FORTY GUNS - #954

A rough and tumble western as only Samuel Fuller could make, 1957’s Forty Guns is the most macho feminist cowboy picture you’re likely to see. Opening with a visual manifesto--three men in their plodding wagon overtaken by a storm of horses, led by a black-clad woman astride a pure white beast--it’s clear from the start that a storm is coming, and it’s not going to be any dude marshalling its fury.

The three men are the Bonell brothers, law enforcement heading into Cochise County to arrest an outlaw wanted for federal robbery. Their eldest, Griff (Barry Sullivan), is a legendary gunslinger, known for his propensity to critically wound rather than kill. He’s also a fellow who’ll stay out of a fight if it isn’t his. So, when he reluctantly picks up a pistol to avenge his friend and stop the ornery Brock Drummond (John Ericson) from shooting up the town, you know it means something. Not just to him, but also to Drummond’s sister, Jessica (Barbara Stanwyck), the woman in black--or “the high riding woman with a whip,” as the movie’s ballad dubs her. Jessica runs the area with her forty-man army, and with the previous sheriff dead, she sees an opportunity to reinforce her regime by pinning the tin star to Griff’s chest.

Naturally, he isn’t having it, and so begins a sexual-tension standoff that drives the rest of the movie. The chemistry between Griff and Jessica is instant, and born of mutual respect, even if Griff is a bit too straight-arrow to admit it--or to accept his own infamy. Fuller’s script for Forty Guns is full of sharp innuendo, equating guns and power to sex and manhood. It’s not just knowing puns about “cleaning guns” or choosing the right stock, either; in the first showdown between Griff and Brock, there’s a clear visual commentary going on, as Joseph Biroc’s camera cuts between tight shots on Griff’s righteous, determined eyes and Brock’s limp pistol, drooping by his side, never to be fired. One is a man, and the other...well, not so much.

Fuller had something to prove with Forty Guns. He had seen how westerns discounted the female characters, and he wanted to upend that cart and all the horse apples inside of it. It’s important that no one ever questions Jessica’s ability to lead, or even suggests it’s strange that she’s the boss--outside that ballad, which concludes by wondering if there is any man strong enough to get her to come down off that high horse. (Not to be all spoilery, but the nature of that lyric does lead to the Forty Guns’ single bum note.) Jessica’s undoing is because of a man, but it’s a family tie, not a romantic one. Both she and Griff are challenged by their younger brothers. The middle Bonell, Wes (Gene Barry), has been Griff’s second for his entire career, but neither of them want their youngest, Chico (Robert Dix), to follow in their footsteps. In terms of western mythology, Fuller has put Forty Guns at the tail end of the gunslinger life. The situation the Bonells find themselves in is indicative of the changing times, and Fuller structures his script to encompass three generations. There are the aging lawmen, the nearly blind sheriff that Brock guns down (Hank Worden) and the marshall Ned Logan (Dean Jagger) that sees himself as Jessica’s #2, both of whom don’t want to give up the ghost just yet; there are the middle-aged veterans, Wes and Griff, who see an end to their wild adventures as society shifts towards civility; and then there are Brock and Chico, eager to make their marks, blind to the oncoming obsolescence of their would-be profession.

It’s quite a switch-up. In any other western, you’d have the put-upon damsel begging the hero to lay his weapons to rest and give her some notice. In Forty Guns, it’s Logan who confesses that it’s love that motivates him to run off Griff and put things back to the way they were. It’s a scene that, thanks to Jagger’s performance, can be viewed both as sympathetic and pathetic. What are we to make of an old-time frontiersman who pleads, “Jessica, I’m a man. I’ve a man’s feelings. You can’t buy what I feel”? John Wane would never be so vulnerable. #notallcowboys

But Forty Guns is a western where a woman owns everything. And has more of everything. She has more land and hombres in her employ than any would-be rival, and the biggest dinner table around so she can feed them all at the same time. (What a power move, forcing Griff to pass his message across twenty other men just to deliver it to her!) Perhaps her respect for and attraction to Griff comes from the fact that not only does he not need anything from her, he is not intimidated by her strength. In their first real scene together, she lets him drink her whiskey while she susses him out, and it ends with neither having given up any ground.

For two people like Griff and Jessica, however, it will take an act of God for them to give in to their desires, which is exactly what Fuller delivers. In an astounding tornado scene, the pair end up huddling together behind a brick wall, their backs to the wind, hoping the structure won’t fall before the danger passes. Once the wind has blown itself out, so too has their resistance.

