Four A-minus Best Picture Oscar Winners!

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

On first viewing, I deemed this a masterpiece. Now I find it a bit sloppy in its revision of the American film western. As Alfred Soto asks, "would Bill Munny really become the Terminator after all those years of dormancy, and why the hell isn’t Morgan Freeman’s race mentioned once yet he’s lynched just the same?" That Munny wastes every Evil at the eleventh hour jibes with neither the narrative nor the revision. And Freeman's Ned Logan raises the eternal question concerning representation of the disenfranchised - do filmmakers hone in on the disenfranchisement or do they ignore it altogether so as not to mess with a good formula (leaving other options to independent cinema?)? Still, it makes up in academic flair what it lacks in dramatic urgency. Like Shania Twain's Come On Over, Unforgiven seems tailor-made for critics and scholars and as a film professor obsessed with the western, I find it irresistible. 

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

Not much to say about this one beyond something noncommittal like "I find much of it moving." I'm far more intrigued by the critical rings of fire through which it has jumped over the past 75 years. Jonathan Rosenbaum has a useful post on his site tracing the shifting responses, especially Dave Kehr's which went from dissing the film for "exuding a stifling piety at times" to calling it a masterwork. I want to think it a masterwork too. Will someone sit through all 172 minutes with me to help me get there? Sarah Kozloff's otherwise-fine BFI on it didn't help much. Maybe Alison Macor's new Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation will. Until then, I'll retreat into history and posit that while 1939 may be Hollywood's greatest year, 1946 was the best year of Hollywood's life in terms of admissions, the apex before the Fall, before all the neos and posts (or the perception thereof since revisionism is never relegated to one post-WWII era). Wyler's film epitomizes that peak which no doubt has contributed to its chaotic critical reception. It stands in for that mythical everyone who went to the movies. For the entropy that followed (and if you want to simplify history further), check out two films that have meant much more to me: Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) and It's Always Fair Weather (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1955). 

The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987)

Unlike so many of the bloated Best Picture winners of the era, The Last Emperor has an attractive perversity at the heart of its conception. The gargantuan scale, especially large masses of humanity effecting change, abrades against an ineffectual main character. Aisin-Gioro Puyi (played by John Lone as an adult) wants to put his mark on the world but he keeps getting tossed about by history. The resulting inertia diminishes the film's replay value. But it makes for a far more hypnotic watch than Chariots of Fire or Gandhi. And the poop sniffing scene, complete with judicious close-up, is for the ages.

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

The 1962ness of this thing bowls me over. In its loonier moments (when Lean pauses the narrative to take a look around the deserts, say), you can feel the late-1960s/early 1970s head film on the horizon. 2001, El Topo, The Shooting, even Head itself can all be detected in those endless vistas and that Dune-looking sun. And I admire how Lean reserved some of his 227-minute running time to observe the effects of violence on random characters as when an unknown passenger from a derailed train walks off dazed into the desert.

Unforgiven: A-minus

The Best Years of Our Lives: A-minus

The Last Emperor: A-minus

Lawrence of Arabia: A-minus

The Last Outlaw (Christy Cabanne, 1936)

From an original story by John Ford, The Last Outlaw stars Harry Carey as Dean Payton, yes, that Dean Payton, famed bank robber who's just got out of prison after 25 years. The older but unbowed Payton is not adjusting to the New West too well - cars, rude people, ineffectual police, byzantine bureaucracy (a banker prattles on in government lingo, e.g., "the CPA - the Cattle Purchase Act") and, in one of the best scenes, talking pictures (Payton talks back to a newsreel)! Payton and pal Chuck Wilson (Hoot Gibson - one of the oatiest names I've ever heard) attend a singing cowboy movie and they're baffled at the "fancy getup" and "soprano" voice of star Larry Dixon. And in a lesson in how things never change, they get shushed for their "very annoying" talking. 

In their indispensable The RKO Story, Richard Jewell and Vernon Harbin deem The Last Outlaw "a minor masterpiece" (96). I wouldn't go that far. The first half is as creaky as Payton's bones. But the climactic gunfight is a minor masterpiece unto itself arriving at an implosive complexity unexpected from a 70-minute oater. In fact, it's barely a gunfight at all. Payton and Wilson defeat a band of newly minted bank robbers through patience and the preservation of ammunition, taking out the water and heat from the bad guys' lair. Payton even shoots at a water pail carried by his own daughter who's been taken hostage.

I also watched John Ford's 1919 version, a two-reeler of which only the first reel exists. The ten minutes are not much to go on. Edgar Jones as Bud Coburn plays the Payton role. In the most redolent scene, he sits outside of a (movie?) theatre and dreams of a rowdy dance hall of old, proving that depletion and nostalgia will always form a foundation to the western if not American life in general.

Jewell and Harbin link the 1936 version to Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962) and Lonely are the Brave (David Miller, 1962) as films that "chronicled the losing of the west." I suggest a quadruple feature of all three with, oh, let's say Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021).

The Last Outlaw (1936): A-minus

The Last Outlaw (1919): Not fair to grade without the second reel. Check your attics. 

Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)

I agree with John Milius who wrote a draft of the screenplay: "I don't think it's so brilliantly written or so brilliantly acted. Siegel can take more credit than anyone for it." I couldn't care less about (the) acting. But the screenplay, whoa boy! Do a shot every time you hear a character utter some variation on "Well, that's why they call him Dirty Harry" and you'll be in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning by the end credits. Dirty Harry is Corn Central which is the fate of a first entry in a new genre, assuming that such a designation is true (or even can be true). But I trust that plenty of viewers in 1971 didn't need to wait for all the copycat films and television shows (and parodies) to detect the film's corniness.

