One that’s bloggy, and filmy? Than allow me to direct you to Dennis Cozzalio’s ever-wonderful blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, which you ought to be going to regularly anyway. Although I myself have been slightly amiss, or else I would have directed you to this sooner: A “Movie Blogger Summit” between Dennis and the wondrous Farran Smith Nehme, known to the millions as The Self-Styled Siren. The two discuss their blogging origins, aesthetic affinities, aesthetic differences (My Lovely Wife had to walk me to the fainting couch after I was reminded again that the Siren, beloved of us both, has no love for Once Upon A Time In The West) and so on. The duo chatted on Skype back in May, and Dennis lovingly transcribed the proceedings. And it’s good, good stuff, and a real tonic for me personally at a time when, for reasons you’ll forgive me for not once again dredging up, I had started to perceive the internet as some kind of combination lunatic asylum/cesspool.
Part One is here, and Part the Second is forthcoming. Check it out. Smoking jacket and monocle not required (and yes, I promise, I will get off that theme soon enough; it still gives me a little chuckle, is all).
Dennis is, roughly speaking, the nicest guy on the planet, so this is no surprise.
I agree, the timing of the piece @ SLIFR is perfect. It’s been a trying week. Good to reaffirm, there’s still quality stuff around created by people who care. Thanks to all for making it happen.
And bill, if you don’t mind me saying so, you seem to be a pretty nice guy yourself. Congrats on your two year anniversary.
Goodness, why would I mind?? Thank you very much, Jimmy.
This is a beautiful compliment, Glenn, and I am touched. Dennis is the best. There can’t be too many bloggers out there willing to take someone to heart even after they diss your blog’s namesake. Although, if it makes you and Dennis feel better, I’ll reiterate that I think the opening of OUATITW is great, and I do like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Not to embarrass the Siren or Mr. Cozzalio, but after the painful nonsense provoked by a thankfully no longer welcome SCR commenter this past week, I just want to thank them (and you too, Mr. K.) for reminding me of what Nabokov – probably not anticipating the Internets – once called “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, kindness, tenderness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
Leone does create problems for himself whenever he attempts to deal with women in his films. Men seem to be willing to overlook those problems more than women, which isn’t necessarily a good thing…
I do think OUATITWest is great, but not particularly in the character sense, or in the sense of presenting a world view that’s particularly congenial, so the Siren’s critique made sense to me. It depends where stuff like mise en scene and editing stand in your list of aesthetic criteria compared to believable motivation etc. And even if the latter doesn’t matter to you one jot, you may still need the filmmaker to be good company. I think, to stereotype grossly, guys may be more willing to overlook Leone’s boorish and insensitive side.
Illustration: my partner gave up on OUATIAmerica not after Noodles rapes Deborah, but after he shows up (very much uninvited) at the railway station to see her off, afterwards. I suspect only Leone would have attempted to play that scene for ROMANCE.
@ D. Cairns: I don’t know if “overlook” is necessarily the exactly correct word. (A phrase that comes to mind is “plow over!”) It’s true; Leone’s depiction of women in his films, even when ostensibly “positive” (e.g. Cardinale’s Jill in “West”) is so unfailingly tone-deaf that one dearly wishes, when one thinks about it, that the man had worked only with all-male casts, such as that of “Ice Station Zebra.” One is also pretty happy that the subject doesn’t come up that often; “America” really is the only one of his films in which he presents a, um, sweeping perspective on male/female relations, and that’s the film’s most disastrous aspect. Leone’s films have many virtues, but in a sense they belong in the science-fiction genre rather than the Western or Crime genres, as most of the “human beings” depicted therein might as well be extraterrestrial beings for all the sense they make as human beings. Good luck, on the other hand, trying to explain the multiple rapes committed by the “heroes” in “America” according to that rationale, or sweeping them under the rug with effusions about the complexity of the film’s structure. It’s a vexed issue. But I really don’t think one ought to define Leone by it. One can sit through “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” and experience little to no discomfort in this particular respect.
For me, the most moving moments in Leone are kind of, well, abstract: the stagecoach ride through Monument Valley with the swelling of Morricone’s score makes me blubber like an infant damn near every time.
@DCairns and our gracious & esteemed host: Once Upon a Time in America retains the distinction of being one of the only films I have ever walked out of in a movie theatre, and lo and behold, it was the same scene that caused the lovely Fiona to throw in the towel. The music, the camera, the whole thing was telling me to feel SORRY for Noodles because he just raped the love of his life. To me it wasn’t vexed, it was irredeemable.
I saw the whole thing later, in the uncut version, and hated it again, only at length.
No, as David says, I don’t find Leone good company, although OUATIA is the only film where he actually makes me sink down in the seat and start wondering where the hell I left my copy of Against Our Will. I acknowledge the truth of Glenn’s point about the characters’ lack of humanity, but then again I wonder why make a movie with human characters if you can’t get in touch with that surely necessary quality?
And I agree it’s no coincidence that GBU is the one film I like, as Glenn astutely points out. But the beauty in Leone is sparing and I have to fight my way through all the stuff that’s appalling me. I have no such trouble with John Ford, just to name the filmmaker Leone is obviously aiming for, among others, in OUATITW. I would, to be brutally honest, swap that stagecoach going through Monument Valley in the Leone film for one single frame of My Darling Clementine.
See, I don’t just dislike Leone, I really really really dislike Leone. I have more love for Preminger, ultimately. And yet Dennis and Glenn and I (and David) play nice. If I may philosophize a moment, I thnk it’s because none of us get personal, or read character judgments into aesthetic differences, or fear summary dismissal from the Valhalla of Nerds should we commit an unforgivable taste error…
Just ran the OUATIIAmerica discussion past my husband, who is very much in the pro-Leone camp, and mentioned the train scene and the attempt to play it for romance. He demurred, saying it’s really more melodrama. I said no, it’s attempted romance all right. Pause. Then, impishly: “Well, it IS the end of the relationship, after all.”