There would have been no better choice for this film than Barbara Stanwyck. She had spent her career playing tough women who managed to maintain their femininity in a world that demanded she could not be both. Think of her turn as the con artist in The Lady Eve [review], the sexy femme fatale who still is a woman and able to feel and be. Stanwyck also pulled cowpoke duty for the Criterion Collection once before in Anthony Mann’s The Furies [review]. She has a commanding presence here, presiding over the men folk as she does, often astride that white horse, which the actress rode herself. No stunt doubles. Fuller uses low angles to give Jessica her proper place as commander, the landscape tilting to accommodate her. (Fuller is far less inclined to pay homage to the mountains and prairies than John Ford, probably convinced that man would end up besting Mother Nature in the end.) The result is more regal than sinister. As a villain, Jessica is never truly evil, she only appears to be doing what she thinks she has to do, and her fall comes from a different necessity.

Were we to call anyone a villain, it should be Brock, who could have commandeered a film of his own. He’s a real mean son of a bitch, with nary a glimmer of moral ambiguity. His betrayal of the sister who tried everything she could to help him could be what drives Jessica to the choice she makes at the end, casting her final scene as some kind of plea for relief rather than a surrender. Griff works as a foil for Brock. He is as unyielding, but he sees nuance in the life he’s lived and accepts the consequences. His confidence is earned. To my eye, Fuller isn’t really condemning the macho lifestyle here--that lip-licking, knowing look the gunmaker’s daughter (Eve Brent) gives Wes when he’s getting things done is no different than how Fuller and his camera look at Griff--he understands the need for decisive action. His ideal is more balanced. It allows for Jessica to have equal power, and for the intelligent, peaceful option to be considered first. Hence, when Brock forces Griff’s hand, Griff sees his worst sin as finally losing control. (Again, it takes a tornado....)

If Jessica’s final decision comes a little too quick, we might forgive it, since Forty Guns is a movie where everything happens quickly. At a lean 80 minutes, Samuel Fuller’s edits are as decisive as his characters’ actions or the violence that results from them. You only have the space between the guy reaching for his gun and his firing it to make your move. Besides, since the very last shot is a long one, we don’t really see what happens. For all we know, this could be the western equivalent of the end of The Graduate [review]. Then again, Fuller fans know he’s got a heart as soft as his gumption is tough, so most likely, we’re looking at some kind of happily ever after.

JULIEN DUVIVIER IN THE THIRTIES - ECLIPSE SERIES #44

There’s a different rhythm to early sound films. Though discussion always focuses on how many actors and actresses found it difficult transitioning from silent films to talkies, be it due to an unsuitable voice or a lack of proper vehicles, there was also a transition required of the people behind the cameras. The staging and pacing was different once dialogue was required. Indeed, even filming was different, because you had to accommodate for the actors having to say actual words out loud and capturing them on microphone.

So, just like with actors, only the most adaptable directors carried on and even flourished. John Ford in America, to name one example. Hitchcock in England. And Julien Duvivier in France.

The Eclipse set Julien Duvivier in the Thirties offers up four of the director’s first sound films, starting with DavidGolder, released in 1930 and made a full decade after Duvivier’s first silent film. Though neither as well-known nor as accomplished of the director’s most popular feature, Pepe le moko, David Golder--and indeed, all of the quartet here--shows a skilled artist eager to master his evolving craft. From the opening sequence of David Golder--a rapid-cut, impressionistic overview of the cultural, industrial, and economic situation in France at the 1920s--it’s clear Duvivier is ready to zoom into a new era.

David Golder was based on the novel of the moment, a dramatic tome by Irene Nemirovsky, who enjoyed a renaissance in recent years with her novel Suite Francaise. The David Golder of the title, played by regular Duvivier leading man Harry Baur (the Jean Valjean of Raymond Bernard’s Les Miserables [review]), is a free-market businessman about to get a lesson in the ups-and-downs inherent in capitalist bullishness. Our first exposure to the man is his relishing the ruin of a former partner who plotted against him and struck out on his own. When said partner commits suicide, Golder is unmoved. He insists the traitor should have reinvented himself, something Golder has had to do many times. Turn your loss into a win.

Karma comes around pretty fast, though, and Golder finds himself on shaky ground, and partially because of the very thing he tried to deny in business: a personal life. Golder’s wife (Paul Andral) is living a lavish existence on the Riviera, spending money alongside the couple’s spoiled daughter, Joyce (Jackie Monnier). As things unravel for Golder, he shows where his true loyalties lie. He’d rather let his wife sink if it means his daughter can swim. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Golder is not going to go down so easy, not without pulling the rug out and dragging her husband with her.

