More movies. Carry on, my wayward blog.
Now here's an interesting movie, though part of that interest just has to do with plain old luck, I'd wager. The (probably) lucky part: The Wild Bunch arrived at the movies at precisely the right time to make its grand thematic gestures, particularly those regarding the death of an era, serve as a sort of metacommentary for the American movie industry as a whole as it transitioned out of the clean, occasionally immoral Studio era into the purportedly more morally and artistically conscious (though perhaps more anarchic) New Hollywood era. I say "lucky" because I'm pretty sure Peckinpah didn't intend to make such a statement and that such a corollary is just the accidental effect of Peckinpah being an active participant in the New American Cinema movement. Don't get me wrong: there's definitely a media critique going on in this film, but judging from what Peckinpah's said and from the content of the film itself, the targets of this critique seem to be the news coverage of Vietnam[1] and the Western genre (not the studio system as a whole). I'll confess to being a little torn as to whether the film pulls off those critiques, though. Don't get me wrong; there's a ton of rich material in the film, particularly in how the violence obliterates all semblance of the "values" that the characters claim to have. Even in the non-violent portions, I love the amiable looseness of the film (for a good stretch, it's pretty much "just hangin' with the guys"[2]) and how that looseness is often undercut with a current of sadness and regret in the older characters that comes into full bloom once the shooting starts. But then there's the problem that, to me at least, the very violence that this movie is trying to critique often looks (is it just me?) kind of beautiful—not in an elegiac, cathartic way but an actual aesthetic way where the blood splatters look like flower blossoms and falling bodies take on operatic poses in slow motion. The film includes plenty of moments when the violence is very, very ugly (e.g. Pike blowing away that woman when her bullet grazes him[3]), but I don't know that its enough to counteract the formal glamor[4] of those slow motion shots. Maybe that's my fault as a viewer, maybe that's Raimi's fault or Tarantino's fault for teaching me to view violence that way, or maybe it's The Wild Bunch's fault after all. I don't know. Sorry... I'm making it sound like The Wild Bunch is a failure of a movie. It's not. In fact, I think it's pretty good. But when what's separating "good" from "great" is so in-my-face, I guess it's just easier to dwell on that instead of the numerous positives. So, in conclusion, here are four things I love about the movie: the screenplay, the editing, the acting, and the unusually unpatronizing depiction of rural Mexican culture.
Well, I've got no complaints about this one. I tell you, these last two posts have been absolutely gangbusters for new movies for me, what with All the President's Men last time and now The Apartment. And boy, I'm about ready to declare The Apartment a future all-time favorite, too. Maybe it's just the weariness that comes from being this deep into blogging about an AFI list, but The Apartment feels like one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, which is kind of funny considering that, on paper, this is exactly the kind of movie that gets the rom-com genre mocked. The Apartment is practically a slave to the technicalities of the romantic comedy formula. You've got a silly high-concept premise (man lets his coworkers use his apartment for their affairs—I mean, come one, dude!), misunderstandings that escalate into an end-of-second-act conflict, a happily-ever-after ending involving one lovebird running toward the other ("I hate you, Harry, I really hate you"... what's that? Wrong movie? Apologies)—heck, you've even got the climactic, epiphanic use of "Auld Lang Syne," which isn't just a rom-com convention but a convention of pretty much every movie genre ever. So shouldn't The Apartment suck? These are the reasons we're supposed to hate romantic comedies, right? They're formulaic? They're sentimental? They're contrived? Yeah well, with all due respect, screw that. The Apartment is top-to-bottom amazing, and it's made no less awesome by its formulaic elements, further proving something one of my English teachers told me in high school: it's the execution, not the bucking of convention, that makes a movie good. The detestable high school me of course didn't believe him, but it's seeming more and more like the truth as I get older. Rom coms (heck, let's just say movies in general) suck when the humor is tepid, when the leads don't have chemistry or charisma, when the cinematography is bland, when the pathos is passionless, and (especially) when the screenplay is dull. The Apartment is hilarious, magnificently acted, stylishly shot, alternately heartbreaking and rousing, and always whip-smart, screenplay-wise. So no, The Apartment doesn't suck. Not at all.
Well, dang, I forgot about this one. Back when I reviewed A Clockwork Orange, I lamented that AFI hadn't chosen any Stanley Kubrick movies that I like. I was wrong (also, I completely forgot that the peerless Dr. Strangelove is on this list, so... wrong on two counts). I really, really like Spartacus, though to be fair, it's not exactly a Stanley Kubrick movie in the sense that films like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining would go on to define Stanley Kubrick movies. Most obviously, Spartacus is sentimental as all get out, and if there's one thing that Stanley Kubrick Movies(TM) aren't, by golly, it's sentimental. And to be sentimental about human characters, you've got to have empathy for those characters and, you know, care about the human race in general, which, again, is right out for a Kubrick film. Spartacus is a great humanist film, and not only that, but one of the most powerful war epics ever. The closest Kubrick film to Spartacus (both chronologically and thematically) is Paths of Glory (another winner, in my book, and probably Spartacus's superior), both depicting the crucifixion—literal and figurative—of individuals who attempt to buck the cruel machinations of their superiors, both other than that, you'll have a hard time finding analogues to Spartacus in the Kubrick filmography. Of course, that's largely because Kubrick was much, much less involved with the filming process of Spartacus than he was with his other movies; he wasn't even the original director for the film, being brought in as an option after the first director fell through. Honestly, I think Kubrick is entirely the wrong choice for this film (Wikipedia tells me that David Lean declined an opportunity to direct it, which is a crushing disappointment on so many levels). His icier, more controlling tendencies are totally at odds with the sort of pure-blooded Hollywood epic this movie is, and while he never had enough control to make those tendencies prominent enough to be problematic, his choice to film a good portion of the movie's "outdoor" scenes in a studio (to, in a typical Kubrick move, be better able to control the filming) has not aged well, especially juxtaposed with the grandeur of the actual outdoor footage. But enough complaining; Spartacus is a majestic tragedy totally worthy of its classic reputation, regardless of its place in the Kubrick canon. Plus, even if everything else had been crap, there's that scene. You know the one. "I'm Spartacus!" *sniff*
Let me know what you guys think! As always, I love hearing feedback from you lovely readers, even (especially) when it's people telling me I'm dead wrong about films. Until next time!
You can read the previous post in the series, #s 76-78, here.
Update: Read the next post, #s 82-84, here.
1] This interpretation is something I totally got from excerpts from interviews with Peckinpah on the film's Wikipedia page. Honestly, it's a pretty obscure critique. Once you know that the movie's supposed to be about Vietnam, I guess it makes sense, but nothing in the film itself would have led me to interpret the film that way if I hadn't read his statements. The critiques of the Western are much more obvious, though.
2] Emphasis on "guys"—The Wild Bunch is a very dude-heavy movie. Which, unfortunately, leads to the film's sometimes troubling portrayal of women. Sure, the movie gets a few digs at misogyny (the scene where the men underpay the prostitutes is striking), but they're pretty shallow digs, not nearly the cutting interrogation I might have liked to see, especially considering how the women are often just pretty faces for the rest of the movie (when they're present at all).
3] The ugliness of the situation really driven home by his scream of "Bitch!" before he pulls the trigger.
4] For the record, I do think there are legitimate artistic and moral reasons to stylize (and even beautify) violence in art. But when one of the main purposes of a film is to make the audience realize the horror and ugliness of commonplace "movie" violence, it's hard to pull that stylization off well. One man's opinion.
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