@ The Siren: Having had the privilege of spending social time with you and your spouse, I can testify that the husband does impish really well. And in a fashion that doesn’t even hint at the coy or unmanly. So your description of his observation carried some added value for me.
It occurred to me that you and other dislikers of Leone must be heartened in a sense that he really is sui generis—there are a lot of filmmakers out there influenced by some specific aspects of his work, but there’s nobody out there trying to do work on the scale, and with the tone, that he did. Nobody is able to make films that play like his, and I’m not sure the current economic model for filmmaking could support them—not that it really could when Leone was active, which is a not insubstantial reason his filmography is reasonably sparse. Even his most obvious and enthusiastic acolyte, Tarantino, goes for something rather different. And thank the gods (the “Movie Gods,” maybe?) that Tarantino’s overall perspective on women has grown more—what’s the word?—enlightened over the years.
Yes, one thing I do admire about Leone is his determination to stick to his way of filming the world. I would never accuse him of playing to the expectations of anyone but himself; he’s got real thematic and artistic consistency.
Don’t mean to butt-into a congenial confab of first-name buddies, but the discussion you’ve just been through of Leone’s infrequent women brings to mind a related personal sort-spot: reasons why I find Kubrick’s post-2001 films so repellent. The signature image is that gross thing he kept doing with marginal actresses, of having them walk slo-mo toward the camera with one thigh rolling massage-like across the other. The girl who torments poor Alex in ORANGE, the wraith in SHINING’s hotel, the sacrificial whore at EYES’ orgy– they all do it. If he could have gotten Berenson to affect that walk under period gowns, I suspect she would have been called-on to tread similarly. Details, sure, but consistent with the awful eyeball-rolling carnality he foisted on poor Sobieski in EYES, the sprint off-proscenium of the naked rape victim in ORANGE, the whole “Me so horny!” set-piece in JACKET. The sensibility of these films as a whole gives me the creeps but my cringing finds its icon in those images.
@ Jwarthen: Kubrick’s enthusiasm for certain aspects of the female anatomy is chronicled at some length in John Baxter’s biography. Actress Adrienne Corri was a friend of the Kubricks, and for whatever reason she lobbied hard for the part of Mrs. Alexander in “Clockwork,” and Kubrick half-kiddingly asked her “What if I don’t like the tits, Corri?” That he was thinking of liking the “tits” in a rape scene speaks of a certain, perhaps Bronx-cultivated, um, crudeness. By the same token, taking reflexive pity on the marginal actresses strikes me as a bit of, you’ll forgive the phrase, self-righteous projection. People get naked in front of photographers for all sorts of reasons, and for all we know the woman who torments Alex may have had the time of her life doing the film. (I can’t quite place her name exactly from the imdb credits else I would have cited it.) Also, I think it’s a trifle unfair to say that Kubrick would have foisted the hip-rolling move on Berenson in “Lyndon” if he thought he could get away with it. Point being he knew he couldn’t get away with it—it’s not appropriate to the material. And given that “Eyes” is all about dreams and fantasies, it’s entirely appropriate that the filmmaker incorporate—well, whaddya know!—elements of his own dreams and fantasies into the piece. So you find Kubrick’s fetishes repellent; well, it takes all kinds to make a world.
By the same token, someone should write an essay about how the collapse of the Production Code and such resulted in certain revered old-school filmmakers revealing aspects of themselves that maybe we’d rather not have seen. Kubrick’s coarse, some might argue banal carnal predilections; the rape scene in Hitchcock’s “Frenzy;” the anti-Lubitsch carousing of Preminger’s “Such Good Friends.” And so on.
The sheer gratuitousness of that shot early on in OUATIA, when a gangster hurriedly looking for Noodles suddenly stops and finds time simply to stuff a woman’s nipple into the barrel of his gun (in extreme close-up), actually bothers me more than any of the rapes.
To quote Samuel L. Jackson in Jackie Brown: Can’t you make your point just by hitting her?
This is interesting. I have to admit that I never really thought of Leone in this light.
I guess I always thought that a) everyone in Leone is so completely and relentlessly mythic, and b) all the stories are so centered on men and male identity – OUATIA in particular – and c) the men in OUATIA are such irredeemable creeps that it all seemed acceptable. But why should it be?
I’m remembering something now that’s always bothered me. I thought the rape in that movie was, and was intended to be, a sickening experience, and that the romanticism of him going to see her off was pathological. The rape of Tuesday Weld seemed like a weirder and more troubling choice, though, along with that gun barrel/nipple close-up. But strangest of all, to me at least: why make Elizabeth McGovern’s character relatively “ageless” in a movie so preoccupied with time and aging? The answer is obvious, I guess: that’s the way the men see her. I find it affecting, but it certainly does lock women down and seal them off within the movie, once and for all. One might argue that something similar happens with Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, but the time span is much shorter, and her revulsion and fear are front and center. She doesn’t conform to his vision of her. The women in the Leone film are molded according to the visions of the men.
I’ve never really worshipped at Leone’s altar. I like the movies, and I like the sensibility in them to a certain extent, but there’s always something a little bit limiting for me. Maybe it’s the “movieish” factor? Not sure. Anyway, thanks for a provocative line of thought. And GK, your point about the Production Code is well-taken. That stuff that Welles shot of Oja Kodar in the car in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is another case in point. A little more complex, though, since it’s from a film within a film and reflects the macho director’s attraction to his young male star.