David Golder touches on a lot of important issues, including class, privilege, and race. Despite his money, there are many who look down on Golder because he is Jewish. Baur plays the dour character with an appropriate heaviness. He is as self-isolating as he is self-made. As a father, he is exasperated and indulgent, and the sprightly blonde Monnier uses his own weight against him, both narratively and in terms of performance. She is as airy as he is grounded. The contrast tires us as much as it does Golder himself, meaning we are as exhausted as he is at the end, a strange feat of empathy on the part of Duvivier.

Though the camera stays relatively stable for the majority of Duvivier’s film, it never feels dull or static. Scenes are long and there are gaps in dialogue, the way there often was before directors learned how to fill all that space, but there is also a precision to what is chosen that suggests that Duvivier is already comfortable with conversation. Sure, more is said that in a silent film’s intertitles, but the lack of excess means no word--or moment--is wasted. 

By 1932, when Duvivier remade his own Poil deCarotte, any hesitancy about movies with sound had long since passed. One could argue there might have been an added confidence in fleshing out material he already knew so well, though my own memory of the silent version of Poil de Carotte is hazy at this point, so I can’t say definitively how much the later effort differs [my review of the 1925 version is here].

Poil de Carotte is based on a novel by Jules Renard. It stars Robert Lynen as “Carrottop,” the youngest of three children in the Lepic family. His nickname is for his red hair, given to him affectionately by his father (a returning Baur), but generally used derisively. The Lepics are dysfunctional on their best day. Madame Lepic (Catherine Fonteney) doesn’t much care for her third child, instead doting on her oldest boy Felix (Maxime Fromiot), a bully and a thief, and the self-absorbed middle child, the girl Ernestine (Simone Aubry). Monsieur Lepic means well, but he’s distracted, particularly once his campaign for mayor is underway.

This leaves Carrottop (real name: Francois) to his own devices, and the imaginative boy is plagued by ghostly visions and a suicidal impulse. Both are shown by Duvivier via inventive special effects, including one scene where two dream images of Carrottop debate his future over the boy’s sleeping body, the proverbial angle and devil sitting on his shoulder. The superimposed figures are simple, but effective. Duvivier is stretching himself throughout Poil de Carotte. Armand Thirard and Emile Monniot’s cameras have become more active observers, sometimes probing a scene, moving between the players, and following the action within the frame. (Thirard was also a cinematographer on David Golder). In a particularly important segment, Carrottop’s youthful desires turn to a jealous rage, and the filmmakers let the anger take over. As the child whips on his horses, driving his wagon faster and faster, they use overhead shots of passing trees to show speed, POV vantage points from the front of the wagon to demonstrate the child’s looming madness, and also a wide view from behind, showing us how wild Carrottop’s path has become.

The cutting is sharper here, too. Editor Marthe Poncin uses dialogue to weave in and out of scenes, ironically juxtaposing a line with the image that follows, or stitching two separate pieces of dialogue together to connect different events.

Of course, all the technical wizardry in the world wouldn’t save Poil de Carotte if the performances were bad, and Duvivier pulls a particularly impressive turn from his young star. Lynen is the essential component of the film, and his performance is full of humor and emotion. He is equally convincing joking around as despairing over what he perceives to be his inescapable fate. The climactic scenes of his final attempts to end his life are disturbing and raw, but perhaps more memorable is the tenderness that comes before, when he shares a sweet moment with his childhood romance (Colette Segall). It’s an exchange so honestly felt, it’s almost too bad the film didn’t end there, with the innocence of young love giving Carrottop courage to carry on, rather than the borderline mawkish reconciliation between father and son.

The following year, Duvivier would attack genre in the most impressive La tête d’un homme, adapting the work of Georges Simenon. On the surface, this is a fairly conventional procedural: a man (Gaston Jacquet) loudly grouses in a crowded bar that he’d pay handsomely for his rich aunt to be killed and an opportunistic eavesdropper takes him up on it. When the deed is done, Inspector Jules Maigret (Baur) has to figure out who did the deed. He suspects the nephew is involved, and that the dim delivery man (Alexandre Rignault, Eyes Without a Face) that they’ve apprehended is just a patsy. The real culprit is Radek (Valery Inkijinoff), a Czech immigrant with a terminal illness and sociopathic tendencies.

La tête d’un homme isn’t really a mystery, it’s a character study. Duvivier shows us all the pieces, and we are generally one step ahead of Maigret. The central question is what is motivating Radek. Is he just a bad dude or is there something else behind it? His character unpeels slowly, with Inkijinoff projecting a cold confidence that eventually devolves into a more unhinged pathology. His performance in the latter half of the film seems to be cribbed somewhat from Peter Lorre’s in M [review], but Inkijinoff doesn’t sell it nearly as well. He’s best when being charming and calculating.

