2011_11_16 Soul-Making, Version 1
Part one
“Each of us enacts Persephone in soul—dragged off and pulled down by Hades—then we see life through her darker eye. We do mot recognize the full reality of anima until attacked by Hades, until unconscious underworld forces overpower and make captive our normalcy. Only then, it seems, are we able to discriminate psyche from human; then we see human concerns differently, psychologically.”
The quote is from James Hillman. I could have used this understanding when I experienced the INFERNO in July 1968; it would have saved me a lot of stress and stumbling around in the dark. On the other hand, I couldn’t comprehend it till after I had gone through the INFERNO. It takes a baptism by fire to open ones psychological pores and to distinguish the psyche from the human.
But let me begin at the beginning of the process.
Organized religion fell by the wayside for me my junior year in Madison, 1957, when I was 21 yrs old and an Applied Arts major at the University of Wisconsin. When I stack up my yrs in academe, first as a student for seven years, and ten as an instructor, it was a long tenure that left its mark on me, just as 21 years as a Catholic left an indelible imprint. All through my academic yrs after 1957 I regarded organized religion as old hat, as bogus. The new self-Image I had carved for myself was largely derived from the guiding philosophy of a few of my favorite professors. Fred Spratt, Dick Tansey, Mr. Collins and Tom Elsner. In two words, secular humanism. Almost two decades later, when I started working at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Tucson, I quickly learned I was in a crowd that despised the idea of secular humanism; they treated it as something aberrant, a dirty word, and a form of godlessness. But for me in my late twenties it was what I embraced as a serviceable credo. For more than a decade I saw myself as a hard-core rationalist who believed in the dignity of man and frowned down my nose at Christianity, which of course upset my mother and brother back in my hometown, Racine, Wisconsin. But that could not be help. I had to go another way than my family.
Not only had I taken secular humanism as my moral and intellectual guide from my teachers at San Jose State College, I totally dropped the art orientation I had grown up with, one that regarded Norman Rockwell and David Stone Martin as the exemplary figures to emulate. I gave up my allegiance to commercial art and threw my hat in the ring of Abstract Expressionism. There was a stage in between where I thought Oscar Kokoschka was the Man. There was still subject matter at that juncture, but more and more the emphasis was on a generous application of paint rather than representation. Naturally, it was my teachers who pushed me increasingly in the direction of abstraction, which by 1960 was a well-established and acceptable style and idiom. Eventually I was producing images on canvas that were devoid of representation. I began to sling paint with the best of them.
My political leanings had always been center-left so I had no hesitation falling in step with the Liberalism prevailing in the art department and on campus at San Jose State. My father had been a union leader at the factory where he worked for 35 yrs. He also had been an enthusiastic supporter of FDR, something I have a very clear memory of. I can recall arguments he had with my Uncle Joe who liked Senator Bob Taft; the house would shake as the two of them would go at with hammer and tongs for hours on Sunday afternoons. I always identified with my father and his point of view. I proved my mettle in regard liberal views when I started teaching at UNLV. I was founder and president of an AFT local on campus; I demonstrated against the war in Vietnam; I got involved with civil rights issues; and I was co-founder of CINEMA X, a film society that showed controversial and experimental films. Someone expressed their disdain for my activity by slashing a 15 inch cut in an oil painting of mine hanging in the UNLV library. In addition to that some angry student defaced two of my drawings in a one-man show in the art department gallery. He or she scribbled all over the two drawings with ballpoint pen. My reward for all this activity was the administration wasn’t going to give me tenure. It made no difference; after 5 yrs at UNLV I had had enough of university teaching.