Siren, I have to read your thoughts on the TCM Festival, but I went with my son and we had a blast. He’s 12, and he loved NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH!
Just as an aside in this awesome Sunday discussion: the actress in CLOCKWORK ORANGE who torments Alex is Virgnia Wetherell. She in fact discusses working with Kubrick on that very scene during the audio commentary for DEMONS OF THE MIND dvd which validates Glenn’s point of performer/performace (as if Mr. Kenny ever needs validating).
Years ago, on mentioning Leone in two diferent conversations with two diferent girl friends, the first thing both said was “have you seen ‘Once upon a time in America’? The one where De Niro rapes his girlfriend?”. And giddily, almost dreamily at that, or I got that impression. So reading now a woman who actually finds that aspect of the film troubling is… sort of comforting.
OUATITW is basically about regret, no? The abbreviated childhood, the death of friends, betrayals, lost time, etc. Hell, the entire film’s final scene is going back to a moment where Noodles is sinking into an opium haze so he can forget everything; it’s probably where he’d most like to be again. The idea that the train station scene is played for romance is ridiculous. It’s mournful and somber and Noodles is there to watch what was left of his soul leaving on that train. Deborah’s reaction to seeing him there him is cold and completely without emotion; I could understand a viewer’s disgust if she was crying or acknowledged him in some way.
As for Elizabeth McGovern not aging, this was clearly a stylistic choice for Leone, as they had no trouble with the make-up on De Niro, Woods, etc. And of course there’s Noodles quoting “…age can not wither her…” If you look closely during that dressing room scene you can see that she has been aged to an extent, and of course the cold cream covers most of that up, but in the follow-up scene where Noodles sees Deborah again at the party it’s more noticeable that she’s older.
@Lazarus, “mournful and somber” is another way of saying what I am saying – that Leone wants me to feel the end of love for poor Noodles. And your phrase “watch was left of his soul leaving on that train” also shows the intended romance of the scene–me, I would say 100% of Noodles’ soul left him back in the car the night before.
@Glenn and haice – Yes, Wetherell talks about that scene in the DEMONS OF THE MIND commentary, but as I remember it, she talks about it in relation to her nude scene in DEMONS…, which she wasn’t at all happy to do, and tossed off the CLOCKWORK nudity as “Well, it was Kubrick.” I don’t think she particularly relished doing either scene, but in the context of a Kubrick film she was more willing, whereas in DEMONS… she felt more pushed.
Lazarus – of course McGovern’s subtle aging is noticeable in her character’s last scene; of course her eternal “youthfulness” relative to De Niro and Woods is a “stylistic choice”; and I’m sure we all agree on what the film is “basically about.” I’ve always found it an extremely powerful experience myself, somewhat apart from Leone’s other films. But maybe The Siren has a point? Maybe it’s great and problematic at the same time? Like a lot of movies.
Glenn, I completely agree with your remark on Hitchcock’s and Preminger’s wretched libidinous excesses as a result of the collapse of the Production Code. Let me throw in Cukor in “Reach and Famous.” (Kubrick being of a younger generation, his own excesses seem less disturbing as the older men’s).
Off topic, could you explain the following cryptic words I stumbled over yesterday on another GK venue: “the looming presence of Jean-Pierre “the enforcer” Coursodon”? What is it exactly that I “enforce” – or try to? I haven’t a clue.
But I must say that being called a “looming presence” is sort of flattering, even if it wasn’t intended as such.
For a first post on this blog I should have been more grammatical. End of line three shouls read: “…less disturbing than the older men’s.”
Well, I give up… “should.”
Kent & Siren: Can’t the tragedy work both ways? Yes, this young woman was raped by a man she may have/could have loved and will be scarred forever because of it, without any implication by the supposedly misogynistic director that she was somehow “asking for it”. But is the only way for the film to morally work to have Noodles be a completely unsympathetic and unfeeling monster for the remainder of the story? Can we not also feel sorry for a kid that seemed relatively decent who winds up spending most of his adolescence and young adulthood raised by the penal system, so that he’s unable to express his feelings in a way other than his brutal display of force?
He is punished for his sin by the loss of everything: his friends, his city, his money, etc. He goes into exile and presumably has to recreate his life from the bottom up, and he certainly doesn’t return to New York looking like he’s happy, content, or anything other than regretful. There isn’t what one could really call closure at the end of the film, and all that can be said about Deborah’s feelings at their reunion is the sense that she pities him. It’s not like she appears to let bygones be bygones or wants to establish any kind of connection with him.
I don’t find this issue nearly as morally disturbing or offensive as the sex scene with Rod Steiger near the beginning of Duck, You Sucker.
Lazarus, you raise an interesting point. How does a film “work” morally? I’m stumped for a good answer myself. I think that art allows a lot of room for ambiguity on every level, and I am not an advocate of going around with a moral yardstick and measuring a movie or a novel for moral soundness. I can’t speak for The Siren, but I’m fairly certain she feels similarly. But sometimes, something troubling comes into view, something that can’t be comfortably filed under “artist’s personal vision.” I have a close friend who now finds himself unsettled by the scenes with the Indian wife in THE SEARCHERS. I find myself pondering the coziness in certain Hawks films, just wondering how well it all sits with me now as opposed to when I was 15. On the other hand, Glenn and I were talking the other day and we agreed that Alec Guinness’ performance as Godbole in A PASSAGE TO INDIA didn’t bother us at all, whereas it did when it came out. Nothing systematic or automatic about it. Just revisiting things, holding them up to the light. I guess I’d part company with The Siren at her rejection of the film BECAUSE of the aftermath of the rape. For me, this discussion just confirms a phantom feeling, raises a question or two.
