Bad Movies from Good Novels

 

For some reason I was thinking a day or so ago about bad movies made from good novels. It certainly is possible to make a really good movie based on a good novel. John Huston’s Maltese Falcon shows that. However, I think it is difficult because of the differences between the two forms, and very few of the very good movies I have seen are based on novels, good or otherwise.

On the other hand, there are plenty of bad ones. I do not know of any movie version of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn that I could stomach watching. The movie version of the Guns of Navarone is bad in an unpleasant way. The novel is a straightforward adventure story of daring and heroism in World War II. The screenwriter Carl Foreman was a (former?) communist who according to reports wanted to turn the story into an anti-war one. If that had been done in an upfront way, keeping the title and the names of some of the characters but telling a different story (in the way the Dean Martin Matt Helm movies turned grim, tough novels into silly comedies), the result probably would have been a bad movie, but not such a dishonest one. Instead there was a shady attempt to have it both ways – keeping enough of the novel’s daring events to get an audience while preaching a minor league Bridge on the River Kwai counterpoint on the futility of war.

The most disappointing  one I know about is the movie version of The Fountainhead. Almost everything about it is bad, starting with the cast. Gary Cooper was badly miscast as Howard Roark, and gave a wooden and unconvincing performance, particularly in his droning speech in the courtroom. Patricia Neal later became a fine actress, bur her Dominique Francon got very little of the character. The performance of the actor playing Toohey was bad enough to leave a person wondering if the film was going to end with him tying Dominique to the railroad tracks. Among the main characters, only Raymond Massey as Wynand was adequate. Ayn Rand’s script as shot (and the usual story is that it was shot as she wrote it) is stilted and uncinematic. Vidor’s direction captured nothing of the strength, fire, and intensity of the book, and some of the scenes are amateurishly bad. Even the architectural drawings and sets are lame.

It is too bad. It might  have been a possible to make good movie. A person can imagine what could have been done with, say, Orson Welles directing and playing Roark, Barbara Stanwyck as Dominique, Clifton Webb as Toohey, and some cinematic freedom from the rigidity of Rand’s script. But that is just pointless wishful thinking. Maybe someday somebody good will give it another try.

Watching Grande Illusion

 

This week Debby and I watched Renoir’s Grande Illusion for the first time in a good while. It was a good as I remembered. It is the best war movie I have ever seen and one of the best of any sort. Its fine performances, superb direction, and most of all wonderful humanity were just as I remembered. So was the sense of loss I felt not only for the characters but also for a splendid civilization that that war wounded grievously (and the next one may turn out to have killed). It was not only the end of the Rauffensteins and Boeldieus.  

State of the Union Night

 

We didn’t watch the state of the union speech Tuesday. Instead we watched The Dark Horse, a 1932 comedy staring Warren William, Bette Davis, and Guy Kibbee. It is my favorite movie about politics, and it was particularly appropriate on that night. The movie begins in a deadlocked political convention where a tricky maneuver by one faction backfires and leads to the nomination of an unknown and randomly selected dimwitted ignoramus (played by Kibbee) as his party’s candidate for governor. The party’s secretary (played by Davis) persuades its desperate leaders to hire a slick and shifty political consultant (played by William) to run the campaign and try to get the nitwit elected. 

The film depicts William’s efforts to put over the candidacy of the “dumbest human being I ever saw.” Highlights include Kibbee being trained to answer every question with an attempt at a thoughtful expression and a “yes, and then again no” and a debate in which both candidates planned identical opening remarks plagiarizing the same statement of Lincoln’s. William does his dishonest work so well - telling wets and dries, Republicans and Democrats that his man is fully on their side, getting Kibbee made an honorary Indian chief, staging a photo op of Kibbee as a great fisherman, and so on – that Kibbee becomes favored to win. However Kibbee had become  involved with William’s predatory ex-wife who connives with operatives of Kibbee’s opponent to entrap him in a “love nest” right before election day. William saves the day at some cost to himself and temporarily to his relationship with Davis, and Kibbee is elected in a landslide. The movie ends with Kibbee headed for the governor’s mansion and William and Davis off to Nevada to do it again for some other candidate. It is good, cynical, perceptive fun. Some people might say its premise is unrealistic or even outrageous. That would be a mistake in a country that has elected Donald Trump and Joe Biden back to back.

