker David Crosby [The Byrds; Buffalo Springfield; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young]) was the Director of Photography on this film.  What's the difference between a cinematographer and a director of photography?  Answer: the level of artistic control over the cinematography.

The high-contrast black-and-white of High Noon was conceived and executed by Crosby and makes the visual imagery as stark as the story and action.  Director Fred Zinnemann had a vivid mental storyboard of how the action should play out.  His firm grasp on his subject no doubt helped Crosby tremendously.  If only ….  If only High Noon had been Crosby's lone film credit, he might have been considered among the world's greatest cinematographers.  Alas, it wasn't and he isn't.

Crosby's resume is unimpressive.  And thus his credit for High Noon stands out as if it were in all caps or red letters.  His work on that film is the work of a true artist at the top of his game.  I spent the time to take screenshots of High Noon from start to finish, following Crosby around, shooting what he shot.  I ended up taking only 57, but nearly every one is perfectly framed.  Here are a few examples.

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Gary Cooper was a lifelong conservative Republican.  I don't know whether he hesitated in taking the role of Will Kane and whether the hesitation, if it happened, was political.  But Fred Zinnemann's first choice—Gregory Peck—turned the role down and it was then offered to Cooper.  His popularity had dropped in the previous seven or eight years.  Perhaps he saw this as a comeback opportunity.  It most certainly was.

Many critics and, doubtless, many filmgoers were disturbed by the age gap between Cooper and Grace Kelly.  Cooper was 51 and Kelly was 21.  Cooper and Kelly had no problem with it.  In fact they carried on an affair during the entirety of the filming.

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Some blacklisted writers continued to work in Hollywood off-the-record, literally.  Their screen credits were given over to fake names.  At least four of their screenplays won Oscars: Roman Holiday (1953), written by Dalton Trumbo; The Brave One (1956), also by Trumbo; The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), co-written by Carl Foreman and another blacklisted writer, Michael Wilson; and The Defiant Ones (1958), co-written by Nedrick Young.  Decades later, they finally received their credits when their real names were restored to the films and to the official records.

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High Noon director Fred Zinnemann's next movie was From Here to Eternity (1953).  It won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1953 and he won an Oscar for his direction.

DoP: Floyd Crosby.  D: Fred Zinnemann.

Screenshot for the Week of 29 June 2020: "THE MAGNIFICANT SEVEN" (1960)

Chris (Yul Brynner) bites the end off a cigar as he prepares to drive a hearse to Boot Hill.  Vin (Steve McQueen), riding shotgun, has just finished shaking the shot inside two shells, one shell at a time, and is now loading the shells into his shotgun in The Magnificent Seven (1960).

Mickey Rooney was a notorious scene-stealer.  (I'm going somewhere with this.)  He had various ways to snatch the audience's attention away from other actors, often by fiddling with something in his hands.  Spencer Tracy was an early victim of Rooney's, and afterward Tracy played the same trick on fellow actors for the rest of his career.

In 1960, Yul Brynner was an established film star.  He had won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1957 for his memorable performance in The King and I (1956).  Steve McQueen, on the other hand, was a relative upstart, a TV actor, which at that time was lower than a second-class citizen in the acting world.

Despite his TV popularity due to his work on the western Wanted:Dead or Alive!, McQueen was trying as a film actor to live down the infamy of his amateurish performance in the laughable horror movie, The Blob (1958).  Nevertheless, using Rooney's and Tracy's tricks, McQueen risked getting fired from The Magnificent Seven by his successful and rather obvious efforts to upstage Brynner at the beginning of this scene—shaking the shotgun shells noisily next to his right ear, one at a time; removing his hat and looking up at the second storeys and rooftops, rotating his head as if scanning windows and balconies while using the hat to shade his eyes.  Brynner feebly tried to keep pace with McQueen by removing a cigar from his pocket, biting the end off, spitting it out, and then lighting the cigar.  But he had already lost the audience.  All eyes were on McQueen.  The two actors did not get along well on set after that.