Now everything I have discussed so far was about outside activity, not what was going on in the inside. There has been no mention of my dark side, which did stir in my time in Las Vegas. The complete story of what happened to me is told in detail in Primus Rota and Bridge in the Fog, so I needn’t go through it in detail here. Let me state a few facts and we’ll leave it at that. My political activity on campus and the negative national mood sent me into a depression that motivated me to stop painting and to start drawing, which had always been my first love as an artist. Synchronous with my mood and bad temper, I began to turn out drawings that had a bite similar to what George Gross and Jose Luis Cuevas had. I became known for these hard-hearted images of ugly, vicious people doing violence to each other. After my benign paintings the drawings shocked locals and me too, as I hadn’t known I had that much anger and raw emotion inside me. The dark side hadn’t been my concerned until I reached my early thirties. (I was hired to teach at UNLV when I was 29.) Sure, I had taken a psychology class and read some Freud and Jung, but that was all book learning; I took nothing to heart nor spent much time on introspection. The only indications of possible internal problems were two things. First of all, I had a long-time fear of the dark, which I attributed to my mother’s nighttime screaming fits, which never failed to wake me up, and to my Catholic past, as the devil was always after you. Secondly, my wife, Sue, had two affairs during the first year of our marriage, which shocked and shattered me; it was something devastating to my masculine identity, as I figured she had sought satisfaction elsewhere because my lovemaking was that inadequate. A darkness rose up in me that I had no idea was present in my psyche. It rocked my world, my confidence and my comfort inside my skin. The impact of her behavior was another influence on my pen and inks. Years later, after we had moved to Tucson, I had divided my Vegas drawings into major categories. One batch of drawings I designated “The Sinister Female.” I had worked out my anger by drawing a load of negative images of the female. I did that off and on for another 20 yrs.
By the time got out of grad school I had shaped an identity I called “the heroic ego.” However, in back of this polished persona there were occasional cracks in the façade, small rivulets of sickness and whirlpools of inner chaos seeping out through chinks in my character armour. The especially vulnerable areas were sexuality and masculine identity, poor self-esteem, personal demons, a deep seeded fear and anxiety, and the instability of male-female relationships. At certain moments my so-called heroic ego was more like a rag on a stick flapping in an ill wind. Behind my cool and confident exterior was, when a crisis hit, a deep insecurity that I worked hard to disguise or hide. My interior world always seemed to be in ferment. What was really happening was what James Hillman calls “ pathologizing or falling apart.” By this he means the psyche is self-regulating; it will through necessity create or manifest illness, morbidity, disorder, and suffering in order that the person can see him-or-herself through a deformed and afflicted perspective. Hillman writes:
“There is a simultaneity in the underworld and the daily world. There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, bur Zeus sees it from above and through the light, Hades from below and into the darkness. Hades’ realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (doppelganger) giving to life its depth and its psyche.”
When I began my teaching career in the mid-sixties I was brimful of confidence and saw things through the light; but soon after I had fallen apart and saw things through a glass darkly. It had to happen and I am glad it did.
“Revival is forced on us by the dire pathologizing of psychic necessities.”
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Letter to S.D.
2011_11_04 Letter to S.D.
Yes by all means send me digital pictures of “The Rock Climber” and “Magic Garden.” Having them would give some option for BRIDGE IN THE FOG. They are two of my best drawings from the late seventies. “The Rock Climber” embodies my spiritual ambitions and projects them upward.
Rather then climbing the Tree of Life I ascent up a mountain and shoot for the moon, my cosmic habitat. Vertical ascent dominates my imagination, as does the moon when it comes to soul making. I have never gotten over the spell it weaved in my inner life during the INFERNO.
Steve Jobs talked about how the prospect of death helped him define himself and honed his vision of things. Being in ill health and being on oxygen has made me acutely aware of my age and the road ahead is very short compared to the road in the opposite direction. These threats to my existence have honed my ambition to get my book project done before it’s too late. I am greatly motivated to accomplish that, as it will constitute my main legacy. What got seeded in me during the INFERNO has come to fruition. As see it, since that turn-around experience, which included a rebirth scenario, I have been engaged in, to quote William Blake and James Hillman, “soul making.” Even Gurdjieff’ had a notion about being seeded, saying we were all born with a “certain inner property” that we were charged with transforming into a living self. I have tried my best to do that and I can die knowing I gave it my best shot. And I recorded the process in three books, thousand of pages in my journal, and in numerous drawings. While others have created “necktie art” I worked on myself. As Heraclitus told his students the essence of philosophy was, “I searched myself.”
JP
Yes by all means send me digital pictures of “The Rock Climber” and “Magic Garden.” Having them would give some option for BRIDGE IN THE FOG. They are two of my best drawings from the late seventies. “The Rock Climber” embodies my spiritual ambitions and projects them upward.
Rather then climbing the Tree of Life I ascent up a mountain and shoot for the moon, my cosmic habitat. Vertical ascent dominates my imagination, as does the moon when it comes to soul making. I have never gotten over the spell it weaved in my inner life during the INFERNO.