Funny Movies

 

Puritanism -The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

- H. L. Mencken

 

One hears all the time that Blazing Saddles (or Airplane or Animal House or Caddyshack or Young Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove or Smokey and the Bandit or many others) could not be made today. It is probably true. We are in a prudish and puritanical time. It is interesting to remember that such films could not have been made much earlier than they were either.

Restrictions come in various forms – including direct government censorship (which is supposed to be illegal in this country), pressure from self-proclaimed defenders of public morality, and so-called self regulation  done as appeasement. Before the 1960s movie makers faced all three. State and local governments prohibited the showing of films on forbidden topics. The Catholic legion of decency and other pressure groups pushed filmmakers to avoid themes and content they considered immoral. The movie industry’s  trade association enforced  the Motion Picture Production Code which specified what was allowed and what was forbidden in movies. These days there are no production code and no censorship from American governments, but the pressure from the defenders of morality is pervasive and intense. Feminist, race hustling, LBGTQ, green, multicultural, “progressive”, and various other woke puritans are on full alert in social and other media to try to make sure that no one, anywhere in the movies is having any good, raucous, politically incorrect fun. They are as dogmatic and seem to be just about as successful with the movie industry as the other legionnaires of decency were in the old days.

Those of us who like that sort of fun can be glad there was a long period between one bunch of prudes losing power and another one gaining it. We can also be glad that for now at least, funny films from those days are still available. However it might be a good idea not to count on that remaining true. Streaming services seem like good targets for pressure to stop offering content someone deems inappropriate. I’d recommend a person going ahead and get copies of the stuff he likes  on his own media in his physical possession just in case.  The forces of decency are on the march.

It is an interesting aside that the puritans in the saddle today and the successors of the ones who were in the past generally despise and would like to cancel each other. There are amusing irony and useful lessons in that, but I doubt if many in either group would see them.

 

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TCM's Woke-arama

 Turner Classic Movies is running a series in which films from the past are weighed in the balance by the standards of leftist “wokeness” and probably found wanting. Tonight is The Searchers'  turn in the barrel, and the results are both idiotic and annoying. The Searchers is the story of a man’s search for his young niece who was abducted by Comanches after they slaughtered his brother’s family, including a sister-in-law he loves. Among its themes, besides its main one of obsession and its consequences, are  ideas of courage, perseverance, redemption, the nature of the outsider and his relation to a community, conflict, moral ambiguity, strength of character, and the pioneering spirit. It is a masterpiece that has been appreciated as such by serious and thoughtful people for years. It needs no defending, but what the people at TCM are saying about it does need ridiculing.

Their first accusation is against  the film’s depiction of “indigenous people”. The simple refutation  is that the depiction of the actions of Comanches is accurate. Raids and abductions of the kind shown the movie happened frequently on the Texas frontier. The Comanches were a rough bunch, and it is neither stereotyping nor improper nor “problematic” to present things as they were. It is foolish to think otherwise.

An even sillier claim is that the main character Ethan Edwards is a racist. The supposed evidence is that he bitterly hates and obsessively pursues the band of Comanches who murdered his family.  Yet in the story that has nothing to do with racism, but rather with loss and revenge. (One might suppose that the only way he could have avoided being a racist in the TCM people’s eyes would have been to go back east and meditate on what thought crimes his  family must have committed to deserve being butchered.) His behavior toward his enemies is harsh and brutal in ways often disapproved of by others who ride with  him, but it is because they are his enemies not because of their race. He does not demean  Indians as inferior beings. He shows no hostility to other Indians he encounters, including at least one Comanche.  He just wants to find his niece and settle with Scar.

