Was it 1989?

It’s an anniversary of sorts today. T. and I started dating 15-years ago tonight, little knowing that marriage and babies were to come in the decades that followed.

Our first (of many many many) movie dates was Back to the Future Part II.

Part II, mind you! I can’t speak much for the movie because I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. I was completely distracted by the company and that intense high-school-era, first-date pressure. It was years later before I got around to seeing Part III.

But it sure helps to put 15-years in perspective, don't it?

Lunchtime in Hadleyville

High Noon (1952), which I hadn’t seen before last week, has the distinction of being my first Classic Hollywood Western. To be clear, I’ve seen plenty of westerns. Most were even made in the Hollywood studio system. But it seems that all of the westerns I’ve seen (and loved) have been left of centre: ironic, jaded (Unforgiven), sentimental (Once Upon a Time in the West) or simply ground breaking (Stagecoach). After sitting through dozens of revisionist westerns, I can safely say that I’ve never seen a true, honest-to-goodness, middle-of-the-road, baggage-free western: the kind with the untarnished hero and the simple white-hat and black-hat conflict. A bona-fide Classic Hollywood Western.

Now having seen High Noon, I understand completely why an entire generation of kids grew up playing sheriff. I recognize the appeal of the staunch, besieged lawman. I see all of the reasons why directors like Leone and his Italian peers paid so much attention to reworking and saluting the Old West. High Noon is the sort of confection that inspires daydreams and puts people on the road to making movies.

The film starts on exactly the right foot by introducing a supporting thug played by Lee Van Cleef, entirely dialogue-free and looking astonishingly young. Here’s the thing: I love Lee Van Cleef. With a dash of Van Cleef in the recipe, I’m immediately having a good time no matter what I’m watching. I’m certain that he is the best thing to come out of the Leone spaghetti westerns, save for the Morricone scores and the Leone close-ups. But seeing him this young and in this role, throws a whole wagonload of new baggage on his roles in the Leone films. It’s easier than ever to imagine him as a young Sentenza (the second part of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly equation.) [I have to confess that it bothered me for a few minutes, trying to pinpoint who the young Lee Van Cleef was reminding me of – but My God, when it came, what a revelation! It’s true that Van Cleef in High Noon is the spitting image of a young Snoop Dogg.] Apart from Van Cleef, the film is stuffed with a ton of delicious and familiar character actors: Lloyd Bridges, Harry Morgan, Lon Chaney Jr. and even Jack Elam, who shows up as one of the three killers at the start of Once Upon a Time in the West.

Force me to put my finger on the thing I enjoyed most about this movie, and it would be spotting the legion of connections to the later westerns that I’ve grown to adore. The action is set up quickly (it has to be – the movie unfolds in real time) and within minutes the bad guys of the film are waiting on the platform of a train station for the their brother, the arch-villain of the movie, to arrive. The angles on the train station and the layout of the buildings are practically identical to the opening frames of Once Upon a Time in the West. One of the waiting goons even has the good sense to pull out a harmonica. While none of this really surprises me, it’s a good thing when a fine movie forces your appreciation of not just one, but several other films. There’s a domino effect here that is really exciting.

Still there is one flaw that I need to pick at. The name of the flaw in this instance comes above the marquee, and it’s Gary Cooper. I’m sure Cooper is an excellent actor and a worthwhile addition to most movies he’s in. He emotes well and his eyes carry a sadness that lends a lot of gravity to whatever’s happening around him. Crap, he won an Oscar for his part in this movie. Even so, he’s clearly the wrong man to carry this movie. To start with, he seems much too old to play the sheriff, even if the sheriff is soon to retire (forget that he’s a newlywed!) We’re told that he captured and arrested Frank Miller (our villain) 5 years before the start of the movie, but this seems unlikely. If it’s true, then his energy and spirit have drained tremendously in the years that followed because Cooper has the passion of a piece of plywood. Worse still, he seems more like an office manager than a lawman, with the sort of face you’d find in a bank not in a dusty frontier town. This dissonance is most evident in a fistfight that happens at the mid-point of the movie. In action, Cooper seems stiff and decrepit, making the fight feel as stiffed and choreographed as most late-career Hulk Hogan matches. Only without the sense that Cooper could’ve won the scrap a decade earlier.