Steve Jobs talked about how the prospect of death helped him define himself and honed his vision of things. Being in ill health and being on oxygen has made me acutely aware of my age and the road ahead is very short compared to the road in the opposite direction. These threats to my existence have honed my ambition to get my book project done before it’s too late. I am greatly motivated to accomplish that, as it will constitute my main legacy. What got seeded in me during the INFERNO has come to fruition. As see it, since that turn-around experience, which included a rebirth scenario, I have been engaged in, to quote William Blake and James Hillman, “soul making.” Even Gurdjieff’ had a notion about being seeded, saying we were all born with a “certain inner property” that we were charged with transforming into a living self. I have tried my best to do that and I can die knowing I gave it my best shot. And I recorded the process in three books, thousand of pages in my journal, and in numerous drawings. While others have created “necktie art” I worked on myself. As Heraclitus told his students the essence of philosophy was, “I searched myself.”
JP
Friday, November 4, 2011
Dennis Potter and Psoriasis
The English television playwright, Dennis Potter, the author of such works as “The Singing Detective” and “Lipstick on my Collar,” like to have sex with hookers. These encounters, although a regular thing, never really threaten his marriage, which was rock solid. He not only liked to fuck prostitutes but he compulsively told his mates about these experiences. It wasn’t in the spirit of boasting though; it was more like something he had to confess. To spill the beans to his mates served to satisfy some kind of Psychological need. One psychiatrist he saw about his depression said he had a psycho-sexual problem. Duh! That much was pretty obvious.
Humphrey Carpenter, Potter’s biographer, thinks these confessions were evidence of a “profound self-loathing.” Just as his psoriasis was more proof of his personal “pollution.”
“Your skin is your outer self—your boundary
between you and the world—and inevitably
you part of the leper syndrome. You know,
‘Ring the bell and shout UNCLEAN! ‘”
‘‘Ring the bells, etc.” is a reference to some lines in “The Singing Detective,” by far his best-known and popular work. The Detective is named, amusingly, Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s knight-errant detective of American fame. Marlowe is the Detective of the title and he is in the hospital for treatment of his severe Psoriatic Anthropathy (psoriasis combined with arthritis.) Potter was in the hospital with this condition a number of times, sometimes with a crust of scales over his eyes, it was that bad at times. The original BBC production is excellent, starring Michael Gambon as Marlowe and Joanne Whaley as his nurse in the hospital. The American version, with Robert Downey Jr., cannot hold a candle to the British production, which has the authenticity the teleplay needs. The psychologist that is working with Marlowe tells him that “the temptation to believe that the illness and poisons of the mind or personality have somehow erupted out on the skin. Unclean! Unclean! You shout, ringing the bell warning us to keep off, to keep clear.” Friends of Potter agree that he believed the disease was indeed a “poison of the mind, as punishment for sins or bad karma.”
Ah yes, the Heartbreak of Psoriasis! That’s the attitude the attitude Dermatologists like to push on the public so they will seek expensive treatments or topical creams. They make it basically a vanity issue with psychological implications. My psoriasis showed up when I was 42, with no history of it in my family. I have what they call a moderate case, where it is a bloody nuisance, but not much more than that, although it has grown worst as time has gone by. I have certainly noticed how people scowl when they notice the white scales on my hands and then back away, as if I was a leper, when in fact psoriasis is not an infectious disease. Out of desperation recently I tried taking a bath using sea salt from the Dead Sea. I wanted to see if the trace minerals in the sea salt would alter my unclean appearance. For the first time since psoriasis had showed up it was bothering my wife, especially when engaged in sex. In particular she disliked having my hands fondling her genital area or having a couple fingers in her. She knows better—that it is not contagious—but the irrational factors can take over sometimes. I couldn’t let that become my Heartbreak of Psoriasis, so I did not let her qualms prevent us from having sex. I was too horny and too needy to let that happen. The “filth” she was complaining about was in her head, not in my fingers. Eventually she came around and we rarely had a problem. Apparently, Dermatopathophobia, (fear of skin disease) is embedded in all our psyches. In our case, love conquers all.