But you know, not to get too lofty about it or anything, but aren’t all works of art provisional in some way? The older I get, the more comfortable I am with imperfection. Everything is an attempt, everything fails in some way. Especially if you look at it closely enough after having placed it on the highest level of your Pantheon shelf. We expect perfection in politics, with disastrous consequences, and I don’t think it works in art either.
Enough musing. I haven’t seen DUCK YOU SUCKER in ages. Can you refresh my memory?
It’s been a couple years, but there’s that intro on the train where all these wealthy people make fun of Juan as some uneducated bum, until he turns the tables and robs all of them. He then corners one of the women in an old building and pulls out his penis in front of her, and I don’t remember if they have sex or not but she’s molested by him in some way and it’s clear that she’s meant to be enjoying what’s happening despite her earlier disgust.
I agree with what you’ve said above, most of our best artists are through their work going to reveal aspects of their obsessions or psyches that many people aren’t going to be comfortable with. But I think this purity of expression is something I treasure for its candor (consciously or not) despite whatever unsettling residue is left. Acceptable artistic collateral damage, I guess.
@ Jean Pierre Coursodon: I am extremely flattered that you stopped by and dropped a few words.
The reference to you was a bit of a jest on my part in the Twittersphere. Jaime C., of the blog “Unexamined Essentials,” asked on Twitter why it seemed that Dave Kehr’s website was the only cinephile’s blog that wasn’t under regular siege by trolls such as the one who recently came to this blog and told me I was bald and would soon be working at a gas station and asked whether I had fantasies about Sasha Grey while I “fucked” my wife. A bad person of the sort that does not frequent Dave’s sight, for which we’re all happy. And my response on Twitter was that I thought Dave’s blog did not attract such trolls because they were discouraged by the Gordon Douglas fandom often articulated therein, and also because they were kept away by you, who I dubbed “The Enforcer” just to be (affectionately) funny. T’was all in good drollery.
Come on, people, all this is taking my focus away from writing my PIRANHA 3D review!
I would have chimed in here earlier, ladies and gentlemen, but as Eric Idle’s obsequious restaurant manager says over that infamous dirty fork, I’ve only just heard. I have to second the Siren’s sentiment that this acknowledgment, and this discussion, is the best kind of compliment. My sincere thanks to Glenn, and Mr. Carson, and Bill, and the Siren, of course, who makes talking about movies fun, even when disagreement is on the menu. I have twisted and turned for a month or so over my ability to creatively procrastinate in undertaking the transcription of the discussion between this wonderful person and I— with fully half the talk still left to go (I’m thinking Tuesday…?)—so I’m really grateful that, through no prescience of intent, it has managed to serve as a kind of corrective to the corrosive pro-wrestling atmosphere that has erupted in the comments here and elsewhere. (I would, with tongue fully in cheek, blame Edgar Wright here, but I don’t want to get anything all stirred up again, even in jest.)
GK says: “It’s true; Leone’s depiction of women in his films, even when ostensibly “positive” (e.g. Cardinale’s Jill in WEST) is so unfailingly tone-deaf that one dearly wishes, when one thinks about it, that the man had worked only with all-male cast… One is also pretty happy that the subject doesn’t come up that often…. But I really don’t think one ought to define Leone by it. One can sit through THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and experience little to no discomfort in this particular respect. For me, the most moving moments in Leone are kind of, well, abstract…”
Speaking as one whose tolerance for on-screen rape is just about ground zero—and one, perhaps significantly, who hasn’t seen ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA in any form for close to 20 years– I share the perception about the movie (not opium-shaded) that it leaves you with a definitely romanticized, painful, even benumbed feeling for the loss of the soul of these men, particularly Noodles who, I would agree, had lost his soul at just about the time Siren makes the call. But I’m not sure in that romanticizing the loss of the souls of corrupt men Leone insists that we should ignore or excuse the implications of their behavior. Of course the attitude of the filmmaker is central to how we receive the imagery, but it is not all there is—there is the conversation we have with the filmmaker in which we have to decide whether Leone is using the medium to suggest things to color our emotions in contradictory ways, or whether he’s just nuts. At the same time, I also agree that Leone can be as crude and insensitive a filmmaker as there ever has been—what more evidence does one need that of that nipple moment—we’re a long way from Jack Elam catching a fly in a the barrel of a gun here, yet such imagery is strong evidence that Leone is either unaware or carefree about the truth of the matter.
But I think I see Leone, in general, in much the same way Glenn does—emotions, characters, character types, archetypes, landscapes, music, are all abstracted to one degree or another. Boorish, criminal behavior, whether sexually oriented or not, is part of that landscape, and I say that not as a route toward excusing it when it comes down to the way the director sees Jill (Cardinale) but as a route toward gauging his attitude toward those elements in the movies that he is using, manipulating, in presenting his flawed but persistently fascinating vision of the world, in the Dollars trilogy and in OUATITW. Personally, I’d like to think I’d take a much more “sensitive” attitude toward Claudia Cardinale if I were Jason Robards. (I’d be much more of the laying-my–buckskin-jacket-over-mud-puddles, “Anything you want, ma’am” variety of Old West Male, much like her new husband, the one slaughtered by Henry Fonda near the beginning of the film, undoubtedly was.) However, given the creepy strain of equating rough sex with business as usual in the old West (particularly for an ex-prostitute) I will admit that Robards’s kind of aw-shucks appearance at the end is a bit of a head-scratcher and makes dealing with Leone’s feelings about women more problematic, even if I cannot define my own reactions to Leone by them.
I’d like to thank Glenn also for mentioning that shift brought on by the dissolution of the Production Code—every time I think about the Hitchcock of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN vs. the Hitchcock of FRENZY, I wonder what kinds of films we might have seen by some of the other master directors who didn’t live to see the freedoms that allowed for the rather frightening glimpse into the abyss Hitchcock gave us in that late period picture.