Despite Cooper’s wooden performance, the movie still manages to build an aggressive amount of momentum. Like the training arriving at noon, the plot of the film picks up speed the longer it plays, accelerating to a dizzying pace in the final reel. In many ways, the film is like a bomb waiting to go off, only the audience has been told exactly when to cover their ears. The clock ticks and the editor gets busier. The countdown builds and, well, look who I'm talking to. You remember what it was like in 3 O’Clock High, don’t you?

It’s pretty great stuff.

Was it 1982? (ii)

Tied with my memories of E.T. are, of all things, my memories of Conan the Barbarian. In grade 4, they were my yin and yang.

Now remember, this predates the mainstream awareness of movie pirating by a good spell, but I had a friend who had E.T. on VHS (or perhaps Beta?) within weeks of it appearing in theatres. I thought it was a miracle of sorts. The tape was crappy, much too dark (a sin for a movie as underlit as E.T.) and likely shot by a hand-held camera (the big boxy early-80’s kind.) On the same tape was a pirated copy of Conan the Barbarian, also still in theatres.

Here’s the rub. To visit this friend and maybe, just maybe, catch some of that E.T. action (which was seldom) I sat through at least a dozen basement screenings of Conan. I’m not sure I ever really saw the beginning. The movie was always in progress when I arrived, and I remember it mostly out of sequence; it was years later before I could put the scenes in any kind of order. Most importantly, I hated it. I hated everything about it. I was a relatively sheltered 9-year old and had been exposed to very little violence in the movie theatre, much less sword play and giant spikes skewering folks. Nudity was not a familiar concept for me. Gore was something that I would grow into years later. Conan had all of these things and most of them in abundance. It turned my stomach. I remember walking home in the afternoons, shell-shocked by the carnage.

Perhaps it was like throwing a child on a roller coaster too early in life (another experience I can share, I’m afraid) but it was at that time that I recoiled against Conan and violent movies in general. It would be years before I could get the nuts to sit through any movie with unnecessary violence or gore. [Note: the distaste translated into a backlash later in life, where I chewed up as much violence and gore as I could get my hands on, channeling obscene amounts of Nightmare on Elm Street and Schwarzenneger movies in my parents’ basement. Making up for lost time.] Much, much later I would grow to love Conan and respect it as a piece of balls-out, fantasy storytelling. Even later still, I would watch it (sound off, of course) while I was putting my newborn daughter to sleep. Blood, guts and baby bottles, if you can imagine it. Full circle, sort of. Or not.

But no matter where I am, I can still smell the basement when I watch it.

Was it 1982? (i)

Forgive the hyperbole to follow.

The short version first. There has never been another movie experience quite like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) for me. No other movie has impacted me so much and so deeply and so sincerely. In the pantheon of movies I’ve seen throughout my life, E.T. is the Big Cheese, the King of All Shit and the One That Hooked Me. It’s the Red Pill.

Funny then that I don’t really remember seeing E.T. for the first time. Like so many movies, I know where I watched it. I certainly remember seeing it at least two more times in the weeks that followed (one instance – my favourite instance – was at the 5 Drive-in with the unlikely partner of Night of the Comet.) However I can’t say that I have any memories of the actual theatre experience. It’s the days and weeks afterwards that stay with me instead, because the damn movie buried itself so deep in my waking mind that it was all I could think about. I was a kid possessed: E.T. sketches on my notebooks, E.T. posters in my room, E.T. toys, E.T. books, E.T. everything. I must’ve made quite a site in my grade 4 classroom, turning a potato art
project into a tribute to E.T. Though I couldn’t have told made the connection at the time, the final product probably looked a little like Andy Warhol’s famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe, but for E.T. heads in different colours spread across the paper. The obsession may have only lasted for months, but in my mind it went on for years. Later in school, people still remembered me as the "guy who really like used to like E.T." Not too freaky that label.

I recognize that E.T. is a strange movie to provoke this kind of roof-blasting reaction, but I must've been sitting bullseye for the target audience for the film. I was 9-years old. Most of my days were spent on my bike cruising the suburbs or exploring the woods behind my house. Nighttime was a scary place. There was no one in a better position to relate to the movie. But don’t misunderstand – I wasn’t projecting myself into the movie or even developing any "alien friend" fantasies like you might expect. I didn’t see the movie as any sort of daydream. Rather, I was delirious with what the movie did and where it took me. More than any other movie I had seen, it was the movie itself that ensnared the 9-year old. The overall experience of sitting in the dark theatre, with the smell of popcorn and the sticky floor and waiting for the lights to go all the way down: it was, if you don’t mind me rolling out the dusty cliché, pure magic. Bicycles over the moon kind of magic. The movie swept me away.