In 1980 I sought the opinion of a Tucson Naturopath about the possible causes of my psoriasis. When he heard I had daily contact with cleaning chemicals, he thought that could be the cause, especially since the outbreak occurred two years after I was hired as custodian at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church. The first time I noticed it was under my fingernails—I thought it was a fungus. In a few year s I decided to write the A.R.E. organization in Virginia Beach, Edgar Cayce’s group HQ. All Cayce’s files are kept there, so I ordered his file on Psoriasis, which turned out to be pretty skinny. He said the affliction was caused by a toxic leak from the large intestine. His cure was daunting, a very complicated regime of several teas I had never heard of. If there was more to it than that I can’t recall. Another thing I tried was Castor oil in a glass of milk. I drank that every day for about 6 months.
Naturally, I eventually asked myself could there be an emotional or psychological cause to the outbreak. If so what could it be? The first thing I considered was the shock I experienced when I started working at the church, which was certainly a trauma, especially when it got linked with my mother’s attitude about me taking a class-less scum job like being a janitor, something she was on my ass about till the day she died. The transition to becoming a janitor among the class-conscious Presbyterians was tough enough, but my mother piling on made it only worse. When I took the job in May of 1977 I had myself convinced that a job was a job, at least if survival not prosperity was the man issue. Not quite. Very simply, I had a hard time making the transition from being a university professor and ‘‘big man on campus,” plus someone who had showed his work around the country, which meant absolutely nothing to Church members. Even though there 5 years in between leaving UNLV and taking the job at the church, what mattered is I was still very much identified with my campus Identity, which was hard won and had been a big boost to my lower class ID. Intellectually I had let go of the ID and image, but emotionally I still quite attached to it. I had bragged about going through a “deprofessional process, “ but part of my ego clung to the past image, which had more glamour and drama. I hadn’t eliminated it, I had just buried it out of sight, and when push came to shove, it resurfaced as a roadblock to my psychological ambition. Going back to being a working stiff turned out to be much less appealing than my “Pride of Ascendency.” Readjusting to being a NOBODY again, and believe me the church members who little or nothing about my past accomplishments, made sure I knew I was a nonentity. The elderly Asst. Pastor loved to call “boy” when I was in my forties. I called him on it but he kept it up. The pretty secretary who was fooling around with the senior pastor once said to me after he upbraided me for something or other, “You know, every once and while he wants to kick the dog.” No one gave a damn about my feelings.
Those bad days at St. Andrew’s coincided with the fact my mother was so embarrassed by my working as a janitor she told all her friends I was teaching at the University in Tucson and Sue was, of course, home with then new baby. It really galled me she had to falsify my existence to save face with her friends who had had sons they could be proud of. Is it possible that her belittling campaign toward me when combined with the corrosive negativity dumped on me the first few years at the church, could that cause me enough stress to be the “poison” that kicked off the psoriasis outbreak. Or do I blame the chemicals I had to work with for years? Who knows? I don’t.
Humphrey Carpenter, Potter’s biographer, thinks these confessions were evidence of a “profound self-loathing.” Just as his psoriasis was more proof of his personal “pollution.”
“Your skin is your outer self—your boundary
between you and the world—and inevitably
you part of the leper syndrome. You know,
‘Ring the bell and shout UNCLEAN! ‘”
‘‘Ring the bells, etc.” is a reference to some lines in “The Singing Detective,” by far his best-known and popular work. The Detective is named, amusingly, Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s knight-errant detective of American fame. Marlowe is the Detective of the title and he is in the hospital for treatment of his severe Psoriatic Anthropathy (psoriasis combined with arthritis.) Potter was in the hospital with this condition a number of times, sometimes with a crust of scales over his eyes, it was that bad at times. The original BBC production is excellent, starring Michael Gambon as Marlowe and Joanne Whaley as his nurse in the hospital. The American version, with Robert Downey Jr., cannot hold a candle to the British production, which has the authenticity the teleplay needs. The psychologist that is working with Marlowe tells him that “the temptation to believe that the illness and poisons of the mind or personality have somehow erupted out on the skin. Unclean! Unclean! You shout, ringing the bell warning us to keep off, to keep clear.” Friends of Potter agree that he believed the disease was indeed a “poison of the mind, as punishment for sins or bad karma.”
