International Hawksblocker: HATARI!, RED LINE 7000

Howard Hawks fans like myself expect motif repetitions: if something works in one Hawks film, you can be damn sure he's going to use it again, and why not? His riffs and motifs strike deep archetypal tones that generate invigorating mythic resonance, especially when they concern men facing death in the service of some grand quest. Whether flying mail over the Andes, blazing the Chisholm Trail, helping save a bunch of ranches from a slimy war profiteer, or just defending the North Pole against some kind of super-carrot, Hawks' men in a group are the men you want to be running around with; their charisma and overlapping witty banter is intoxicating. But there can't always be wars, or endangered ladies, or murderers in jail with rich brothers trying to bust them out, or pilots trying to land in ceiling zero fog, or mighty herds to be driven through a Civil war-torn wilderness rife with border gangs, or a dame whose nympho kid sister is ensnared in the disappearance of her elderly father's IRA-expat drinking buddy. What do these brave death defiers do then? Do we still cheer their risk-taking even if it's just for kicks and/or cash? 

That's what it boils down to: underlying motive. The stuff that makes a hero in one situation is just a death-wish-ridden adrenalin junkie in another. Without a worthy cause, Hawks' men-in-a-group are far less mythic. There's no nobility in driving super fast around a track, or capturing and caging wild, noble animals for lifetime confinement in zoos. The risk is purely for the risk, purely for the rubes entertainment, which might hit the viewer--slack-jawed in his recliner at two in the morning-- a little too close to home. 

So it is thaat Hawks' later non-western films reveal the less-heroic side of heroism, the urge to find danger somewhere, anywhere. The resulting 'adventures' reveal the sociopathic side of Hawks' masculine camaraderie. We Hawks fans realize his protagonists may be less honorable, far less 'cool' than we thought once they have to adjust to civilian life.

 Hawks, as we know, flew biplanes with Faulkner in WWI. He hunted and fished with Hemingway and NASCAR raced with Gary Cooper. He's clearly a 'rugged' outdoors thrill seeker. Maybe due to some repetition compulsion disorder, some existential PTSD lingering forever after adopting the "hurrah for the next who dies" approach to impending mortality while in the Signal Corps. (WWI being, let us not forget, before the full development of parachutes). For all his bravado, the Hawks male is still stuck at the Russian roulette table in Hanoi.  He's still signing up for another tour in Iraq's detonation squad like in THE HURT LOCKER.

Hawks made very few bad films in his long career (far fewer than John Ford) and yet he receives far less lionization. The press tend to think of his best work more in terms of the stars that were in it (there's no 'Hawks box' DVD set), thus BIG SLEEP and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT are in the Bogie-Bacall box; ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and HIS GIRL FRIDAY are in the Cart Grant box, etc. Part of this might be that Hawks' personal stamp is harder to discern, so comfortable is he across a spectrum of genres, sometimes mixing genres within a single film; another part, that his iconoclasm kept him independent, signing with studios for three picture deals or getting financing from this or that outfit; no studio is able to claim him, the way Columbia claims Capra, Paramount claims Lubitsch, MGM Minelli, or Fox Ford. Still, when many of us list our top all-time favorite films, Hawks takes up at least half the top twenty. My list does at any rate.

But, by the mid-1960s we had come a long long way from Hawks' prime. He was old --perhaps less clear-eyed about what true courage was. Nonetheless, even the last last few films in his oeuvre reward study, if only to further discern the pros and cons of his recalcitrance. I've already analyzed one of his very last comedies, MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT? (see: Fear of Fishing), and now....

HATARI!

1962 -  **1/2

This the one with John Wayne lassoing --and having his jeep butted by--charging rhinos, fleeing giraffes and snorting wildebeests. Africa + Wayne = how can it fail? Wayne and Hawks, these old dudes, were really out there doing this crazy shit! But it can fail nonetheless, at least for some of us. Why? Blame it on the Buttons. And other things. 

The problems start with the supporting cast, continue with subject matter and end with the subtext. As with Hawks' very last film, Rio Lobo, he saddles the Duke up with a bunch of young unknowns, some from other countries, or sons of friends, and these youngsters can't always capture the finer points of group camaraderie or erudite cocktail hour wit the way, say, Wayne could with Dean (Martin), or Mitchum (Sr)., or Montgomery Clift (honey). And there are very slim pickings in the way of cool Hawksian women. In fact, there aren't any. Was Hawks too old to pick 'em and build 'em from the ground up, training their voices to go deeper, light cigarettes cooler, and not refuse drinks like little bitches? 

That's what hurts the most. 

Of the two women in Hatari, French actress Michèle Girardon is a bit too mother-earthy as ranch owner Brandy, and Italian model Elsa Martinelli (as a visiting photographer who hooks up with Wayne) shows all the emaciated signs of either fever or an eating disorder, making her regular refusal of cocktails all the more painful and buzzkilling (as Don Birnim says "in the morning it's medicine! Haven't you learned that yet?"). Nothing kills the mood like a person who is so miserable and you know one drink and they'd be the life of the party, but they just say no, and sulk, and wonder when you're coming up to bed. Then come downstairs every hour or so to glare at you as you slowly kill all available bottles. 