And thanks also to Kent for this: “The older I get, the more comfortable I am with imperfection.” I just saw LISZTOMANIA last night and loved it even more than ever before. How else to explain THAT reaction?
Lazarus, I have to say, I’m with you. Because if it’s a choice between someone who’s been motivated to make a film because they want to present “a positive image” of someone or something, and someone who NEEDS to communicate something and shoots first and asks questions later, I’ll take the latter every time.
Glenn, if you want to make sure that Jean-Pierre sticks around, you might want to assure him that it’s okay with you if he says nice things about John Huston, Billy Wilder and the Coen Brothers.
Dennis, I walked out of LIZSTOMANIA when I was 15. I’m sure I’d like it more now. I regret missing it at the newly reinvigorated Film Society show. Big hit.
Have you, or anyone else here, seen the footage Hitchcock shot for KALEIDOSCOPE?
No, but from all accounts I’d sure like to!
Kent, LISZTOMANIA was one of those big “gotta sees” that I never got around to until I was about 19 (1979). I liked it at the time, on the back of a certain Russell enthusiasm I was engaged in, but I can’t say it made a lot of sense to me.
It made a LOT more sense last night, and you can take from THAT whatever you must! 🙂 And Paul Nicholas struck me as the Tina Turner of that movie– he throws himself into this wildly absurd portrait of Wagner without hesitation, and Russell must have loved him. I always wonder why he never became a movie star.
“Aren’t all works of art provisional in some way?” is a lovely and wonderful question. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the movies we truly love or truly hate – as opposed to the mass of routine crud and mere stylistic curlicues – speak to us so privately that it’s a wonder we’ve evolved an only semi-spurious vocabulary to discuss them.
As for Leone, I admit that judging his work in moral terms at the “Does he approve of rape?” level never crossed my mind, and I don’t believe that means I’m callous. I just never saw anyone in his movies as a human being in the first place. My hunch is that he’s one of those filmmakers we love to argue about – pro or con – because the movies are pure artistic id, without intervention from ye olde superego. In other words, while I could argue that Noodles in OUATIA getting sentimental about the woman he’s raped is an absolutely devastating indictment of male narcissism, I’d never claim Leone thought of it that way. He just put the stuff out there and let us make of it what we would.
Perhaps it’s no less offensive in the simplistic portrayal of women (depends on how one looks at it/takes it), but I find the “Jules and Jim”-like romantic flashbacks of “Duck, You Sucker” to be Leone’s most complicated parsing of gender/gender politics, etc. Done in very broad strokes, of course, yet there’s something deeply mysterious and, hell I’ll say it, queer about the way Leone reveals the three-way love affair between James Coburn’s John Mallory, his IRA compadre and the woman they both love. That Rod Steiger’s Juan Miranda is then metaphysically brought into that coupling in the film’s final scene adds additional resonance. I really don’t know if I can adequately explain how that last passage perplexes me in the best way possible as to its motives/meanings.
“Duck, You Sucker” seems to me the missing, less-discussed link between “West” and “America” (one of its titles was, appropriately enough, “Once Upon a Time…The Revolution”). Both movies grew in my estimation upon watching them as a sequential trilogy.
Well, this is my first comment ever on this blog (I am a devoted reader) and I figure it’s because “Once Upon A Time In America” is my favorite movie of all time that it’s now I’m speaking up.
I agree with Lazarus about the scene after the rape scene. I’ve seen the film 5 times or so, and I certainly don’t think it’s meant to be “romantic”. It’s tragic (and yes, a rapist can be a tragic figure, as any human being can be). But, even if it were romantic, you have to realize that the film IS from Noodles’ point of view, and how he views himself. He doesn’t see himself as evil, nobody does. It’s approaching the film the wrong way, I think, to expect objectivity from a film that is so inherently subjective, right up to it’s (maybe) opium dream of the future (equipped with the satire of modern America turning out pretty much EXACTLY how a 1930’s gangster envisions it).
The whole film is about, like what other Leone’s films are about, life never being able to live up to the mythology we build (and subtextually, how this is tied to cinema). When Noodles comes out of jail, America has changed forever. He’s now in a modern America where his best friend and the love of his life are moving up in the world and becoming capitalists basically, and all he wants is for it be like what it used to be. When Deborah doesn’t live up to the myth he creates, he physically abuses her in a sickening fashion that is the culmination of the rage that’s been slowly building inside him. It’s the pivotal scene of the movie, in the same way the Billy Batts scene in Goodfellas is, and it must be shown for what it is.
But that gets me to another thing that interests me, which is the depiction of physical/sexual violence towards women in cinema, and people’s reaction to it. I understand why it’s so sensitive to so many people, but frankly, whenever I hear people raving about it (especially men, though not in this thread, of course), I can only think that it’s, in a weird roundabout way, mildly sexist. Women aren’t children, and I don’t see why rape should get some special treatment in the same film that features the character of Fat Moe getting brutally beaten to the point of his eyeball nearly popping out of his skull, or a scene where James Woods blows a man’s face off. Violence is violence, and dare I say it, I think that showing it all as it is without sentimentality or exception is rather moral.
The Tuesday Weld “rape” scene isn’t actually a forcible rape scene in the same vein as the Deborah one is. She’s in on the robbery, as established with the Burt Young scene literally before the scene in question, and there’s no exposition in the scene; it’s played out purely in physical gestures and facial cues. She wants to make it “look like a rape”. That, and she wants to get on the gangsters’ good sides, which ties back to the themes of ambition and capitalism. She uses her sexuality to move up in the world, tired of her bank clerk job, which I don’t think is some sort of sexist portrayal, because I don’t think she’s all that different than Max, really. They both use what they have, whether it be brutality or sex (speaking of which, I think Weld is extraordinary in the film and I don’t she ever got enough credit for her performance).