Ah yes, the Heartbreak of Psoriasis! That’s the attitude the attitude Dermatologists like to push on the public so they will seek expensive treatments or topical creams. They make it basically a vanity issue with psychological implications. My psoriasis showed up when I was 42, with no history of it in my family. I have what they call a moderate case, where it is a bloody nuisance, but not much more than that, although it has grown worst as time has gone by. I have certainly noticed how people scowl when they notice the white scales on my hands and then back away, as if I was a leper, when in fact psoriasis is not an infectious disease. Out of desperation recently I tried taking a bath using sea salt from the Dead Sea. I wanted to see if the trace minerals in the sea salt would alter my unclean appearance. For the first time since psoriasis had showed up it was bothering my wife, especially when engaged in sex. In particular she disliked having my hands fondling her genital area or having a couple fingers in her. She knows better—that it is not contagious—but the irrational factors can take over sometimes. I couldn’t let that become my Heartbreak of Psoriasis, so I did not let her qualms prevent us from having sex. I was too horny and too needy to let that happen. The “filth” she was complaining about was in her head, not in my fingers. Eventually she came around and we rarely had a problem. Apparently, Dermatopathophobia, (fear of skin disease) is embedded in all our psyches. In our case, love conquers all.
In 1980 I sought the opinion of a Tucson Naturopath about the possible causes of my psoriasis. When he heard I had daily contact with cleaning chemicals, he thought that could be the cause, especially since the outbreak occurred two years after I was hired as custodian at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church. The first time I noticed it was under my fingernails—I thought it was a fungus. In a few year s I decided to write the A.R.E. organization in Virginia Beach, Edgar Cayce’s group HQ. All Cayce’s files are kept there, so I ordered his file on Psoriasis, which turned out to be pretty skinny. He said the affliction was caused by a toxic leak from the large intestine. His cure was daunting, a very complicated regime of several teas I had never heard of. If there was more to it than that I can’t recall. Another thing I tried was Castor oil in a glass of milk. I drank that every day for about 6 months.
Naturally, I eventually asked myself could there be an emotional or psychological cause to the outbreak. If so what could it be? The first thing I considered was the shock I experienced when I started working at the church, which was certainly a trauma, especially when it got linked with my mother’s attitude about me taking a class-less scum job like being a janitor, something she was on my ass about till the day she died. The transition to becoming a janitor among the class-conscious Presbyterians was tough enough, but my mother piling on made it only worse. When I took the job in May of 1977 I had myself convinced that a job was a job, at least if survival not prosperity was the man issue. Not quite. Very simply, I had a hard time making the transition from being a university professor and ‘‘big man on campus,” plus someone who had showed his work around the country, which meant absolutely nothing to Church members. Even though there 5 years in between leaving UNLV and taking the job at the church, what mattered is I was still very much identified with my campus Identity, which was hard won and had been a big boost to my lower class ID. Intellectually I had let go of the ID and image, but emotionally I still quite attached to it. I had bragged about going through a “deprofessional process, “ but part of my ego clung to the past image, which had more glamour and drama. I hadn’t eliminated it, I had just buried it out of sight, and when push came to shove, it resurfaced as a roadblock to my psychological ambition. Going back to being a working stiff turned out to be much less appealing than my “Pride of Ascendency.” Readjusting to being a NOBODY again, and believe me the church members who little or nothing about my past accomplishments, made sure I knew I was a nonentity. The elderly Asst. Pastor loved to call “boy” when I was in my forties. I called him on it but he kept it up. The pretty secretary who was fooling around with the senior pastor once said to me after he upbraided me for something or other, “You know, every once and while he wants to kick the dog.” No one gave a damn about my feelings.
Those bad days at St. Andrew’s coincided with the fact my mother was so embarrassed by my working as a janitor she told all her friends I was teaching at the University in Tucson and Sue was, of course, home with then new baby. It really galled me she had to falsify my existence to save face with her friends who had had sons they could be proud of. Is it possible that her belittling campaign toward me when combined with the corrosive negativity dumped on me the first few years at the church, could that cause me enough stress to be the “poison” that kicked off the psoriasis outbreak. Or do I blame the chemicals I had to work with for years? Who knows? I don’t.