It was probably the first movie that I cried in. I know for certain that it was the first movie to frighten me. I was tense, emotional, excited, delighted and terribly sad. It was the first movie that didn’t have an easy handle or a quick solution for the question, what did you like about it? There was no shortcut like giant boulders or Wookies or Muppets. The movie sort of danced around me until I was dizzy, unsure what to isolate as the reason for the odd blend of feelings, and that made it an enigma. Not that I’m going to pretend that E.T. was any kind of Lynchian masterpiece, but I remember vividly that it was mysterious. Prior to seeing it, I had no clue at all what it was about. I didn’t know what an extra terrestrial was and from the TV commercials, I only knew that the boy in the red hooded sweater cut his finger on a saw. Then someone raised a hot poker towards it (after Raiders, I believed that the glowing finger was exactly that.) These were pretty fleeting impressions and tough for a kid to nail down. But there was also E.T. himself who seemed to look different to me in every photo I saw (different sculpts probably), lending to the feeling that he was part of the dream. As an adult, the movie has lost that complexity, but as a child, I remember that it was the most sophisticated experience of my short life.

Which brings me to adulthood. I was delighted by the opportunity to take my wife to see E.T. again in the theatre in 2002, with an amped-up digital soundtrack and a remastered picture. Forget about the crumby new CG effects (thank you Spielberg for leaving the original film intact on the DVD release), the treasure of seeing E.T. again on a monstrous modern screen was invaluable. The movie made very few bones at the box office, but I am so grateful for the decision to re-release it.

Seeing the film as an adult was startling, because it was like watching an entirely different film. I could see Spielberg pulling many of the strings that were invisible to me as a child, and I could appreciate the mastery with which he did it. The movie pushes buttons, there’s no question about that. But there was also an added layer to the film that I could appreciate as an adult: a sort of sentimentality about childhood that was sweeter for the fact that the movie figures so strongly in mine. It’s a rare experience for a film to allow an adult to revisit the world from the level of a child.

I think that’s what makes it special to me now.

December. No friend of the Monday Project.

Three Mondays. That's how many have been lost to Christmas activities and scheduling conflicts in the coming month. Work and weather permitting, it will be December 20th before I am home again on a Monday night. Christmas should also put the screws to the last week.

As a result, the movie project is likely to become a little scattered. Updating this blog will get a little dicey.

I mention all of this in case there is any radio-silence in the weeks to come. I don't intend it. It's my plan to keep watching the movies, and I hope that there will continue to be at least a few updates per week. But who can say?

It's in the hands of the movie gods and the Baby Jesus now.

Bob and Doug in 16-bit

Canadian films are a funny animal, no? I’ve tried to throw as many Canuck films into my Monday list as possible, but they are tough nuts to find. Very few carry the weight or reputation of being high quality, historically important, or (sorry to say) even entertaining. Looking for trust-worthy lists on-line is like sifting for gold. As a result, I’m afraid only a handful of Canadian titles are on my 500+ list of movies. Still, if anyone reading this post has any valuable suggestions, please please let me know.

So it is that the first Canadian creature to scamper onto my Monday nights is Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970.) Heard of it, gentle reader? Few people have it seems, though if the DVD packaging is to be believed, the title is "a superb movie, the finest Canadian effort ever, and excellent by any standards" (Montreal Gazette) and "a legend…a landmark in Canadian filmmaking" (Peter Feniak, Globe and Mail). In an effort to put this rep to the test, I asked a few people if they were familiar with the movie before I watched it. My father, who was 23-years old when the film was released and teaching Canadian history in Calgary, tells me that it never showed up on his cultural radar at all (which I can vouch was fuelled tremendously by the CBC.) And if he doesn’t remember it, I would suspect it was not top of mind among most Canadian moviegoers. Film critics, sure. Regular joes, not so much. [Still, I should point out that Shebib’s movie was note-worthy enough to be parodied in a famous sketch by SCTV, which he talks a little about in the commentary.]