That leaves Siegel, an adept genre director. To be sure, he's created an adept genre film here. The climactic counterpoint of the children singing on the bus while the sniveling psychopath Scorpio (Andy Robinson) attempts to send them to their doom is classic thriller architecture. And the famous shot when the camera blows back while the law-unabiding Harry tortures a confession out of Scorpio at Kezar Stadium is worthy of all the commentary it has engendered. To many minds, this moment proves that Siegel is trying to distance himself from Harry's psychotic behavior. I find this impossible to accept because the viewer knows more than Harry every step of the way. We know Scorpio is guilty. So who needs evidence? We already have it.

But who cares if this film is right wing or left wing, if it supports Harry stepping outside of the law or stands at a distance from his vigilantism, or both? As typical Hollywood product, it can only imagine individual solutions to systemic societal problems. It's called Dirty Harry, not Dirty Police Force or Dirty Urban Planning or Dirty Nixonian Politics of Resentment.

Grade: C+

Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021)

An odd rooster, this. To start with the worst, women throw themselves at retired rodeo star Mike Milo, a character many decades younger than the 91-year-old Clint Eastwood who plays him. In a perfect world (to choose a redolent Eastwoodian phrase), that sentence would make no sense. But in that perfect world, we would enjoy the story a 91-year-old woman with men swooning over her. We would also enjoy her decades-long career as a director and bankable star. So while I applaud the unconventional relationships, the focus is on Eastwood and not the relationships. And certainly not the women either - the whorish Leta (Fernanda Urrejola) and the angelic Marta (Natalia Traven) are empty vessels for Eastwood who is always one.

But the structure of the film is perversely attractive. The long second act (at least it felt long; I didn't have a stopwatch) functions as a narrative oasis. Milo shacks up with Marta at a dusty café, retarding the progress in his mission to return the 13-year-old Rafo (Eduardo Minett) to his dad and Milo's former employer Howard (an equally dusty Dwight Yoakam). Slow dancing with Marta, teaching Rafo how to ride a horse, conversing with Marta's deaf grandchild, so little happens in this section that the more violent dénouement feels like a coda rather than a third act. Far from Eastwood's best but I'll take my shameless auteurist pleasures wherever I can get them.

Grade: B

Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood, 2019)

In a terrific capsule review of Richard Jewell for the Chicago Reader, Kathleen Sachs claims that "Clint Eastwood is the most American director working right now. Not the greatest, mind you, just the most." By this, I take it Sachs means that Eastwood's films don't sway decisively in one ideological direction. In Richard Jewell, he seems to have a readymade story to propagate right-wing ideologies. Jewell was the security guard who discovered the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The FBI quickly targeted Jewell as a prime suspect and the media proceeded to investigate his potential culpability. Jewell was exonerated while the real bomber would evade capture for seven years. Some critics have thus read Richard Jewell as a right-wing primer on fake news and how government institutions fail the individual.

The first quarter of Richard Jewell, however, paints the protagonist as a George Zimmerman type who constantly oversteps his bounds as a security guard at Piedmont College. An ineffectual bully who hungers for more power than his rent-a-cop status affords, Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser, jaw-dropping) comes off more as a dangerous crank than any kind of hero. So however heroic his actions were at Centennial Olympic Park, they are already filtered through this most unheroic portrait. Had Eastwood intended to uphold Richard Jewell as a martyr, he failed. 

This is why I don't have as much of a problem as other critics do with the more cartoonish portrayals. Most damningly, Eastwood commits the same error as the media did with Jewell by falsely fashioning Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) into a vixen eager to exchange sexual favors for information from the purely evil FBI composite character Agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm, oily). And few critics have mentioned how Eastwood transforms Piedmont College Raymond Cleere (Charles Green) into a symbol for an effete higher-education system that cares more for its boozing privileged students than its hard-working staff (not faculty). But none of these performances render Jewell any more a hero.

Because, of course, Eastwood never intended to conceive of him so unambiguously in the first place. As the most American director working right now, he's asking audiences if this type of person deserves due process. Is he innocent before proven guilty? Does this person who consistently makes stupid decisions (Richard Jewell is frequently an uneasy comedy) earn our compassion? Framing these questions is a masterful mise-en-scène that always reminds us about exactly the kind of person we're contemplating here. Richard Jewell explodes with props that lend savor to the frame (Sirk would be proud): underwear, Tupperware, TV sets, guns and more guns, etc. A poster in Watson Bryant's (Sam Rockwell), Jewell's attorney, office reads: "I fear government more than I fear terrorism." Confederate flags stand witness to Bobi's (Kathy Bates, almost as jaw-dropping as Hauser), Jewell's mother, plea to the media to exonerate her son. 

Allow me to quote Sachs' line in full. "For better or worse—some will say better, many more will say worse—Clint Eastwood is the most American director working right now." What Eastwood is asking us to do in Richard Jewell is to imagine ourselves in a position opposite to our own or perhaps others heretofore unforeseen. How will a black viewer receive Bobi's tearful plea? How will a NRA member take those early scenes at Piedmont College? I cried at the final title informing us that Bobi watches Bryant's children every weekend just like I cried at Eastwood's song at the end of Gran Torino. But I'm crying again right now because these are the people who probably voted for Trump last night. On November 4, 2020, I can't think of anything more American than that, for better or worse.

Grade: A