TCM seems to have gotten more politically  correct over the years. Perhaps people in the business of showing old movies and acting as though they liked them have felt they needed to for cover.  It is annoying, and a little hypocritical, since it involves some serious talking out of both sides of the mouth.  Still they do show some good movies, and the mute button is always there for the commentary.

 

  

Favorite Directors

 

While there is too much stuff on the internet of top ten this and best twelve of that, making a list can be a good way to get a person thinking about  his or her favorites in some category. After watching two of my favorite movies – Rear Window and Singin’ in the Rain – with my grandchildren in the last few days, I was thinking about who are my favorite  film makers.

 My first half dozen came fairly easily. In alphabetical order they would be Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Renoir, and Welles. After that it got harder. Today I think I’d put Keaton, Kubrick, Lubitsch, and Wilder next to fill out a favorite ten, but that might change tomorrow.  There are so many others I like enough to think about including.

This is a list of favorite directors, not necessarily best directors.  Lists  of best directors would  vary depending on the criteria – whether single movie, entire career, originality, visual style, or whatever.

 

War Movies on TCM

Turner Classic Movies is running its tribute to Memorial Day this weekend.  There are some very good and appropriate selections including  Glory, The Longest Day, The Big Parade, From Here to Eternity,  and especially Ford’s They Were Expendable which is the best movie about World War II that I have ever seen. Most of the others  fit the theme, though some of the  fairly large group of service comedies are a stretch.  However a few of the choices make one wonder what the programmers were thinking.

The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Hill, and A Bridge too Far are films entirely or mainly about the British Empire in World War II. Since Memorial Day is a holiday honoring members of the U.S. armed forces,  their selection is a little odd and out of place. The Dirty Dozen, M*A*S*H,  and Kelly’s Heroes, while fun in a different setting (at least the first two; I haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes, only previews of it), simply do not belong in a salute to Memorial Day and fallen service people.   The tone deafness is surprising. 

Credit for Trying

A while back Debby and I watched the third movie of the trilogy based on Atlas Shrugged. When a friend asked me what I thought a couple of days later, the best thing I could say was that I gave them credit for  trying.  It and the two others before it were not awful. They just were not very good. They were done on low budgets with generally unknown actors and directors and no continuity of either actors or directors from one film to the others. However, I wonder if a good director with a Lord of the Rings size budget and the same cast and crew  throughout would have done much better. I think it would be really hard  to make a good movie  from a very long, tightly interwoven, and philosophical story such as Atlas Shrugged.

The most unfortunate thing about the movies is that they reinforced the false impression  that the book is mainly about politics.  In the book, while the political conflict and ideas are important to the story, they are also clearly only a part of larger and more fundamental issues and a much bigger set of ideas.  It would be easy for someone who had not read the book to come away from the movies thinking the political story was all there was.

Atlas Shrugged is hard enough for many people to understand anyway. A basic thing to grasp is  that it is not a book about real life or the real world despite its generally realistic setting, but rather a book about how the world might  or would be if people followed their beliefs and theories though to their logical conclusions and reflected them in their behavior pretty much without reserve.  I fear the movies miss conveying that point almost entirely.

I also doubt if someone unfamiliar with the book could have followed the plot of the movies very well.  Things seemed to get a bit sketchy from time to time. Still, I enjoyed watching the films even while wishing they had been better. I have two of them on DVD and will buy the third. 

Bad Movies

What is the worst movie of your experience? It is an interesting question and one people enjoy talking and writing about, I think partly because there are so many ways a movie can be bad and so many types of bad movies.