So what kind of animal is it then? Well, close your eyes and imagine a Lars von Trier film shot in the early 1970’s on the streets of Toronto. Cinema verité to the extreme, shot guerrilla-style with no budget at all (to call $27K "shoe-strong" would be generous) and a 3-man crew: the film school definition of quick and dirty. Shebib explains in the commentary that the crew had no permission to film at any of their locations and no insurance of any kind. Case in point, from the production notes included with the DVD:

The car that features so prominently in the film was one great worry. The car was an old Chevrolet convertible, vintage 1960, which a friend of Shebib’s painted in outrageous colours. It was acquired without the remotest possibility of proving ownership; as it had passed through so many hands, its ownership history was a complete mystery. Nor was there time to get it passed as a roadworthy vehicle. While shooting it was discovered that neither of the lead actors, nor Shebib had a driver’s license. All in all, they were paralyzed by the prospect of being stopped by the police.

The result is a remarkably natural film, showcasing Toronto as it must have been in 1969. Though I’m told in the DVD packaging that the film has been remastered for DVD, it’s astonishingly flat and colourless (note: it’s not black and white), riddled with film grain and overly dark sequences. It reminded me most of those great Hinterland Who’s Who segments that appeared on the CBC throughout the 70’s and 80’s, highlighting Canadian wildlife with scratchy newsreel footage. Or better yet, the movie feels sort of like your parents’ home movies, catching the atmosphere and authenticity of the early 1970’s, without ever feeling scripted or rehearsed.

It must be this authenticity that makes the film so appealing. The acting in the film is so naturalistic that it’s hard to imagine either of the actors behaving or speaking differently in their regular lives (perhaps this is the case, since only one of the leads was a semi-professional actor.) Nothing about the movie seems composed or directed. The expression that comes up again and again in the commentaries and extra features on the DVD is the "documentary tradition," which was the whole of the Canadian film industry prior to the 1970’s. Shebib himself had his most success with documentary films and so it is that this movie, his first foray into fiction, carries a lot of documentary baggage: stolen shots around the city, close-ups of non-actors, available lighting. Each of these components lend something to the striking realism of the film. The 3-man crew carried all of their equipment in the back of a station wagon and literally improvised the shots and set-ups as they came upon locations. Toronto itself is a character, a very real character, in the film.

The movie also does a nice job of snapping a valuable photograph of the city at that time. The skyline (with only one major skyscraper) is remarkable and the visits to Toronto landmarks (including the old A&A Records building on Yonge Street, which I believe is now the HMV Superstore) are appealing. More importantly (and this is something that clearly couldn't have been appreciated at the time, but is invaluable now), the movie captures the particular look and feel of the early 70’s in a refreshingly truthful way. Between the wash-outed wallpapers, the boxy TV sets, the cars on the street and the overall vibe of the film, I swear (even though I was born a few years after the film was shot) that I can remember when the world looked exactly like this. Unlike Hollywood films of the same period which were still only as sincere as Hollywood’s imitation (look at movies released this year for evidence of this reliability), the movie doesn’t seem to be projected through any filters. What you see is what you get. And what you get is a version of Toronto that only lives in books now.

Tell me if this sounds at all Canadian. A couple of hosers move from Cape Breton to the big city of Toronto, chasing their dreams and a sense of liberty that they can’t find in the Maritimes. What they get up to in TO is a cycle of drinking beer (out of stubby bottles, no less), looking for work, chasing women and sharing cigarettes in the frosty air. Amid all this, there's an awful lot of TV watching and nights out on Yonge Street. The fact is that not a lot really happens in the film; Goin’ Down the Road is extremely light on plot on relies instead on the atmosphere of Toronto, as well as the deflating expectations of these two Eastern losers. But it’s good that way.

The movie must have been good, because even though it took me most of the week to finish it (an indication of my timetable, not my interest in the film), I made the time to sit through both of the commentaries on the disc on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The commentaries were very worthwhile, especially Shebib’s insights into where a lot of the film was shot (location info like shooting at Yonge and Major Mac or Don Mills at Shepherd add to the distinctly Toronto flavour of the film.) Furthermore, there’s a 30-minute interview between the director and Pierre Berton which is a little ironic in light of the fact that Berton passed away this week. [As a point of interest, the Berton interview was shot in 1972 and in it, Shebib explains that one of his favourite Capra movies is It’s a Wonderful Life, which both he and Berton regard as obscure during the conversation. The interview clearly predates the proliferation of this film during the early-80s.]

