We've reached a section of the list where there are quite a few movies I haven't seen yet. This is exciting for me, as it means I'll be getting to experience lots of classics for the first time, but it might be tedious for you readers who want me to hurry up and finish this project already. Expect delays as I wait for Netflix DVDs to trickle in.
I ended up liking Midnight Cowboy a whole lot more than I thought I would. Maybe because of its legacy as the only X-rated movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture, I had filed Midnight Cowboy in my mind somewhere alongside Natural Born Killers and Fritz the Cat as one of those films whose primary artistic and historic significance was that it broke those taboos. I'm not a big fan of taboo-breaking just for the sake of it, and movies that are interested in doing so generally have a pretty short shelf life. I'm happy to announce that Midnight Cowboy is not one of those movies. Sure, there's maybe some shocks for a 1960s audience (though nothing that would have earned the film anything above an R rating even a few years after its release[1]), but the film has a tender core to it that makes the would-be shocks actually artistically relevant. John Voight's titular cowboy is a sweet but damaged individual, damage that extends to the seedy world around him and makes his relative innocence (and pre-film loss of it) all the more poignant. I was also surprised at how visually engaging the movie is, with the cinematography and editing taking numerous cues from avant-garde and world cinema. The mid-film dream sequence is particularly stunning, mixing fractured editing with both color and black-and-white film in a way that makes for a strikingly efficient method of delivering exposition. Mix the visual inventiveness with that immortal "I'm walkin' here!" improvisation from Dustin Hoffman (who is, by the way, excellent throughout), and you've got yourself a good movie.
There's a stretch of The Philadelphia Story where the film actually feels like one of the greatest movies of all time and probably one of the top five best romantic comedies ever. That stretch is the thirty-ish minute sequence that begins with the party on the night before Katharine Hepburn's character's wedding and lasts up to about fifteen minutes before the movie ends. During that sequence, The Philadelphia Story is excruciatingly funny, complex, and thrilling, and the plot is impressively choreographed throughout the relatively confined locations of the party. This sequence confirms what It's a Wonderful Life only hints at, which is that James Stewart (who deservedly won an Oscar for his role in this movie) plays an amazing drunk. Come to think of it, the party and post-party scenes probably work as well as they do because every character is drunk, loosening up the otherwise quite stagey dialogue elsewhere in the film. I can't stress enough just how mesmerizing and hilarious every single cast member is here once their characters get a few drinks in them. When they're sober, though (and, unfortunately, they are sober most of the rest of the movie), The Philadelphia Story doesn't work nearly as well. I dropped the word "stagey" a few sentences back, and I meant that literally; this movie is based on a play, and for much of its runtime, it shows. The shots are lethargic and even static, with characters entering and exiting the frame as they would a live stage. The dialogue, too, simply reeks of the sort of starched intricacy that stage dramas can pull off because it fills out the otherwise stripped-down nature of the medium. Cinema, however, (and particular Hollywood cinema) is rarely stripped down, and consequently, the dialogue often feels overwritten. Also, the character work is troublingly dodgy, as the script doesn't do nearly enough to interrogate the male characters' misogyny (a possibly minor problem if you're one to forgive a movie's dated politics) or, worse, develop Cary Grant's character as a compelling love interest (a huge problem once the film's finale rolls around). All of this makes the non-night-before-the-wedding scenes kind of a drag, although I can't knock Jimmy Stewart in the slightest (he's stupendous throughout). Those night-before-the-wedding scenes, though: golden.
"Shane, come back! Shaaaane!" Poor little Brandon deWilde is definitely the weak link in the cast. But he tries his best as Joey, and there's no denying that he sells the crap out of that final line delivery. His plaintive cried for his hero to return is one of the saddest, most sincere moments from any movie on this list, and as iconic scenes in Westerns go, this one ranks up there with any put to film by John Ford or Sergio Leone. What makes that ending even more effective is that it's not just a one-sided lament; though he's put a straight face on it, Shane himself is genuinely grieved to leave as well. His is a more existential sadness than the raw abandonment that Joey experiences, as he realizes that the insuppressible violence that defines his character is incompatible with the compassionate, domestic life he tries to adopt for much of the film's duration. He understands that he is doomed to be lonely and unhappy, separated from meaningful human contact by the heroic role he is compelled to adopt. Shane is one of the earliest self-reflective Westerns I can think of (followed a few years later by the granddaddy of all self-reflective Westerns, The Searchers), and that conflict of the irreconcilability of gunslinger violence with happiness is central to its questioning of genre tropes. There's a typical Western romance to Shane's lone gunman heroism, but there's also the decidedly unromantic subtext that Shane yearns to break free of the role the movie forces upon him. But of course, characters can't do that unless their movies allow them to. Tragically, Shane doesn't.
I'll try to post again soon, but as I said earlier, I gotta wait for those darn discs. In the meantime, feel free (as always) to let me know what you think of these or any movies. Until next time!
You can read the previous post, #s 40-42, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next post, #s 46-48, here.
1] 1969 falls within that magical period of maybe five years in which the X rating actually meant what it was supposed to mean, before the R rating got a ridiculously high ceiling to hedge out the increasingly explicit higher rating. Thanks, pornography. Thanks, MPAA.
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