Harry Baur is barely recognizable as the detective. He is calm and cool, the wheels constantly spinning in his brain, and relatively unflappable. It’s easy to see why Duvivier used him over and over. You hardly track that it’s the same man from picture to picture. He can do anything, and should be listed alongside Michel Simon and Jean Gabin as one of the unforgettable masters of early French cinema.

Duvivier’s structuring of Simenon’s crime fiction is elegant and effortless. Thirard and Poncin return on camera and editing duties, and clearly the crew has locked into a groove by this point. The eye is drawn through a scene carefully, Duvivier making sure we see the right clues. He also remains inventive, with one stand-out sequence illustrating both the drudgery of canvassing witnesses but also the speed to which one cop follows up on leads. In the scene, the officer remains in the same space within the frame, but the locale keeps changing. Duvivier placed his actor in front of a rear-projection screen and has him talking to actors via pre-recorded footage, effectively jumping from location to location but without ever cutting. At one point, he even has another actress walk on to give the cop an answer, as if she were on the other end of the shop from the person the cop is facing. For modern audiences, the effect is obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less clever. (And watch for the actress tossing a look directly at the camera as she walks back off. Oops.)

The final film in Julien Duvivier in the Thirties is perhaps the best. Released the same year as Pepe le moko, Un carnet de bal (or Dance Card) is a crafty ensemble piece reminiscent of Max Ophüls. It stars Marie Bell as Christine, a newly widowed woman in her late 30s whose present grief inspires her to look back at past loves. A dance card from a ball she attended at age 16 provides a road map, of sorts; she will visit each of her former dance partners and see how the intervening decades have treated them. Also, they will hopefully know the whereabouts of Gerard, the one who got away.

What Christine finds on her journey surprises her. Life takes funny turns in twenty years. The lawyer has become a crook (Fernandel), the artist is now a priest (Harry Baur). Some of the men have married, some have had children. Most have realized their dreams on some small scale of success, even if, in some cases, tragedy followed. Christine is ill prepared for these turns of event, and even less so for the one underlying theme in the tales of all her former suitors: their lives changed the night of the dance, the night she broke all of their hearts.

Thought never explicitly stated, what Duvivier’s script explores are the reverberations a small action can have. In this case, the casual offer of affection, and the subsequent withdrawal of the same. Christine is never presented as callous or mean, except perhaps by the mother who claims her son took his life when Christine rejected him; yet that mother is reacting with her own broken heart, and we have no reason not to believe Christine when she says the boy had never confessed his feelings. Or could that be Christine’s greatest sin? She was oblivious. Even now, her real goal isn’t really to catch up with these old beaus, but to find out something about herself, and the irony is that, despite how things turned out for them, the one-time suitors whom she hurt have lived richer lives than the one of sheltered wealth she chose instead.

Un carnet de bal flows smoothly from one episode to another. Duvivier plays most of it straight. Outside of some intriguing cross-fades, he never really calls attention to his technique, the craft has become invisible. In fact, the director inadvertently creates his own metaphor for his style. When Christine first starts to reminisce about the fateful night of her youth, the memory literally dances in, a slow superimposing of past over present. It’s beautiful and elegant, an enticing invitation to follow where the reverie will lead.

As an artist, Julien Duvivier has done the same. His inventions have intrigued, his constructions occasionally dazzled, even as he slowly erodes the evidence of each, immersing us in his narratives until we are so thoroughly involved, we forget all else.

These discs were provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 4/13

Ah, it's that time of year where I start running behind, isn't it?

Well, here are the reviews for other movies from April...

IN THEATRES...

* The Angels' Share, a heartwarming Ken Loach dramedy about a whisky heist. Let me in on that action!

* The Place Beyond the Pines, an unwieldy family story from the director of Blue Valentine. Are literary pretensions and a strong cast enough to overcome a director's indulgences?

* Room 237, like a collapsing wormhole of internet crazy, a tape loop of nonsense about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

* To the Wonder, the latest from Terrence Malick is beautiful and emotionally provocative.

* Trance, wherein Danny Boyle uses Rosario Dawson's private parts to try to hypnotize you into believing that he's not just pulling the same old bullshit.

My Oregonian columns...

* April 5: two festivals come to town: the Polyester Pulp series of 1970s crime films and the disjointed Beer and Music Fest. Plus, Thale, a creepy Scandinavian folk tale turned into a creepy modern movie.

* April 12: the environmental documentary Trashed, featuring the very serious face of Jeremy Irons; Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer in weird and grisly The Silent Partner; and, hey, another environmental disaster in the schlocky 100 Degress Below Zero.