Music plays a very important part in the film and I’m disappointed to hear (in Geoff Pevere’s analytical commentary) that the songs used in the movie will probably be hard to track down. The soundtrack was written (and largely improvised) by Bruce Cockburn and they soak the film with a certain sad and doomed optimism that is really touching. I’m anxious to include them on my Monday Project compilation. And so it is that I’m going on the hunt…

How about “scurrying along” with Giants?

The following excerpt is taken from the introduction to Roger Ebert’s 2005 Movie Yearbook. I like and agree very much with what he’s saying here. In fact, he’s done a wonderful job of laying out exactly why I’m jamming these movies into my eyes each and every Monday night:

Too many moviegoers look at movies and do not see them, but then it has always been that way. Movies are a time killer or a casual entertainment for most people, who rarely allow themselves to see movies that will jolt them out of that pattern. The jolting itself seems unpleasant to them. I'm not a snob about that; anyone who enjoys a movie is all right in my book. But the movies don't top out; as you evolve, there are always films and directors to lead you higher, until you get above the treetops with Ozu and Murnau, Bresson and Keaton, Renoir and Bergman and Hitchcock and Scorsese. You walk with giants.

Now listen up. I certainly hope I’m not a snob about any of this either. And if I ever am, please please PLEASE - call me on it. It’s not my intention at all to become that snooty movie guy. The purpose of the blog is just to share how much fun I’m having with a lot of movies that don’t make the chart at Blockbuster.

You can read the rest of Ebert’s article here.

She walked up to me and she asked me to dance, / I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said…

A great Monday night movie – in fact, a great movie by any definition – gets past the defenses and finds a home under the skin. These movies do much more than entertain. They take up residence somewhere at the back of the brain and drops time bombs in the days that follow. Experiences like this storm past the traditional meaning of movies; they might be better described as dreams organized and manufactured by committees. I’m learning that a lot of old movies are good that way.

Take Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) (1930). The Blue Angel is a movie that I had never heard of before compiling my Monday list. In fact, the only blue angel I was familiar with before Monday was the one that involved drunken university students, some light flatulence and a Bic lighter. (There’s a world between, let me tell you.) This Blue Angel is actually an early German talkie (subtitled for those of us that don’t sprechen sie Deutsch) about an upstanding and strict university professor who falls in with and then falls in love with an exotic dancer named Lola Lola. (Mind you, that’s not just one Lola; a temptress this bad has to wear the name twice.) What follows, and I don’t think this will give much away, is his downfall. What I won’t spoil here, and what they certainly don’t advertise on the VHS case, is that the professor’s ensuing descent into madness is as primal and shocking as any old monster movie, made worse because we haven’t been anesthetized by decades of familiarity. No, I think it’s safe to say that I was chilled somewhere under my daytime conscience by this film.

Speaking of scary, this was also the most frustrating presentation to show up in the Monday night line-up so far. I’ve begun to take DVD’s for granted. The Blue Angel was only available to me on a crummy library-copy VHS tape, and it was easily the scratchiest and most antique thing I’ve ever seen. Between the jumpy, washed out images and the thick muffled audio, the experience was a little like watching the white ghostly projection of a story broadcast from another dimension. And while this sensation certainly extended the dream-like quality of the film, I could never completely trust the aspect ratio of the picture, which cut off heads and subtitles at random. This is one that I’d love to revisit as a crisp, polished DVD transfer (John Ford’s Stagecoach is another.)

One thing that I will come back to again and again when I’m watching these old movies is the awesome economy of storytelling. The brevity of information on-screen (and the presumed intelligence of the audience on the part of the filmmakers) is marvelous. Vast sections of the film pass with little or no dialogue, letting the actions and looks of the characters fill in the details of the story. Considering the age of the film, this might well have been a consequence of restrictions imposed by the new sound technology being used, but the ultimate effect on both the narrative and the mood of the film is breathtaking. [I should also point out that big chunks of the German dialogue were simply not subtitled on my VHS copy, meaning that there were a few points where I had to draw my own conclusions about what was being said. These sections didn’t fall during any of the key turning points of the film, but they did remind me I was watching a foreign movie from time to time.]