There is the obvious category of films so badly designed, cheaply made, oddly cut, and amateurishly directed as to be easily recognized as awful – though usually harmlessly awful and often amusingly so. Many people pick one of these, such as Robot Monster, Plan 9 from Outer Space, or Monster a-Go Go, as their choice for the worst movie.

Then there are the more professional looking and usually more coherent bad  movies of the sort that would have fit well on Joe Bob Briggs’ Drive in  Theatre – films such as Swamp Thing, Hell Comes to Frogtown,  Snake Eater, Billy Jack, or Barb Wire. There are lots of these, and some of them are very bad indeed.

Worse are the shocking and grotesque supernatural horror movies which prey on the fears and weakness of superstitious, ignorant, or overly impressionable people  to terrify their audience and do little else. There are plenty of these too.

We also have the present day genre of gross, moronic, half wittedly adolescent, guy comedies -  many  of which make Porky’s, the original of the type, look like Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder by comparison.  There are some plausible choices  in that bunch.

Earnest, tendentious, preachy moralizing and propaganda movies can be so bad on that basis alone as to rate consideration.  Good examples include several films from Stanley Kramer  and a large  fraction of Hollywood’s left wing agitprop films of the last forty years.

A close relative of the propaganda movie is the self-promotingly   pompous, “artistically significant” movie. There are plenty of hard to take specimens of this class around too, both foreign and domestic.

My present choice though, comes from none of these worthy categories.  My selection for the worst movie, or more precisely  the worst waste of a movie, I’ve endured is an extravagantly bad expensive and expansive “epic” film with a trashy and ridiculous plot, a famous director, a cast of talented  and successful actors, several over the top performances, an absurd conclusion, and the producer of Gone with the Wind who is said to have seen this film as a chance to match that movie’s success – Duel in the Sun.  I cannot think of another movie where, despite potential for making something good, so much went into creating something so bad. It is something else. 

Same Old Hollywood

Some conservatives are annoyed that a company that makes video games based on the characters and events of the Star Wars movies has added a planet of homosexuals to a game.  (Many of the rest of us think it is merely a bit of cosmic nonsense even Mel Brooks probably could not have made up but would have had good fun with if he did.)  They probably need to relax and surely should not have been surprised. Hollywood has always followed  the politically  correct prejudices of the day as some examples will illustrate. Of course all of this will be  broad generalization about what I think are trends, not strict patterns without variation. Counterexamples  bucking the trends are plentiful and easy to find.

The first really famous American movie The Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915, excused slavery, glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and presented black people as dangerous semi-savages who had to be kept in line.  This fairly accurately reflected the racial prejudices of the time, the Jim Crow politics of the south, and the views of the segregationist president of the United States Woodrow Wilson (who praised the movie’s accuracy and viewpoint).

The 1920’s were a time of popular disillusionment over the Great War, more relaxed social mores particularly for women, fewer social restraints concerning sex, and greatly increased prosperity.  A good fraction of the silent movies of the decade followed those trends fairly closely.

Things changed with the coming of the depression and  the Roosevelt administration. A reaction against the licentious and freewheeling ‘20s led to a motion picture code restricting both the depiction of sexuality and the content of plots. Movies of the 1930’s  tended to extol Roosevelt and the New Deal, attack wealth, business, and profit, glorify the mistreated and exploited little guy, and reflect the general collectivist political mood of the day. One movie Gabriel Over the White House even promoted a folksy, all-American version of the fuehrerprinzip as a solution for the nation’s problems.  Political correctness still dictated favorable treatment of the Confederacy and the Old South and no discussion of Jim Crow or the injustices suffered by black people in the south (perhaps because of a fear of offending movie goers in that region, perhaps also because the solidly Democratic south was a cornerstone of Roosevelt’s political power).  Gone With the Wind is the best known example of this, but a perhaps more blatant one comes from The Santa Fe Trail in which John Brown and his abolitionists and not the slaveholders are shown as the ones exploiting the black people.