* April 19: Two recent French films, Women on the Sixth Floor and Tomboy, and two 1950s classics, The Little Fugitive and Imitation of Life.

* April 26: Emily Mortimer in the historical drama Leonie, an indie debut called Everything Went Down, and Peter Gabriel in concert.

ON BD/DVD...

* 28 Hotel Rooms, an indie romance with an interesting story structure.

* The Devil and Miss Jones, a delightful class comedy from 1941, starring the wonderful Jean Arthur.

* Hemingway & Gellhorn, literary legacies desecrated, good actors embarrassing themselves, and a myriad of other reasons why this is one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time.

* A Message to Garcia, a poor presentation of an otherwise decent early Barbara Stanwyck vehicle.

* Not Fade Away, a rock 'n' roll drama from Sopranos-creator David Chace.

* Once More, with Feeling! a middling Stanley Donen effort from 1959.

* The Sun Shines Bright, John Ford's friendly portrait of a Kentucky judge and his community ca. 1905. If you can look past some of the troublesome racial elements, the film actually has a surprising message of unity.

* Tatsumi, the animated biography of influential manga creator Yoshihiro Tatsumi

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 2/13

It seems that this is becoming the time of year I fall behind. Just around the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle. The good news is, unlike last year, I am not nearly as buried as I was last year, and so should be catching up much faster this time. Stay tuned.

Regardless, here are films I did manage to review in February, including work for my new gig at the Oregonian.

IN THEATRES...

* Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, a documentary about a tragic night in Portland's recent past. Currently doing the festival circuit.

* Jack the Giant Slayer, the fantasy adventure picture from Bryan Singer never grows into being what it really wants to be. Or so it would seem.

* Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh caps his career with an efficient and entertaining psychological thriller.

Oregonian columns:

* February 15: I cover a shorts program featuring local African American directors, as well as a screening of the first Best Picture Oscar Winner, Wings.

* February 22: The ethnic drama Bless Me, Ultima and the amazing Eddie Pepitone documentary, The Bitter Buddha.

* March 1: The Arrow Awards, a compilation of commercials from the UK that won industry accolades, and Koch, a new documentary about the legendary New York mayor, completed just before his death.

ON BD/DVD...

* Beauty is Embarrassing: The Wayne White Story, a fun documentary about one of the pop artists responsible for some of the sets and puppets on "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."

* The Boogie Man Will Get You, a slapstick flop from 1942, starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, both playing on their image as villains.

* Hello I Must Be Going, an indie starring-vehicle for Melanie Lynskey that is rich with emotion and possessed of a raw honesty.

* The Hour: Season Two, the second cycle for the entertaining suspense soap from the BBC. Sadly, it has been cancelled, making this the de-facto finale.

* How Green Was My Valley, John Ford's nostalgic look at a working village in Wales at the turn of the 20th Century. Winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1941.

* I Wish, a heartfelt and heart-warming portrait of childhood from Japanese director Hirakazu Kore-eda.

* A Simple Life, a surprisingly moving portrayal of old age from Chinese director Anne Hui.

* The Vertical Ray of the Sun, a lyrical Vietnamese film telling a tale of three sisters, originally released in 2000. Directed by Tran Anh Hung.

* White Zombie, the Bela Lugosi cult hit that is credited with starting off the zombie genre.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 1/13

My reviews for non-Criterion movies written in the first month of 2013.

IN THEATRES...

* 56 Up, another seven years in the life of Michael Apted's groundbreaking documentary series.

* Amour, Michael Haneke's drama of old age. Reserved and emotionally powerful.

* Barbara, an enthralling German drama about one woman exiled to the country in East Germany, ca. 1980.

* Gangster Squad. The low-bar for 2013 has been set. Here's your challenge, movie industry: don't do worse than this.

* Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunter. I'm a sucker for Gemma Arterton so I went to see her as Gretel, and now I'm a sucker for this movie.

* The Impossible, a good movie about surviving a tsunami, despite the ethnic whitewash.

* The Last Stand, teaming Arnold Schwarzenegger with awesome  director Jee-woon Kim. It's not as good as his Korean movies, but it's better than most Arnie movies.

* Mama, starring recent Golden Globe winner Jessica Chastain. She had a whole week to enjoy her win before this stinker hit.

* Rust and Bone, Marion Cotillard in a dark drama from the director of A Prophet.

Dick Tracy by Brent Schoonover 

ON BD/DVD...

* 5 Broken Cameras, the Oscar-nominated documentary made from one Palestinian man's personal video diary.