What goes around comes around
2011_10_19 what goes around comes around
I caught three films by Nicolas Ray last night on TCM. . The first one was “The True Story of Jesse James,” which I had never seen before. It was released in 1958. Ray wanted Elvis Pressley to play Jesse, but that idea fell through and he got stuck with two ‘hot properties,’ Robert Wagner, a pretty boy actor of limited range, who played Jessie James, and Jeffrey Hunter--who a few years later would be Jesus (with shaved arm pits hanging on the cross) in “King of Kings,” another Ray film-- was selected to play Frank James. The pair did not look like a couple rough and tumble cowboys; more like matinee idols.
What surprised me in the film was how Sam Peckinpah had borrowed heavily from the film, which he seemed to regard as a kind of sketch of what he wanted to do with the ideas. For example, the botched robbery in Northfield Minnesota; it was the model, the staging, for the first shoot out in “Wild Bunch,” a scene now regarded as the epitome of an action scene, along with the 12 minute closing scene which was different in character but equally brilliantly staged. William Holden as the Pike Bishop, the leader of the Bunch makes Wagner’s Jesse look like a boy scout playing at being a bad guy. Peckinpah took the western to a new level of intensity and drama. But the robbery has bits in it that seem almost lifted directly out of Ray’s Western, for example, the random chaos on the city streets, the horseman crashing through a store front window, and the gang members being sitting ducks for the town’s folk shooting at them from atop buildings, events that in “Wild Bunch” are sharply edited with a pace equal to the crazy energy of the action, with some slow motion added to the mix to alter the pace here and there. Never has violence appeared so lyrical. At the end of the scene you had to catch your breath.
Another idea lifted from Ray’s “Jesse James” was by George Roy Hill, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” It was that scene
of Jessie and Frank leaping off a cliff to escape some lawman chasing them. In 1969 that scene showed up in Hill’s movie, only he made it last a bit longer, and he made it really memorable with a great tag line, “Who are those guys?”
The second Ray movie I watch was “Bitter Victory.” Also made in the late fifties. Richard Burton and Curt Jergens are two offices sent on a secret mission by British Command in North Africa to steal some important papers from Rommel. The two men hate each other, largely because they are in love with the same woman (Ruth Roman.) The mission was a success but several men are lost in the process, including Burton. When Jergens returned to base he is treated as a hero for leading the mission and receives a high-ranking medal, which he was hoping for at the start of the mission. But in retrospect he laments Burton’s death and the killing of other men. He ends up taking his medal and sticking it on the heart of a practice dummy hanging from the ceiling. I thought that was a nice touch at the conclusion of the story.
Last March, while I was on a kick to see a number of Michael Caine movies after reading his second book about his life in pictures, I saw “Play Dirty,” a 1969 movie about two British officers who dislike each other but are teamed by British Command to go 400 miles behind enemy lines to destroy a fuel depot. Nigel Green partners with Caine and two eventually have respect for each. However, keeping German uniforms on when they approach some fellow Brits turns out to be a fatal mistake.
The third and last movie by Nick Ray was one I saw when it came out in 1958. “Wind over the Everglades” was something of a hodge-podge movie with Christopher Plummer and Burl Ives playing the lead, with a lot of local people taking roles, and some other characters throw in, like Two-Ton Tony Galento, a heavyweight boxer, Sammy Renick, a jockey, Emmett Kelly the clown, and for glamour, Gypsy Rose Lee. I would call the film a good bad movie. (One critic who hated the movie titled it, “Break wind over the Everglades.”) It was Chris Plummer’s first starring role in a Hollywood movie. He plays Walt Murdock, a Game Warren trying to protect the rookies of several species of birds; he’s essentially an early environmentalist trying to stop the silly fashion of the day, fancy feathers on women’s hats, which was depleting the everglades of many birds. The leader of the poachers is a man named cottonmouth (Burl Ives) who has a bunch of rag-tag followers. He knows his way around the swamps and he has a pet cottonmouth. The ratty gang have tagged Murdock “bird boy” and they assume Cottonmouth will eventually kill him. Actually they get drunk together, become friends (of a sort) and Cottonmouth allows Murdock to take him in. But alas, there is some poetic justice for Cottonmouth at the end of the movie. As for Ray, he got sick and was fired before the film ended.
The film had its moments and there are plenty of scenes of the wild life. At times I thought I was watching a National Geographic wild life program. But the movie put Nick Ray ahead of the times. A movie about a game warden? You got to be kidding?