The Blue Angel shares a curious connection with the theatre. It’s no secret that screen acting (and in many cases, the stories themselves) came from the vaudeville tradition, but what’s fascinating about these early movies is that the connection is still so strong. A lot of the actors in these films came up on the stage or in the circus-like environment of the vaudeville houses. As a result, The Blue Angel is at its best when it’s in this environment. Much of the film unfolds backstage and on the road, and between the clowns, the bears and the overall circus environment, the film seems like a credible witness of that sort of life-style. In fact, the movie delivers some pretty racy material (relatively speaking), including a couple of sequences with Marlene Dietrich stripping down or wearing only her briefs.

And on that note, let’s talk about Marlene Dietrich for a moment. Looking back (and I’ve already told you that I had not heard of this movie before), I imagine that she was the primary reason why this movie found its way onto my Monday list. Dietrich is one of those old, old, old-school actresses whose name is more famous than her face. I’ve never seen her before and I doubt most of my generation has either. She was, if the film books and the Internet are to be believed, a model of the style and fashions of her time. The highest paid actress in the industry. Enormously popular on both sides of the ocean. A 1930’s sexpot. The whole package. OK, that’s all fine. But reporting back from the 21st Century, I’m afraid she was also a little manly. In fact, startlingly so. And not altogether the best actor on the screen in this movie.

I want to give that title to Emil Jannings, who played the central role of Professor Immanuel Rath. Jannings delighted me throughout the film, giving a subtle and surprising performance that never seemed to go where I was expecting. In fact, his performance was so believable and human that I think it’s the very thing that grounded the film for me (particularly in that rocky opening, as I struggled to get past the VHS flaws and into the movie.) His transformation is equally spectacular; I revisited a couple of early scenes in the film before returning the movie and marveled that the same actor played the professor at the start and end of the film. [Spoiler ahead, my mates. One thing is certain: I won’t be able to look at the sad face of a circus clown again, without flashing back to the final scenes of the movie.]

Now despite the fact that I’ve already spilled that one small spoiler, I want to write about that ending without speaking further spoilers. It has been promised to some that I will try keep these reviews as clear of spoilers as possible. While I can’t imagine anyone reading this will be lining up to watch an old German film anytime soon, I won’t spills the details of the conclusion. Mostly because the finals scenes are remarkable, and I think everyone should see them. Suffice to say that the final minutes of the movie were strong enough to propel the movie from being a curious museum piece to a deeply troubling, nightmare-painted, piece of scar tissue. The movie ends (mostly) in the theatre house where much of the story takes place, but the greatest miracle is how the final act elevates the action from burlesque side-show to Pagliacci-ish Grand Opera. The melodrama is off the planet.

And that, my friends, is what sticks with you in the days that follow.

An ocean of red brake lights.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that I loathe the drive to and from work. Nor am I saying that it was definitely a good idea that T. and I bought a brand-new bigger house closer to the office (even if we have to wait 21 months for the house to be built.)

But what I am saying is that I spent more time in the car tonight, struggling with the absurdity of the 401, than I did watching the whole of tonight's Monday night movie. [It was The Blue Angel, in case you're asking - details to follow in the days to come, traffic permitting.]

The saddest part of this post is that I had almost 2 hours to dwell on it.

When you put your hand into a bunch a goo...

Timing is everything.

Here’s something I never thought I’d say, but I was in a military mood on Monday night. Having spent much of the weekend with Roméo’s Dallaire’s devastating Shake Hands with the Devil, I had spent many hours trying to adjust my thinking to the politics and military maneuvers Dallaire describes in his book. I was already thinking about artillery and infantry and leadership issues. I think I was in the right head space to watch Patton (1970), though let’s be clear here: Roméo Dallaire and General George S. Patton could not be more different, both in personality and leadership style.

I carried baggage with me into Patton. My expectation (and first impression) was that Patton, being a decorated and much-ballyhooed war hero, was someone to be admired – at least by the gung-ho American audience who regard this film as a classic. I didn’t expect him to be my hero necessarily, but I certainly expected that he would be hero-like, possessing some qualities I would admire. However as the movie got underway, I became more and more aware that Patton was not only a bastard (which was no surprise of course), but that he was also a bit of a fool: glory-driven and arrogant. In fact, the Patton on-screen seemed to me to be no hero at all. Despised by his men and tolerated (barely) by his peers, Patton was a wild card that no one seemed to have much tolerance for. The early scenes were a bit of a struggle for me, as I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be identifying with or admiring Patton (in which case, the movie was failing) or simply marveling at George C. Scott’s spectacular performance. I chose the latter.

