In A Lonely Place (the Nicholas Ray-directed film not the Joy Division song)

the lead out of they live by night was talking after the screening about catching one of his later films, made in china with some enormous ensemble cast, and not being able to follow it. seeing his early stuff working in pretty tight parameters was nice

55 Days at Peking was really a producer's film, it was sold with just a premise and a star, Charlton Heston, but no story or script. Ray was more of a hired hand and at that point was not in good shape- he may have had the monkey on his back, Ava Gardner wore him out with her own dipsomaniac diva behavior- so much so that he ended up suffering a heart attack and being taken off the picture. All of which I just learned by looking at my copy of Lee Server's Ava Gardner bio Love Is Nothing, which also tells an amazing story of how she got the part in the first place, which I won't put here. I highly recommend any book with Lee Server's name on the cover, especially his Robert Mitchum bio called Baby, I Don't Care and the source book The Big Book Of Noir that he co-edited.

Oh, Lee Server is the fucking man. That Mitchum bio is compulsively readable even if you didn't care about the dude (I do, obv.) I've been tracking some of Server's books down, he wrote a really interesting take on asian genre cinema that works as a good time capsule now (speculation on whether annexation will destroy the Hong Kong film industry, Korean described in pre-boom terms) and is laudable for giving time to a lot of the less well known countries (Taiwan, Philippines.)

Bitter Victory has one of Richard Burton's best performances and is unremittingly bleak.

Love this thread and the film in question, obv.

So much else that I haven't seen tho'.

It's a very good film. Everything else I've seen by Ray seems to have dated far less well. Is this just me?

What's "dated"? I think Johnny Guitar is timeless, ditto Bitter Victory.

The acting. I'm thinking of "They Live By night" and "On Dangerous Ground". It's been years since I've seen them though.

And call me a reactionary philistine, but Johnny Guitar has always struck me as laughably bad.

You may just be a trendy, ahistorical philistine.

Didn't make it to Bitter Victory and heard a friend of a friend badmouth it, but also heard others say good things about it. Still would like to see.

Ahistorical? Do you mean to say that I must accept the creakiness of certain old films as part of the deal or...? I'd genuinely like to know what people think is good about JG. The only person of note I've heard speak of its astonishing awfulness is the very unhip Michael Winner, which doubtless fortifies you cool kids in your sense of artistic superiority. ;-)

I had to get over the boring performance of Curt Jurgens to enjoy Bitter Victory.

you must ENTER INTO THE SPIRIT of the aesthetic goals and cultural environment of a classic-era film, yes. Or be a hipster yutz at the Film Forum.

That "tell me you love me" JG dialogue is even great w/out the images, in JLG par JLG.

But with JG, it isn't just a question of ropey acting or whatever, the campy woodenness is just so all-consuming.

I'm also not much of a Johnny Guitar fan, honestly, but it's not enough to get me voted off the island.

I would not want to see Elia Kazan's Johnny Guitar.

btw, TCM has Gloria Grahame day on Thursday, with IaLP in primetime.

People like Johnny Guitar for the tension created between the tone of the screenplay and its direction; they sense a subtle, pleasurable irony in the dissonance between the two. It's not awful so much as high kitsch, kitsch as high art. It also stands on mythopoetic strength, and is interesting as a feminist film.

IMDB says the guy who wrote the script treatment or "adaptation" for In a Lonely Place won the Oscar for best screenplay for Patton.

Philip Yordan, the guy with primary credit for Johnny Guitar, wrote some interesting pictures, but mostly westerns I haven't heard of.

Also the blatant Freudian symbolism.

xpost

One era's realism (i.e. the ever-present) is another's all-consuming campy woodenness (p.s. I'd avoid Last Year at Marienbad like the plague if I were you). Although Mercedes McCambridge's Emma is about as wooden as well-cooked spaghetti.

Also, all-consuming camp (with or w/o wood) has saved my life on numberless occasions so I don't understand it as a pejorative.

I would not want to see Elia Kazan's Johnny Guitar.

The OTMness of this statement just took out Paris. Phone lines across France are down so do not attempt to call.

xpost yes, def.

all-consuming camp (with or w/o wood)

http://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/thumbs/7/76/Aged%20in%20Wood-Margo%20Channing.bmp/100x100px-LS-Aged%20in%20Wood-Margo%20Channing.bmp

Click to add to your cart.

Philip Yordan, the guy with primary credit for Johnny Guitar, wrote some interesting pictures, but mostly westerns I haven't heard of.

And unwittingly contributed to the grade-Z omnibus film Night Train to Terror which just might be the most shameless and preposterous concoction in English-speaking cinema history. HIGHLY recommended.

Campy wood has doubtless taken us all back from the brink many times, gazing suicidally into our local river, but the campy damp wood in JG does not seem intentional, and even if it is, it isn't realised in any way as to satisfy this viewer. And as for "interesting as a feminist film", bah! I mean, if a film is badly acted, has a dreadful script, who really cares if Joan Crawford is holding a gun - i.e. phallic symbol - in such a way as to imply feminist subversion of patriarchal society? That's the kind of thing for ponderous English Department babblers to get their teeth stuck into, not real people. Nevertheless, I'll try and dig out my old video of it, though I may have taped over it.