The wind of course changed again after Pearl Harbor.  Industrialists were no longer presented as villainous exploiters but rather as dedicated partners with labor as producers for the war effort.  Instead of social conflicts, movies showed us guys from all groups and backgrounds (except for blacks) coming together as harmonious units to fight the war and tended to display a syrupy, new found reverence for traditional habits, religion, and folkways. War movies gave us cruel and vicious Nazis  (though almost all actually underestimated the Nazis’ actual savagery and crimes) and utterly depraved and barbarous Japanese. While a distinction was often made between ordinary Germans and Nazis, the Japanese were generally presented as evil as a race. This  fit the national mood at a  time when the Roosevelt administration was putting loyal Japanese Americans into concentration camps. There were as also various  pro-Soviet pictures such as Mission to Moscow and  The North Star glorifying and whitewashing  our cobelligerent of the time.

Movies’ presentations of Russia and communism changed completely and with almost Orwellian suddenness in the immediate post war years as  the Cold War began and the public learned about Soviet espionage and subversion in the United States. Hollywood gave us movies such as The Red Danube  and  Pickup on South Street showing Soviet  brutality in occupied nations and Soviet spying in the United States. Pro-collectivist propaganda in movies of that time usually was both subtle and well disguised.

During the era of good feeling of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, movies generally were less obviously political in content than either immediately before or after that time. They did tend to reflect a national mood of optimism, ability to recognize and solve problems, and pride in the country and its history.  The trend of glorifying traditional mores, beliefs, and life styles continued, as did code based restrictions on the depiction of sexual activity and  the content of plots.

Things changed rapidly in the disastrous Johnson, Nixon, and Carter years.  Pessimism, cynicism, and overt hostility to the country and its culture became commonplace in both the general milieu and  the movies. Hollywood responded to the freer sexual mores of the time by abandoning the production code and its restrictions. New taboos and stereotypes regarding race and women  replaced the old, both in movies and society. Various old time Hollywood communists and fellow travelers who had been silent or careful during the post war years joined with a younger generation of leftists to give the movies a definite leftward slant. 

The 1980’s and 1990’s saw a bit of a counter trend as the country prospered, became more optimistic,  won the Cold War, and enjoyed the benefits of peace and success. It was not quite a return to the 1950’s, but films probably were on average less political and pessimistic. Then came George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the financial crisis, two long wars, and  the dogmatic political correctness of the present day. When the winds change again, probably so will Hollywood. It is that kind of business. Indeed one reason present day Hollywood people present business people in such a bad light may be that the only business they know well is their own.

Movies about WWII

World War II has been the subject of a very large number of movies. I’ve seen a lot of the and have a few favorites. There are of course many other good films out there, but these are some that come to mind.

David Lean’s In Which We Serve, Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters, and Ronald Neame’s The Man Who Never Was are my favorites among the British made movies from the war. I’ve heard The Cruel Sea is also good, but I haven’t seen it.  William Wellman’s Battleground and Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry are two good depictions, one in the ETO and one in the Pacific, of a war fought by American  citizen soldiers. Some criticize these films for following a clichéd formula by populating their combat units with neatly diverse cross sections of the population, but in fact  the war did throw men from all sorts of backgrounds and origins together, often into units very similar to those depicted in these films. At least the characters in these films are mainly recognizably 1940’s people, and not, as is so often the way these days in “historical” movies, present day people projecting  present day attitudes, mannerisms, clichés,  and prejudices back in time.  I have seen only part of Wellman’s The Story of GI Joe, but it seems to compare well with the other  two. Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity is a pretty good film, but is really more a pre-war movie than a war movie.  Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way  is a very good movie about the naval war in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor  through a fictionalized version of the Solomons campaign. Its only real flaw is a silly soap opera subplot about a son  resenting his father (which is not in the novel the movie is based on). Dick Powell’s The Enemy Below is a good film about the naval war with German submarines in the Atlantic. Mark Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail, Tay Garnett’s Bataan,  and Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan are good movies about America’s defeat in the Philippines and  its aftermath, with Sandrich’s being my favorite of the group. John Milius’s Farwell to the King is quite odd, but a fairly good movie. Tora! Tora! Tora!  and The Longest Day  are my favorites among the semi-documentary dramatizations of the war’s major events. Finally there are my two favorite movies about the war - John Sturges’ The Great Escape  and John Ford’s They Were Expendable, which is the only really great movie about the war that I have seen. It is a wonderful movie, touching, strong and one of Ford’s best.  Its only really false note is a too generous treatment of Douglas MacArthur, but that flaw is both minor and quite understandable given the times.