Let’s talk about the good stuff then. Patton – by way of George C. Scott – is a wonderful character, a full-bodied performance and a great many things that I didn’t expect: a poet, a student of history, and a fiercely spiritual man who believed strongly in reincarnation. I particularly enjoyed the assessment that he was an anachronistic Romantic warrior forced to lead troops in the 20th Century. But of course, that’s entirely right. Even 60 years ago at the height of the biggest war in history, he was starting to become dangerously outdated, a relic of a different type of warrior. Imagine with me the surprise then that the balls-out, war-loving General, who was already out of fashion by the end of WWII, would likely fit in better with this year’s president’s agenda than any in the last 6 decades. I don’t want to stymie this review with politics, but with the climate of the world today, it’s tough to watch a war-movie without thinking about the real wars going on in the world. And watching Patton in an early 21st Century context is probably a pretty similar experience to watching it in 1970 (when another widely unpopular war was deep underway.) I can’t help but think that even as Patton’s behaviour is thrown up on the screen for scrutiny, there are some (active) military leaders that might admire him and overlook the critique.

Patton was written by Francis Ford Coppola, which seems a little funny. The reason being is that Patton’s swaggering battlefield bluster reminds me so sharply of Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore character from Apocalypse Now. In that film, there’s a scene when Kilgore surveys the battlefield, elbow on one knee (just after the "smell of napalm" line) and observes that, "someday this war will be over." The burden of the line is that without the war, the true warriors (like Kilgore) will not be able to survive. Patton is another of these doomed characters. There’s a melancholy throughout the last act of Patton (after Hitler’s forces are defeated) when Patton realizes that, by winning the war, he has also destroyed his own sense of purpose. He grapples with the idea of starting up a new war right away (against the Russian allies – prophetic, no?) but resigns himself instead to the fact that he’ll never be in another world war. That realization drains him. And maybe that also goes some distance to explain the war-mongering leaders in the world today: where would some of these men be without their wars? [I’m getting further from the point here, but it reminds me most of that classic Looney Tunes cartoon where Elmer Fudd finally kills (or rather, thinks he kills) Bugs Bunny. Depression sets in for him immediately.]

So then. That’s the good…

The purpose of this blog is a little funny. After all, I’m watching and writing about movies that have already (in most cases) proven themselves to be classics. Thousands of words have already been written. Some of these movies have books written about them. I’m not really telling you anything you don’t already know if I say that a movie is good or isn’t good. Case in point: Patton won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, so there’s no point trying to tell you that it isn’t an accomplished movie. Instead, this blog is really about my impression of the film, or better yet, answering the basic question: did I like it?

The truth is no, not really.

I’ve grappled with this question a little bit, because when I don’t like a movie, I always like to know the reasons why. I’ve been running through a list of ideas. Was it perhaps that I’m not a big fan of the war movies after all? Patton is about little else other than a revered general launching an invasion. But then I remembered my affection for Apocalypse Now, Band of Brothers or even Saving Private Ryan (and more recently, Barry Lyndon) and I concluded that not to be true at all. Big explosions are the bee’s knees. I love war movies as much as any genre and look forward to more of them in the Monday line-up. Perhaps then, could it be that the main character was so unlikeable? But again, there are so many movies that I adore with unsympathetic leads that there’s no point in even trying to pack together a list. That’s not an issue for me at all. Bring on the bastards. Was the movie less than meticulously performed and directed? Absolutely not. Again, who am I to pick apart an Academy Award-decorated picture like Patton? The movie was perfectly great.

Nah, it just seemed to me that there were a handful of things that prevented me from completely enjoying the film. Chief among them: the stiff and spare battle sequences, that seemed more akin to an A-Team episode than a war epic; the portrayal of Patton’s war-time nemesis, the British Commander Montgomery, played so much like a panty-waist as to seem like a retired Monty Python character. Really, the movie just didn’t take off.

So let’s leave it at this. I don’t know what it is exactly, and I’m not going to call is a misfire in the Monday Project (because I certainly expect to feel cool about a good many titles in the 500+ list that are queued up to go.) It was a fine experiment.

But by Good God, let’s hope George C. Scott shows up again.