* Dangerous Liaisons, a 2012 Chinese update of the French novel, transplanting it to Shanghai in the 1930s and starring Zhang Ziyi and Cecilia Cheung.

* Dick Tracy, Warren Beatty's ambitious 1990 comic strip adaptation was a head of its time.

* Doctor Zhivago. Not the good David Lean version, but the boring 2002 TV version.

* Enlightened: The Complete First Season, an unfocused but entertaining HBO series from actress Laura Dern and filmmaker Mike White.

* The Good Doctor, the director who gave us Kisses returns with an ethically curious medical drama with Orlando Bloom.

* Indiscreet, the Stanley Donen romance film reteaming Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman appears to be geting better with age.

* A Man Vanishes, Shohei Imamura's 1967 breakthrough. In addition to the main film, there are also five documentaries the Japanese director made in the years leading up to Vengeance is Mine.

* Misfits: Season Two. Well, you can't win them all. Sophomore slump?

* Mrs. Miniver, sincere propaganda done as a moving drama by William Wyler, buoyed by an understanding performance from Greer Garson.

* Post Mortem, a strange kind of love story form Chile.

* The Quiet Man, John Ford's romantic classic starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara is now a stunning Blu-Ray release.

* Searching for Sugar Man, one of 2012's best documentaries is also a great rock-'n'-roll story.

HEAVEN'S GATE (Blu-Ray) - #636

As John Ford so often demonstrated (and as Ford-hater Quentin Tarantino barely took advantage of in the sometimes-cramped Django Unchained [review]*), the western is the ideal vehicle for widescreen motion-picture filmmaking. The vast, open spaces of the American frontier (or, if you're Sergio Leone, Italy and Spain), show us how large a movie screen really can be--and the movie screen in turn teaches us a little something about the size of our world. This is something Michael Cimino learned from Ford, and something he puts to great use in his late-70s western Heaven's Gate, a film where everything is massive, where going small is never an option. Even in the most intimate moments, the frame turns lovers into giants. Isabelle Huppert is here to kiss you puny humans to death.

Most importantly, perhaps, and what maybe separates Ford and Cimino from some of the rest, is this vision is of an idealized America, a belief that these vistas represent everything the country could be, and the nostalgic glow that they seek when they photograph the mountains and the blue sky provides a kind of warmth, soothing the sadness they feel at all the ways we have gone wrong, all the bad we have done in the service to the democratic experiment. The melting pot requires a certain amount of fire, alas.

Heaven's Gate, fittingly, is a movie about an idealist made by an idealist, and both lose control of their situation, ground beneath a machine that is larger than they ever imagined, and yet tragically heroic for doing so. At least unlike his fictional avatar, the rich-boy sheriff James Averill (Kris Kristofferson), Cimino has found some vindication. Though vilified on its release, and mostly for its budgetary excess to the exclusion of its storytelling success, Heaven's Gate has increasingly found new life and new audiences. Having never seen it prior to this Criterion release, I am now in awe of it. It's a phenomenal, audacious masterpiece.

For the plot-minded amongst us, the bulk of Heaven's Gate is set in Wyoming in 1890. (There are also bookends on the story, of Averill graduating Harvard as a young man in 1870, and of the old man reflecting in a brief epilogue set in the early 1900s.) Averill, we quickly learn, is a man who puts his mouth ahead of his money, a true do-gooder who dislikes injustice and human indecency. He promotes fair play where he can, and wearily accepts when the scales are tipped against the little guy. Those scales, he discovers, are soon to take on more weight than they can bear. The wealthy industrialists in his state, a group that previously blackballed Averill for failing to take a hard stance against the lower classes, have shored up their power and are preparing to patch what they perceive to be a hole in the law. Wyoming has become a home for European immigrants, many of whom find the land harder to work than they anticipated--due in no small part to the prejudice that awaits them from "real" Americans. According to the rich men, and at least based partially in fact, some of these immigrants resort to stealing their cattle when times get desperate. Up until now, the courts have done little to prosecute these "thieves and anarchists," but thanks to the efforts of one Frank Canton (Law & Order's Sam Waterston), they now have a bureaucratically approved kill list. 125 men and women in Averill's county have been marked for death for alleged crimes. Canton and his cohorts are hiring men at $5 a day, and $50 for each dead immigrant they deliver, to wipe these people out. As Averill notes, that's nearly everyone in the whole damn town where most of these farmers have set up shop.

And so it is that Averill returns to his township with a heavy heart, unsure if he can stem the tide that is coming. The town itself, named Sweetwater, is muddy and in progress, a microcosm of the U.S. Beyond its dirty streets is the perfect blue sky, the snow-capped peaks, the lush land that will sustain them all if everyone would just share. At the center of the town is the dancehall/skating rink, Heaven's Gate, surely named such as a gesture of hope, if not just for the earthly pleasures it promises. It will be a name that will take on a deadly irony, however, as it becomes where the townsfolk huddle in fear and anger to learn their seemingly inescapable fate.