Your false dicthomies won't help matters.

?

yeah really. There's such a dense thicket of rong in that freedom forest that it'll take until Monday morning at the earliest to get back out of it. Wire me, though, if Joan Crawford in Della is showing sometime soon.

You are an enemy of Freedom.

i was pretty disappointed by 'johnny guitar' when i finally saw it.

not that big on this one either, to be honest. 'rebel' is still my favorite ray film.

I enjoy Rebel cause Natalie Wood is pretty - the film itself doesn't do much for me.

IMDB says that at on Johnny Guitar Yordan was a front for Ben Maddow, apparently . He did work on those final made-in-Spain Nick Ray Samuel Bronston productions mentioned above, 55 Days In Peking and King Of Kings. Apparently at one point on Peking they brought in Robert Hamer to script doctor, but he was such a wasted away death's doorstep alcoholic wreck that they sent him back to London after one day!

The OTMness of this statement just took out Paris. Phone lines across France are down so do not attempt to call.

Dancin' Kid: I didn't get your name stranger.
Johnny: Guitar. Johnny Guitar.
Dancin' Kid: You call that a name?
Johnny: Care to try and change it? .

Past Friday would have been NR's ninety-eighth birthday.

I enjoy Rebel cause Natalie Wood is pretty - the film itself doesn't do much for me.

― Freedom, Sunday, August 9, 2009 6:35 PM

^ has it really come to this?

The smear campaign that gets under way all because I don't like Johnny Bloody Guitar! ;-)

Quite.

As for The Lusty Men, Arthur Kennedy was kind of annoying, I prefer his brother Edgar, as was Susan Hayward- at the screening Ray's daughter Nicca said Mitchum called her "The Old Gray Mare" and would eat garlic before their scenes together, but Mitchum, the rodeo footage of Lee Garmes and team and character actor Arthur Hunnicutt as the broken-boned tall-tale-telling rodeo veteran all make it worth seeing.

Here is link to article on NR I just found: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2005/03/rebel200503

xpost

Feminist status of Johnny Guitar is not of interest only to English professors and film journal contributors. Aren't the situations of women in movies of the past and present ever conspicuous to you? People use ideas ripped out of college courses because they help them understand a movie and figure out how to talk about their reaction to it, not because they necessarily want to overinflate the value of a piece of trash.

Of course, of course. I'm just saying making a claim for its goodness on that basis is wrong.

Tonight I found a flyer in the Jefferson Market branch of the NYPL for an imminent Oned-Eyed Auteurs festival at the Anthology. You can read about it here: http://www.tcm.com/movienews/index.jsp?cid=251309

Nicca Ray said she is writing a book about her dad. But I think she is going to beaten to publication by Orson Welles's daughter.

I knew about that fest -- have never seen Flying Leathernecks.

Just saw IALP thanks to this thread - amazing, thanks for that. Bitter Victory next.

Finally saw On Dangerous Ground tonight. Boy, is Robert Ryan wound tight here. And the kid villain is right purty.

this movie---in a lonely place----is soon to be remade with gerard butler and january jones.

wayne wang directing.

lol @ "Freedom" itt

i love On Dangerous Ground

One of my fave movies to watch for wallowing in romantic angst.

Just saw this film this evening at the BFI.

Really can't understand the love for this film: it's slow, clunky and stilted. And the worst problem is that Bogart/Dixon Steele is just such a horrible character there's no interest in watching him. If it was a more nuanced performance where he shows different sides to his character it might be different, but as it is he's just a violent bore.

I thought so the first time I watched it: a B-movie setup.

Then I watched the Criterion edition a couple weeks ago.

squeeze harder

Wow, I saw it at the BFI yesterday too, I thought it was really wonderful, didn't really know much about it in advance, only knew the stars and director and a vague sense that Graham and Ray were breaking up when it was filmed. She's fabulous in it and given more to do than usual, what a waste to always serve her up as the same conniving cheap dame. There was real charm in their relationship even as you knew that he was a serial abuser. I liked their outfits, her bomber jackets and drop earrings especially.

I thought there were lots of really excellent things about it. The offhand reveal of the murder and the remoteness of the investigation from the workings of the plot, how the film itself was situated in the margins of some other larger drama. Laurel's view of the action, her ability to know what happened seems to approximate our own so that the architecture of their apartment complex seems like the framing of the film itself, the view of her standing on her balcony from between the slats of the venetian blind, the vignetted scenes of domestic bliss that Dix's agent sees when he's checking in on the progress of the screenplay, the increasingly tangled criss cross views of the courtyard, in and out of doors and windows,and her and our gradually unravelling certainty about what happened to Mildred Atkinson, so that the paranoia of the noir genre seems to stand in for some general unease about what can be contained in an image and what subterranean violence frames it.