Moreover, a lot of the unmitigated masculinity in the film is really used as subject for critique, since the movie is, amongst other things, a deconstruction of the gangster genre (of which misogyny has a long history). If you don’t see the scene where Max forces Weld to leave his office by screaming at her until she finally obliges, just to impress his buddies, as satire, I just don’t what to say to you.
Which is, of course, not to say Leone is a feminist, because he ain’t. But does he have to be? To me, great art is about honesty and aesthetic value. I’d rather have a film that you can feel is truthful to the artist’s perspective that I find morally problematic than a film that’s politically and ethically “correct” that I find utterly fraudulent, like a good number of films that are up for Oscars every year. You learn more about people and the world around you from the honest film.
I apologize truly for the quite long post, but it’s a film I feel awfully strongly about. It’s the most “complete” film I’ve ever seen. It has the narrative freedom of a novel, but it’s text is purely cinematic, and based in mise-en-scene. I knew as soon as I saw it that it was the best movie I’ve ever seen, though it took me several viewings to really crack it, and it still has mysteries that have yet to be solved for me, and I hope they never will.
Anyway, I’m just glad people are talking about it seriously. It doesn’t seem to get a lot of talk compared to even something like “A Fistful Of Dollars”. Terrific blog and I enjoy all you do here. Keep it up.
@ Hollis Lime: Damn, that is an interesting, and tough, analysis, and it makes me want to rewatch “America” RIGHT NOW. Which of course I won’t do on this damn 13-inch set that’s my backup while I’m waiting for the plasma to get fixed. A lot to chew on there. Thank you.
Oh, that scene in Duck You Sucker is gross and vile too.
I think the problem in OUATIAmerica is twofold: it may be possible to preserve some fragment of sympathy for DeNiro’s character, but not if the filmmaker asks for it explicitly with sad music and that Italian train station and air of, yes, romance… and not if the character is so insensitive as to show his stupid face at the station! Because for that to work both he and us would have to be completely indifferent to the heroine’s emotions. Which means he doesn’t really understand what he’s done, can never process it in a dramatically meaningful way, and so maybe we didn’t need to see it anyway?
I think the film is staggering on many levels, and flawed in many others. I find Peckinpah’s misogyny more “rewarding” because I think we learn more about the filmmaker from it. Somehow Leone’s seems more unexamined and therefore unproductive. It’s just a blot on the films, which I otherwise enjoy and think rank very high on the list of cinematic achievements in self-conscious genre film-making.
Another filmmaker who showed a less appealing side once the Production Code was lifted was, to me, Joe Mankiewicz with There Was A Crooked Man. I have a hard time seeing that movie as coming from the same guy who made Letter to Three Wives.
I don’t think the filmmaker who made “Ride The High Country”, which features a story about a young woman and how she can’t fit into an old west where her father and the man she marries do nothing but mistreat her, or “Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia”, which is about how men degrade women and devalue their morals, could ever be a misogynist.
@ Hollis: Or, for that matter, the criminally misinterpreted “Straw Dogs,” which doesn’t favor the rapists of Susan George’s character but rather explicitly asks the viewer to identify with her anguish in a jarring flash-frame flashback to the act in a subsequent scene in the film. As I noted elsewhere, though, Peckinpah didn’t do himself too many favors in his interviews, but if there was ever a trust-the-tale, not-the-teller guy, Sam was that man. The misogyny rap against Peckinpah, of course, comes in large part from the boisterous whorehouse scenes in some of his pictures, and the fact that the director himself liked to bluster about his predilections in this area. And there’s also the fact that, like so many great modern artists, he refused to sanctify any of his characters, male or female, and felt quite at liberty to depict them in any number of extreme modes of behavior. I am moved by a great many of Peckinpah’s women; Stella Stevens’ Hildy in “Cable Hogue” and Katy Jurado’s wife of Sheriff Baker in “Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid” in particular. One of the dumbest things I ever did was forget to ask Olivia de Havilland about working with Peckinpah on the splendid teleplay of Katherine Ann Porter’s “Noon Wine.” And then…Ida Lupino in “Junior Bonner?” Maureen O’Hara in “Deadly Companions? ” Don’t even get me started!
@ Kent: Oh, I quite enjoy reading nice things about the Coens. And Wilder. And even Huston, within limits. 😉
Dennis, regarding Paul Nicholas, I have a feeling that you’re too young to have even heard of his 1977 top 40 disco hit “Heaven On the 7th Floor.” Oy… And isn’t Wagner dressed in an SS uniform and goose-stepping in LISZTOMANIA? Well, I’ll give it another try…he said, with a sigh.
Tom, “speaking privately” – yeah. I get wary of language that places films in some kind of socio-political Olympics, rating them them for gold, silver or bronze in terms that have nothing to do with what they are, how they move and pulse and engage. The kind of language I used to use, I guess – at least I wasn’t alone. True of music too, right?
Glenn – “even Huston?” “…within limits?” “..:-)?”
God bless you, Mr. Jones, for your presumption of my youngish age. In reality, I just turned 50 this past Wednesday and am waaaaaay old enough to remember “Heaven On The 7th Floor,” which haunted my days as a freshman in college. Nicholas was in the Robert Stigwood/RSO stable, as I recall, which may explain his presence in TOMMY. That was also the label that released the aforementioned Top 40 hit. I do remember him also for his role in the Mia Farrow thriller SEE NO EVIL.