Amidst this expansive drama there is, of course, a more personal story. For all his gruff ways, Averill is a lover. (Indeed, his last name is a variation on Aphrodite, goddess of love. Heaven's Gate is a movie where the names of its heroes have meaning.) The sheriff has a rather sweet romance with the French madame at the local whorehouse. Ella Watson, played by a young Isabelle Huppert, is the kind of frontier gal who has learned to take care of herself, who runs her own business, and runs it well. For all intents and purposes, she is on her own, but no one wants to be alone forever, and so she hopes Averill will one day step up and offer her something different. If not, the lawman has a rival. Ella is also having an affair, though one of a different stripe, with Nathan D. Champion (Christopher Walken), a dapper gunslinger who works as foreman for the secret association, but who is also conflicted about their goals. Champion is the embodiment of the American Dream, a man who has come from nothing and who is trying to make something. He resents Averill for his money (the sheriff, some argue, is engaging in an early form of ghetto tourism), and fantasizes about being his equal. His proposal to Ella is to tell her he has enough income to cover them both. And to prove such things are possible, Champion takes her to his shack to show her his wallpaper, a sad and endearing symbol of how out of his element he really is. It's not the kind of decoration we would expect; rather, he has merely covered his walls in newspaper. He's done a nice job with it, but no cigar.

And so this love triangle will play out as the bigger story comes to a boil, with Ella caught between the two men, and the two men needing to learn that just as they love the same women, they believe in the same things. They can't keep up the tug-of-war without tearing everything in two. This becomes an undeniable fact when it is discovered that Ella is on the kill list because she has accepted cattle as trade for her wares, some of which is most assuredly stolen, at least according to the propaganda. There are no hard facts about how rampant this "immigrant problem" is, how many are the thieves and anarchists that Frank Canton keeps harping on. The idea that anyone would forego feeding their family and steal a cow to get laid is, of course, reprehensible; yet, for all we know, it's little more than fear mongering. They're coming for your food and your women! Fox News via pony express!

The narrative of Heaven's Gate, which was written as an original screenplay by Michael Cimino (remember original screenplays?), is grandiose in scope, full of characters and character alike, not unlike a great Russian novel. It is sweeping and human, giving its different participants their moment in the spotlight, allowing for digressions into real life even when it may not obviously serve the plot. Scenes run long, conversations are allowed their natural course. There are two different dance sequences, the waltzing at Harvard (which breaks out into a brawl) and the roller-skating linedance at Heaven's Gate (which breaks into a two-person slow dance for Averill and Ella), both shot as a constant wave of movement by the brilliant Vilmos Zsigmond, dizzying and yet locked down. The dancers keep spinning, but the movie screen maintains its own keel. The sea may be rocking, but the ship will never go under.

Which is maybe what critics and audiences failed to see when Heaven's Gate was first released. They had lost sight of the forest, too concerned with what money was falling from its trees. Does Michael Cimino go overboard? Maybe. But it's only in pursuit of authentic expression. Tolstoy could build bustling crowds and the activity of a city life with words; Peter Jackson can pull an army of orcs out of his digital ass; but Cimino had to make 19th-century Wyoming come to life using flesh and wood. He had to show the human traffic by gathering the numbers together, show where they traveled by building the towns. Once the map was drawn and the sets erected, the mythology had to be lived. In one memorable scene, the first time we really see Champion and Averill talk, the younger man visits the sheriff at the bar where he lives and where he's having his breakfast. (The sibling establishment to Heaven's Gate, both owned by John H. Bridges, and portrayed by Jeff Bridges, who appears so lost in the role, it's almost savant-like the way he plays it.) As they speak, our eye is drawn to the window behind Kristofferson, and the man outside, a juggler, who, via optical illusion, appears to be standing on the actor's shoulder. Is it necessary? Not really. But it does add something to the moment, providing a visual metaphor for the dangerous game Averill is playing. As constable, he is intended to serve all sides, but eventually, he either has to walk away from it all or accept something is likely to drop.