I caught three films by Nicolas Ray last night on TCM. . The first one was “The True Story of Jesse James,” which I had never seen before. It was released in 1958. Ray wanted Elvis Pressley to play Jesse, but that idea fell through and he got stuck with two ‘hot properties,’ Robert Wagner, a pretty boy actor of limited range, who played Jessie James, and Jeffrey Hunter--who a few years later would be Jesus (with shaved arm pits hanging on the cross) in “King of Kings,” another Ray film-- was selected to play Frank James. The pair did not look like a couple rough and tumble cowboys; more like matinee idols.
What surprised me in the film was how Sam Peckinpah had borrowed heavily from the film, which he seemed to regard as a kind of sketch of what he wanted to do with the ideas. For example, the botched robbery in Northfield Minnesota; it was the model, the staging, for the first shoot out in “Wild Bunch,” a scene now regarded as the epitome of an action scene, along with the 12 minute closing scene which was different in character but equally brilliantly staged. William Holden as the Pike Bishop, the leader of the Bunch makes Wagner’s Jesse look like a boy scout playing at being a bad guy. Peckinpah took the western to a new level of intensity and drama. But the robbery has bits in it that seem almost lifted directly out of Ray’s Western, for example, the random chaos on the city streets, the horseman crashing through a store front window, and the gang members being sitting ducks for the town’s folk shooting at them from atop buildings, events that in “Wild Bunch” are sharply edited with a pace equal to the crazy energy of the action, with some slow motion added to the mix to alter the pace here and there. Never has violence appeared so lyrical. At the end of the scene you had to catch your breath.
Another idea lifted from Ray’s “Jesse James” was by George Roy Hill, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” It was that scene
of Jessie and Frank leaping off a cliff to escape some lawman chasing them. In 1969 that scene showed up in Hill’s movie, only he made it last a bit longer, and he made it really memorable with a great tag line, “Who are those guys?”
The second Ray movie I watch was “Bitter Victory.” Also made in the late fifties. Richard Burton and Curt Jergens are two offices sent on a secret mission by British Command in North Africa to steal some important papers from Rommel. The two men hate each other, largely because they are in love with the same woman (Ruth Roman.) The mission was a success but several men are lost in the process, including Burton. When Jergens returned to base he is treated as a hero for leading the mission and receives a high-ranking medal, which he was hoping for at the start of the mission. But in retrospect he laments Burton’s death and the killing of other men. He ends up taking his medal and sticking it on the heart of a practice dummy hanging from the ceiling. I thought that was a nice touch at the conclusion of the story.
Last March, while I was on a kick to see a number of Michael Caine movies after reading his second book about his life in pictures, I saw “Play Dirty,” a 1969 movie about two British officers who dislike each other but are teamed by British Command to go 400 miles behind enemy lines to destroy a fuel depot. Nigel Green partners with Caine and two eventually have respect for each. However, keeping German uniforms on when they approach some fellow Brits turns out to be a fatal mistake.
The third and last movie by Nick Ray was one I saw when it came out in 1958. “Wind over the Everglades” was something of a hodge-podge movie with Christopher Plummer and Burl Ives playing the lead, with a lot of local people taking roles, and some other characters throw in, like Two-Ton Tony Galento, a heavyweight boxer, Sammy Renick, a jockey, Emmett Kelly the clown, and for glamour, Gypsy Rose Lee. I would call the film a good bad movie. (One critic who hated the movie titled it, “Break wind over the Everglades.”) It was Chris Plummer’s first starring role in a Hollywood movie. He plays Walt Murdock, a Game Warren trying to protect the rookies of several species of birds; he’s essentially an early environmentalist trying to stop the silly fashion of the day, fancy feathers on women’s hats, which was depleting the everglades of many birds. The leader of the poachers is a man named cottonmouth (Burl Ives) who has a bunch of rag-tag followers. He knows his way around the swamps and he has a pet cottonmouth. The ratty gang have tagged Murdock “bird boy” and they assume Cottonmouth will eventually kill him. Actually they get drunk together, become friends (of a sort) and Cottonmouth allows Murdock to take him in. But alas, there is some poetic justice for Cottonmouth at the end of the movie. As for Ray, he got sick and was fired before the film ended.
The film had its moments and there are plenty of scenes of the wild life. At times I thought I was watching a National Geographic wild life program. But the movie put Nick Ray ahead of the times. A movie about a game warden? You got to be kidding?
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