Yes, Russell has Wagner resurrected after his death as a kind of Frankenstein monster crossed with Hitler who marches through a cobblestone village murdering Jews with an automatic weapon dressed up as an electric guitar (or is it the other way around?) But that’s after we’ve already seen him dressed in a Superman cape and tights singing a plaintive ballad about the virtues of restoring Teutonic godhead, and after we’ve seen him sink his vampire fangs into Liszt’s neck in an attempt to win the composer over to his methods of musical revolution. History it ain’t, at least in any kind of literal sense!
And if I may, “speaking privately”– most definitely true of music too, I would think.
With Once Upon a Time in America, the train scene didn’t come in a vacuum; it came well after the Tuesday Weld scene, which also repelled me, and the nipple-in-the-gun-barrel scene, and I can’t remember whether it came before or after but the scene where Weld picks a gangster out of a lineup after getting them all to drop their trousers also had me rubbing my temples. So it wasn’t so much moral dudgeon, as Kent says, although I won’t deny that was part of it; it was also this fetid atmosphere not just of disrespect for women, but the attempts to wring both laughter and pathos from it.
I spend most of my time watching movies from an era that can dish out oh-jesus-god-that’s-bad moments quite, quite often. Before we get all mushy about the Production Code, let me interject that the Code never prevented, say, Preston Sturges from putting some knees-knocking eye-rolling ghastly black stereotype into a comic scene. Ultimately it is about whether the aesthetic and thematic rewards outweigh whatever qualms you may have about what the director is showing you of his worldview. I get plenty out of Sturges that outweighs, say, Snowflake. I don’t get much from Leone. I don’t find his movies all that beautiful (in fact, a good many shots in his Westerns strike me as deliberately ugly) and his characters move me not at all, despite what I see as operatic attempts to sentimentalize them.
All that said, I am enjoying the hell out of the defenses here, Lazarus, Kent and especially Hollis Lime. Holy heck, Mr. (Ms?) Lime, when you de-lurk you do it in style. I almost kind of want to revisit the Leone now. Not enough to actually do it, but that was a superb post.
One more thing about this Code discussion aspect–I hope we aren’t attributing late-work infelicities entirely or even primarily to the newfound post-Code freedom. I’d argue that what we see in Frenzy (for example) is also the souring of attitudes and sympathies that often comes with the onset of curmudgeonly old age.
Oh, and Dennis, let me reiterate from my old Siren post that I do enjoy Robards in OUATITW very much, despite his head-scratching final appearance, as you so aptly put it.
My feeling with Peckinpah is that yes, of course he made scenes and entire films that flatly contradict his reputation as misogynist. But Peckinpah was a walking contradiction, and his sympathetic, at times sentimental portrayal of Stella Stevens does not wholly cancel out his abhorrent treatment of Sally Struthers. And that’s just on “s”.
So I’d agree that “misogynist” shouldn’t be used as an argument-finishing blanket statement with him: but I think “marked misogynist tendencies” would be fair comment. Part of the reason I think he’s interesting is the complexity of his tortured relations with women, and indeed men, as evidenced in his work. He’s grappling with something, and it isn’t always pretty. Leone isn’t so much grappling, I feel. Maybe bear-hugging.
@ Kent: Another attempt at humor, as they say. What can I tell you, I’m re-finding my footing here…
Reading Hollis Lime’s comments again, I see a very good evocation of what’s so special about the film. I know it much better than any other Leone, and I’ve always found it shattering. The core idea of “life never living up to the mythology we build” is powerfully conveyed throughout – in the incredible scene where the kid eats the pastry on the staircase, for instance – and I do agree that the tone is extremely layered and complicated and never merely romantic or celebratory. But I don’t think that the reservations raised by The Siren and D. Cairns and others can be argued down on those terms. It’s true, there is a lot of violence against men in the movie as well. But then, as James Brown said, it’s a man’s world, and in Leone’s case it would still be something without a woman or a girl. I just don’t think that the women in the movie have inner lives (not true of Peckinpah). I’m sure someone can mount a spirited argument about no one in the movie having an inner life, how they’re all equivalent to the figures in the Chinese shadowplay, playthings of capitalism, etc. But I don’t have a problem with finding it shattering AND imperfect. And, like all of Leone’s movies, a little bit on the fussy side.
Interestingly enough, I read an interview with Leone where Noël Simsolo asked him whether his favorite young American director was Coppola or Bogdanovich, or whoever else. His answer: John Cassavetes.
Dennis, I see that Paul Nicholas has one of those strangely long Wikipedia entries that looks like it was submitted by a publicist (“In the summer of 2006, he was a celebrity showjumper in the BBC’s Sport Relief event Only Fools on Horses…”). He is now in a South African touring production of GREASE. Book your tickets now.
The Siren raises a provocative point about FRENZY. Toward whom did Hitchcock’s attitudes and sympathies sour? Women? A possible clue. Michel Subor told me that he was invited to Hitchcock’s house for Sunday dinner when he was in TOPAZ. Everyone had to come smartly attired. When the guests arrived, Hitchcock took them on a tour of the house. “This is the kitchen…this is the living room…this is the den…” Then he opened a door to reveal Mrs. Hitchcock sitting on the edge of a bed in her nightgown. “This is the bedroom,” he said as he closed the door, “where nothing ever happens.”
Glenn, I find that certain Huston films mean more and more to me as the years pass. THE MISFITS, which we just took another look at, is NOT one of those films. But that’s an Arthur Miller problem, I think.