I'm a defender of movies of length. It's a fallacy to say that movies should always be somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours. It's an artificial number concocted by theater owners to maximize the number of showings, to sell the most tickets in a day. Other media have suffered similar fates. Prose fiction and comic books are a certain number of words or pages due to cost of paper and shipping; long-player records famously got longer when CDs were invented because compact discs could hold more music. While artists in all of these fields learned to cope with these restraints, and make an art out of how to meet the economic demands, that does not vindicate the idea that such restrictions are somehow inherent in this mode of expression. Heaven's Gate runs over three-and-a-half hours. There is something refreshing about watching a movie like Heaven's Gate--or, indeed, Bertolucci's 1900 [review] or Leone's Once Upon a Time in America or more recently Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford [review], which tellingly are all examples of stories about eras ending and centuries turning--where the scenes are not trimmed to fit, where the dialogue is not manicured to move everything forward**. You can have five minutes of two people talking as people are wont to do, can step back and enjoy the dance, can walk the streets of the town and see the sights. Heaven's Gate is the movie equivalent of a semester abroad. You really live there for a suitable length of time and truly experience the culture; by comparison, most other movies are just two-week package tours.

For as much as Heaven's Gate maybe went from a well-planned cattle drive to an out-of-control stampede during shooting, I don't think that shows on the screen. Or if it does, only when it counts. The film's climax, its true one, not counting the subsequent stinger and the epilogue, is pure chaos. In both of its battle sequences, Cimino unmoors the whole thing and lets the herd run wild. It's impossible to tell who is shooting whom, and where one side has drawn its line and where the other is in relation to it. The pointlessness and confusion is by design, it erases any notion of clear victory, of well-defined winners and losers. And even if it wasn't, even if the auteur had lost control and had to spend time revising, reworking, reimagining--well, this takes us back to novelists again. No one would blink if Steinbeck went beyond his allotted schedule, if his word count exceeded expectations. Not when it meant getting East of Eden.

And so busted budgets and extra cans of film are also worth it when the result is Heaven's Gate. It's an engrossing movie event, deserving of all the time it demands, deserving of you opening your mind wide to accept it.

* Having only seen Django Unchained once, and not really considering how much of the landscape Tarantino does or does not use until now, I concede in advance that my memory could be playing tricks.

** Back to Tarantino, this is also something he does incredibly well, particularly in how he writes conversational sequences.

Please note: The images used here were taken from promotional materials and other sources, not directly from the Blu-Ray.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 7/12

My reviews of non-Criterion movies in July.

IN THEATRES...

* The Amazing Spider-Man, the improbable relaunch that could.

* Beasts of the Southern Wild, a noble effort with great acting and beautiful cinematography, but overbearing music and a muddled script.

* The Dark Knight Rises, maybe the most anticipated movie of the year. But must what goes up also come down?

* Ruby Sparks, a would-be deconstruction of the "manic pixie girl" concept that doesn't have the gumption to take it all the way. Noble debut writing effort from actress Zoe Cassavetes, however, and she's also really good in the movie.

* Savages, Oliver Stone's proof that the only losing proposition bigger than the War on Drugs is his movie about the War on Drugs. Contender for worst of the year.

* To Rome With Love, Woody Allen's tribute to Italy is a pleasant comedic quartet.

* Total Recall, a surprisingly action-packed remake with Colin Farrell. Go watch the punching and the shooting and don't worry about it.

* Trishna. It's a bummer summer with Michael Winterbottom adapting Thomas Hardy. Pity poor Freida Pinto. 

* The Watch, your summer safeguard against laughing. Trust me. You won't. Starring Stiller, Vaughn, Hill, and a bunch of dead air.

Also, if you're in Portland, the NW Film Center is starting Mark Cousins' epic movie about movies, The Story of Film: An Odyssey this week. It's five parts, spread over all of August. I wrote it up for the Portland Mercury.

Annnnnd, Shawn Levy at The Oregonian did a round-up of Portland comics folks, asking them their opinions about superhero movies. Included are Brian Michael Bendis, Jeff Parker, Natalie Nourigat, Dylan Meconis, David Chelsea, and many others. And, naturally, yours truly. It's a pretty neat round-table. Read the full version online here.

ON BD/DVD...

* 1900, Gerard Depardieu and Robert De Niro star in Bernardo Bertolucci's sprawling, mad epic.

* Force of Evil, a sharp gangster picture from 1948, with John Garfield as a mob lawyer looking to take his gambling racket to the big time.

* The Last of England, Derek Jarman's post-apocalyptic poem. A vision of the future from the vantage point of the 1980s.

* Panda! Go, Panda! an early kids movie from Hayao Miyazaki.

* Rio Grande, a pre-Quiet Man teaming of John Wayne, John Ford, and Maureen O'Hara.

* La terra trema, Luchino Visconti's second feature, is a classic of Italian Neorealism.

* Treme: The Complete Second Season. HBO's most challenging show is a lot like life. And, hey, ain't life worth it?