I have also seen a number of bad or overrated movies about the war.  Some that come to mind are The Dirty Dozen and its epigones, The Guns of Navarone, which is not awful but is so vulgarly Hollywood hokey compared to the fine novel it is based on, Stalag 17, which is one of the few movies by Billy Wilder that I don’t like, and The Bridge on the River Kwai.  I have not sat through all of Saving Private Ryan, but have seen enough to think that I would see it as being about as overrated as  the other films  by the C. B. DeMille of our time.

A Programming Suggestion

I really enjoy Turner Classic Movies. Indeed it is the main reason we are still on cable. However I have to wonder about their thinking if not their sincerity with their Memorial Day tribute. Once again they are showing films such as  The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes. One would think that TCM’s programmers would notice  that  portraying them as psychopaths, halfwits,  and criminals is perhaps not the best way of honoring those who served in the armed forces. (Of course TCM is not alone. One of the other networks is showing Apocalypse Now as one of its Memorial Day offerings.)  The most charitable explanation is that those in charge see all war movies as an undifferentiated collection of shoot ‘em ups with any one doing about as well as another. There are of course less charitable and perhaps  more likely interpretations, particularly since the folks at TCM are supposed to be movie buffs.

It is especially unfortunate since there are so many other choices available. Wings, Sergeant York, What Price Glory, and The Big Parade from World War I, Flying Tigers, From Here to Eternity, In Harm’s Way,  Wake Island, They Were Expendable,  Bataan, Cry Havoc, So Proudly We Hail, Gung Ho, Destination Tokyo, The Enemy Below, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Gallant Hours, PT-109, Patton, The Longest Day, The Story of G.I. Joe, Darby’s Rangers, Command Decision, Twelve O’clock High,  Air Force,  Flying Leathernecks, Sands of Iwo Jima, Battle Cry, Battleground, Stalag 17, and The Big Red One from World War II, and The Bridges at Toko-ri, Pork Chop Hill, The Hanoi Hilton, Flight of the Intruder, The Deer Hunter, and The Green Berets from later conflicts are examples that come to mind easily.  (That does not mean they are all better movies. Some are fairly or even very poor movies, but they would be more appropriate for a tribute because they do not demean the service people who are their subject. That is the point. Movies that do demean service people would be better shown at other times if one’s intent were to produce a tribute.) Of course TCM does include many of these and other appropriate films in their tribute each year. It  just would be nice if they were a bit more consistent.

Errol Flynn

Errol Flynn is one my favorite movie actors. I like his movies and his performances in them. I think that people will be watching and enjoying Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk and a few more long after many of the more actor-ly and pretentious films of his contemporaries (and ours) are properly forgotten. It is often said that he was not a very good actor. That of course raises an interesting question. If what he did was so easy and unremarkable, why had no one else been able to match or duplicate it in all the years that have followed?

A couple of nights ago I saw Lauren Bacall on a short on TCM saying that Flynn was always dissatisfied because he wanted to play more “serious” dramatic roles. If that is true, it is sad. For he was the best there ever was at doing what he did, playing the swashbuckler, just as John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, respectively, were at playing the Westerner and the score-knowing, tough guy loner walking down the world’s mean streets. That should have been enough for anybody.