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?