As I said in the last post, I've already seen the next eight entries on the AFI 100 Years...100 Movies list, so I didn't actually have to watch any of these films again to write the commentary. Hence the speedy posting. I really, really like all three of these movies, so I'm sorry if there's some gushing of praise here. But honestly, these are some seriously good movies.
In my treatment of Singin' in the Rain last week, I mentioned that there is at least one musical on this list that I love. Well, here it is. And it's not just because I love The Dark Side of the Moon [1]. Like no other movie I can think of, The Wizard of Oz is a display of the pure joy of cinema. This is a movie that is in love with the magic of filmmaking, and every aspect of the film radiates this playful energy that makes it the rare work to successfully combine beauty with upbeatness without being cloying. Take that famous scene (really, is there any other kind of scene in this movie?) when Dorothy walks out of her house into Oz for the first time, and the movie blossoms into Technicolor. In the shot panning out from Dorothy's black-and-white door into the vibrant Munchkinland, the great thing is not just that Dorothy or we the audience is awed by the wonder of color but that the movie itself seems amazed by what's unfolding onscreen. What could have come off as silly or hokey (especially to modern eyes—are those flowers made of wax?) instead feels captivating, a magic show somehow without the cynicism of deception. Such unbridled enthusiasm characterizes pretty much the whole movie, from the songs (which, c'mon, how can you not love?) to the acting to the set design to the cinematography itself, and it's all so successful in its exuberant straightforwardness that I'm forced to admit (albeit begrudgingly) that it was probably a good choice to ditch the more complicated mythology of L. Frank Baum's novels. In the interest of transparency, I should also mention that The Wizard of Oz is the first movie on this list that brings with it a hefty dose of nostalgia for me. I have very pleasant memories from early in childhood of me being super excited any time the movie came on TV. So there's the chance that I'm looking at this movie through a slightly tinted lens. Do with that what you will, I guess, but as me for, I'll go on loving this film.
Ah, here we have our first Charlie Chaplin film. I'll be honest: City Lights isn't my favorite of Chaplin's. Don't get me wrong; I like it plenty, but it doesn't quite reach the heights of either the immaculately timed staging of The Gold Rush or the pitch-dark social critique of Modern Times (both of which appear later in the list and are about tied for my favorite Chaplin film). It's perhaps a little unfair to call it a "flaw" of City Lights to not be The Gold Rush or Modern Times, though, since clearly the film isn't trying to be either of those. Sure, there are elements of mild social commentary in the film's mocking of the bourgeoisie (mocking that would later flower into full-on rancor in Modern Times), but what the movie does try to be is largely a romance. And on that level, I think it's a success. Modern Times has the social commentary, The Gold Rush has the comedic setpieces, but City Lights is unquestionably (for me, at least) the peak of Chaplin's humanism among the films of his that I've seen, and it's the central romance between the Tramp and the flower girl that allows for it. Plenty of other Chaplin features had romantic interests, but the beautiful sincerity with which this one is portrayed make it emotionally naked on a level that's rare, even in Chaplin movies. I do feel that parts of this film dip too deeply into sentimentalism at times, but man, if the film's ending doesn't make up for it in spades. I don't think it's a perfect movie, but that final scene is cinematic perfection, for sure.
And speaking of perfect endings: ladies and gentlemen, The Searchers. And it's not just a perfect ending but perfect ending shot: the frame slowly collapsing into the doorway as the characters exit the screen to leave John Wayne's character walking away from the camera, alone in the small field of vision remaining. And that's what we as an audience are left with, too: the lingering image of this titanic, cruel, iconic character who is this dually off-putting and magnetic version of the all-American hero. I don't think of John Wayne as a great actor, but he has a tremendous screen presence in any movie he's in (and heck, that might as well be enough to make him a great actor); here in The Searchers, that presence is at its most fascinating. Along with True Grit, The Searchers is the most self-reflective role the Duke ever played, an intriguingly non-partisan depiction of both the brutality and nobility inherent in the gunslinger archetype in the same way that True Grit's Rooster contrasts the mockable, showman aspects of the character type with his eventual heroism. That non-partisan aspect of The Searchers is the darnedest thing, too, because it also makes the film extremely slippery to interpret. I for one think that the anti-racism often ascribed to the movie by modern critics is slightly overstated—making Ethan Edwards as cruel as the archetypal Native Americans in Western movies is not quite the same thing as making a statement against the cruelty against that people group, although I do think that the movie has one of the more sophisticated depictions of race relations among classic Westerns. It's a morally ambiguous work of art for sure, and not one of those works that belabors its moral ambiguity by repeatedly calling attention to it (e.g. Breaking Bad [2], to jump media for a moment) either. In The Searchers, we don't see the formation or philosophical mechanics of a moral framework, just the grim (and maybe even successful?) application of a system so ingrained in a man that he performs it automatically. And that's powerful cinema, no matter how slippery.
That's all for now. I'll be posting about the next three movies shortly, maybe in the next couple days. As always, I encourage discussion here. Do you, for example, nourish a virulent hatred of The Wizard of Oz? Well, feel free to explain the inexplicable and tell me about it! I hope it's apparent that I'm not trying to be any sort of authority on this blog, so I look forward to alternative points of view. Until next time.
You can read the previous entry in this series, #s 7-9 on the list, here.
Update: The next post, #s 13-15, is up, and you can read it here.
1] For the record, I found the whole Dark Side of the Rainbow thing where you play Pink Floyd alongside this movie to be pretty disappointing, save for two points: 1) the beginning of "Money" where the bobbing munchkins match the cash registers and 2) the "black...blue" moment of "Us and Them" when the Wicked Witch of the West and Dorothy correspond to the respective colors. Other than that... I guess I needed to be in an altered state of consciousness or something.
2] Just to be clear: I don't think calling attention to moral ambiguity is necessarily a flaw. It's just that Breaking Bad advertises itself as a rumination on morality much more loudly than The Searchers does.
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