Hollis Lime, that’s an interesting point about reaction to sexual violence towards women in the movies (among many others in your wonderful post). I think some of it could be explained by the fact that audiences are expected to be horrified, rather than titillated, by a man getting his face beaten in or shot off, whereas rape in the movies has often been used as the expression of stormy romance or simply a way to get the heroine’s clothes off. I remember being enraged, when I was little, by what seemed to be an unspoken assumption that regardless of her feelings a nice girl wouldn’t, so making her (or tricking her into it, in early 60’s sex comedies) was really only the gentlemanly thing to do.
For me the only two genuinely horrifying movie rapes, without a hint either of romanticism or cheesecake, are the flashback in Scorsese’s WHO’S THAT KNOCKING and the Noodles-Deborah scene in OUaTIA.
The disturbing male-female thing for me in OUaTIA (which I loved in both versions) isn’t so much the casual violence (pistol-nipple frottage is mild compared to the carnage of the scenes sandwiching it) or the instant sexual compliance, but the assumption that women find it a turn-on. Miss Nipple seems aroused; all the whores love their work; etc. But that could very well be interpreted as Noodles’ worldview, with only Deborah breaking through.
I’d go a little further with the Weld character in OUaTIA. Her “rape” during the robbery isn’t a rape at all, it’s a staged fantasy on a Neronian scale (so a few men get beaten, robbed or killed – she’s gotten her jollies). She’s the one who sets up the robbery, it’s established, and you’re wondering what’s in it for her – then you see her eyes as she lets the gang in. The greatest nympho eyes since Loretta Young in MIDNIGHT MARY. She’s fluttering around, panting, “Make it look real,” while the boys are trying to rob the joint around her (Noodles even mutters “Hey lady, straighten up and fly right,” if I’m not mistaken). The wonderful running joke is that she treats these demonstrably murderous hoods like bachelorette party strippers with tearaway pinstripe G‑strings.
“Then he opened a door to reveal Mrs. Hitchcock sitting on the edge of a bed in her nightgown. “This is the bedroom,” he said as he closed the door, “where nothing ever happens”.”
But see, the implicitly-explicit subject matter aside, that seems to me to be exactly the same Hitchcock sense of humor he had as a much younger man. We also see it in his trailers, the Annie Ondra sound test, his interviews and correspondence, and the opening segments to his eponymous TV shows. And it’s also consistent with things long known about his taste for practical jokes.
I can think of two occasions in my own life when someone made more-or-less that exact joke to me. One was when I was crashing on an out-of-town friend’s couch at 2am. We had just gone to a topless bar after he had a quarrel with his live-in girlfriend. He gave me pillows and a blanket and as he was retiring to their bedroom, he said “if you need anything else, don’t hesitate to knock. You won’t be interrupting anything.”
Here’s the Anny (CQ) Ondra sound test I was referring to.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6SMOSXa7A
Gee, and I thought I’d found the smoking gun. I guess it’s back to the drawing board in my search for ultimate proof of Hitchcock’s misogyny. I know it’s out there. If I could just find the key…
Actually Kent, a younger friend of mine watched THE LODGER for the first time at the weekend and we were IM’ing each other about it. He was amazed by how “Hitchcock‑y’ it seemed despite its being made as early as 1927. I remembered the scene of all the blondes’ photos on the wall, and popped him back “you think this film proves he had an unhealthy obsession with blondes before ever meeting Grace Kelly et al” (I’d forgotten about Margaret Lockwood)
A few years ago a bunch of us wrote up a pile of Peckinpah movies for The High Hat, and probably the most useful contribution was Dana Knowles’ long but crunchy notes about Straw Dogs’ sexual politics:
http://thehighhat.com/Nitrate/002/straw_dogs.html
Kent, Hitchcock loved to tell people that he never had sex (he made it perfectly clear to Truffaut among others). It’s arguably a better option than claiming you have sex when you don’t. It was Hitch’s sly way of avoiding the embarrassment of being suspected of being sexually inactive by humorously announcing it. I don’t think it is the key to his misogyny though, but there are plenty of keys in his films, so some of them at least might provide “the ultimate proof.”
I sometimes wonder if he masturbated and if so what kind of fantasies he had. That might provide a key…
Glenn, thanks for the clarification! Maybe trolls haven’t found their way to Dave’s blog yet. Recently there was a lot of posting about Kim Novak, a so-called “Goddess of love” the mere mention of whom seems to cause most posters to swoon or salivate (or both). But even those highfalutin cinephilic discussions have failed to attract any trolls. I’ll keep a vigilant watch though.
Just to be absolutely clear, I offered the story only as a related anecdote. I’m really not searching for evidence of Alfred Hitchcock’s misogyny. And if I were, I don’t think I’d be prepared to go to the lengths (or depths) suggested by Jean-Pierre in the final sentence of his 6:22 post.
Jean-Pierre, please note that Glenn himself is an unqualified Novakian. I myself am on the fence. Although I certainly can’t agree with that poseur William Goldman, who wrote that VERTIGO couldn’t possibly be a good movie because Kim Novak was in it.
I do worry about lowering the tone after expressing my gratitude for SCR once again becoming a haven of cinephilia, but the image of Hitchcock masturbating is either too disturbing for words or the definition of coals to Newcastle. As for Peckinpah, what links his sympathetic and crude views of women is pretty simple: they’re both effed up beyond belief. The point is who’s gazing, not the object(s) of the gaze. And that’s a guy who loves his movies talking, for better or worse.
Re: Hitch and the Hithcock bedroom. It’s been a VERY long time since I read the John Russell Taylor authorized biography, but as I recall it very bluntly stated that the Hitchcock marriage had been an entirely chaste affair since the birth of Pat Hitchcock in 1928. I found that to be a kind of strange revelation for an authorized bio – especially since it was mentioned on the book jacket copy, if I remember right.
1. Robert Aldrich
2. Abel Gance
3. Montgomery Tully
Alternates to proposed study above.