Unbeknownst to both actors, Brynner's stardom was on the wane in 1960 while McQueen's was about to take off.  Indeed, The Magnificent Seven made McQueen a legitimate big-screen movie star and the very personification of cool.

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The Magnificent Seven (1960) is John Sturges's homage to Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954).  [SPOILER ALERT!] In the scene that sets up the story and plot of Kurosawa's classic, an unemployed samurai moseys into a village and learns that a young girl has just been kidnapped and taken into a nearby hut.  The men of the village are afraid to intervene because the kidnapper works for a dreaded local warlord whose band of marauders have for years terrorized the village, killing peasants at will, looting their farms, and raping women.  The samurai wastes no time in walking into the hut.  We hear a brief scuffle, and the samurai walks out of the hut with the girl and no sign of the kidnapper.

[SPOILER ALERT! CONTINUES] I took the above screenshot from the parallel scene in The Magnificent Seven, which sets up a different story but in a similar plot.  In an act of racial progressiveness, Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen) volunteer to drive a hearse to Boot Hill carrying the coffin of an Indigenous American.  A racist and armed white mob has formed at the cemetery, intending to prevent the Indigenous man's burial there. [END OF SPOILER ALERT!]

This scene is an artistic wonder.  The cinematography of Charles Lang shows the effective work of a craftsman keeping it simple and not saying, "Look at me!  I'm the cameraman!  Look at what I can do!"  The actors are comfortable in their characters.  The dialogue is brilliant in its economy.  The action is telegraphed and, for our purposes, needn't be otherwise.  This is one of my favorite scenes in a John Sturges movie.

C: Charles Lang.  D: John Sturges.

Screenshot for the Week of 22 June 2020: "THE BIG COUNTRY" (1958)

Steve Leech and Jim McKay (Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck or their stunt doubles) fist-fighting in The Big Country (1958).

There is an art to taking a great screenshot.  Of the screenshots I have taken, this is one of my favorites.  Jim McKay has just thrown a right cross (a powerful punch) and landed it on Steve Leech's jaw.  Leech is knocked backward, falling down several frames later.  McKay's momentum while throwing this punch has bent him over like a baseball pitcher who has just thrown a 100 mph fastball.  To capture this perfect moment, I took at least half a dozen screenshots of the punch, eventually discarding all but this one.

I have seen hundreds of screenshots taken by dozens of people, and I have rarely seen any that were taken with perfection, much less art, in mind.  The overwhelming majority appear to have been taken by rote, with no discernible interest in capturing the best frame in the scene.

My best screenshots are a collaboration between me and the cinematographer.  When the cinematographer has done great work, he or she will have given me many chances to take great screenshots.  The rest is up to me.  A poorly shot movie might give me little raw material for art.  After all, I just follow the cinematographer around and shoot what he or she shot.

I can tell when I am following a master craftsman around after he or she has done stellar work.  The better the work, the more screenshots I take.  The cinematographer for The Big Country was Franz Planer.  And I took more screenshots of The Big Country than any other film thus far, 125 in all.

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An entire filmmaking course could be taught using The Big Country alone.  It is not the only one-film filmmaking course that comes to me, but every element is masterfully accomplished.  The cinematography is first rate.  So is the art direction, indoors and out.  The musical score is rousing.  The script is a powerful allegory for the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.  The dialogue is economical.  Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston put on an acting clinic.  Heston's performance is easily his best.  There are moments when he is so good it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  William Wyler's direction is an artistic success all around.  None of the above artists, however, won an Oscar.  Burl Ives, God bless him, won the film's only Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor.  Oddly enough, I thought his performance, like that of Chuck Connors, was a bit cartoonish.  I would have nominated Charlton Heston instead of Ives.

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[SPOILER ALERT!] The fist-fight scene is the entire film in microcosm.  The two men—one, an angry man spoiling for a fight and the other, a self-assured man of principle who fights when all peaceful alternatives have failed—trade knock down punches for so long they punch themselves to exhaustion.  When they cannot go on any longer, and both are almost prone on the ground, the principled man looks up and asks, "So tell me, Leech—what did we prove?"

C: Franz Planer.  D: William Wyler.