The ration girls to men is absurd and all the men are either too old or too short, or both. Brandy is shared by diminutive German actor Hardy Krüger (who wears a little pair of khaki shorts shorts so we can see his bandy little legs) and lil' froggy Gérard Blain. Valentin de Vargas (he played the leather jacket-wearing ball-having "Pancho" Grande in Touch of Evil) is OK though, and--in the type of cigar-chewing role usually reserved for Ward Bond or George Kennedy--Bruce "Kong-block'" Cabot is "the Indian." So there's them, but they don't scintillate. 

Now, I have nothing against international casts, but if English is not your first language it can be hard to sound breezy and conversational while delivering a mouthful of brilliant Leigh Brackett dialogue. I mean this as no reflection on the actors themselves, only that the international vibe might be what Hawks or the distributors wanted but--we who love Hawks' unique ability to bring witty overlapping dialogue to a group brave and skilled men and witty deep-voiced, cigarette and scotch and soda women--don't like to see what we like to see taken away by bad casting decisions. These actors just can't deliver the overlapping lines fast enough, or with enough zip, nor do they know what words to emphasize so the dirty jokes come across. It's like asking Paul Henreid play Oscar Jaffe or Walter Burns. Sure, Henreid is great but he simply can't talk fast enough and with enough tail-flap flair to get lift-off. 

There are perks to be found in the margins: the memorable Henry Mancini score ("Baby Elephant Walk" comes true) and the lack of stunt doubles being the top two. We can assuage our guilt over the animal abuse by the knowledge Wayne and company had the guts to do all their own animal-wrangling; there's no rear screen projection and no stock footage of any kind ("of any kind, David") and it makes a huge difference. Compare it something like MGM's Tarzan series (which relied on all three) and the many scenes of the groups' complex hunting strategy as their vehicles roar across the plains, driving vast herds before them, really sparkle in the African dust, revealing the film's clear influence on, amongst other things, Spielberg's Jurassic Park: The Lost World. 

I like some other things at play here too: the leisurely cycle of the film follows, say, Hemingway's first person accounts of safaris, like Green Hills of Africa, where the book is divided into hunting on the plains by day and drinking/conversing at night; the cycle of animals and drinks, hunts and conversations, as natural and easy as the progression of drinking life itself. 

But this time--rare for Hawks--it's the night part, the drinking, that fails. Breeziness and camaraderie are a hard thing to force.

I could forgive that forced feeling, maybe, but it's harder to forgive after trying all day to shake the bad vibes of watching these wild and free animals terrorized and forced into a lifetime of captivity. Surely, such behavior is the anathema of heroism. 

But I can even forgive that.  

But what I cannot forgive is the presence of something far worse than bad vibes or forced joviality. It's something so odious, so vile and unspeakable, no forgiveness is possible.

And that thing is a hirsute little ham named Red Buttons.

Red Buttons, the original red-headed stepchild... I love his convulsive dance marathon heart attack in They Shoot Horses Don't They? But in Hatari! there's no need to ask which animal I'd like to shoot first.

Sure he's got a kind of Rooney-like Arthur Murray tenement hoofer grace to his burly hobbit movements, but his hammy cowardice and passive aggressive cockblocking drag the joie de vivre down over the film's wings like a steel mesh net. Endlessly showboating, whining, blowing up one of the blazing hot Serengeti's last acacia trees, solely in order to abduct a whole tribe of monkeys who live in its branches, and then getting drunk that night and refusing to let anyone else talk about anything but how he was too scared to watch his big moment of triumph... oh my God!  He's as un-Hawksian as it's possible to get.

Imagine if you parachuted Jerry Lewis down into Casablanca, cast him as a waiter at Rick's, and told him to do everything he can, up to abd including jumping up and pissing on their table, to prevent Ilsa and Rick from hooking up. Remember that sketch in SNL with Fred Armisen as the weathervane character removed from Wizard of Oz? Surely it was based on Hatari's Buttons. Was that sketch written after seeing this movie. Abbot and Costello are the souls of wingman discretion by comparison.

Not only is he a cockblocker of Wayne and Martinelli's blooming and unrealistic romance, not only does he steal all the ice normally used for cocktail hour (for his poor widdle ass after falling into the pig trough), not only does he kill an acacia tree to snare a barrel of monkeys, he steals the Earth Mother girl from the Froggy and the bandy-legged Hitlerjugend who've been fairly and gentlemanly dueling for her hand all through the first half of the film. And how? By pretending to be hurt! He plays the sympathy card, and ever the maternal caregiver, the animal husbander, she buys it. As Ursula the Sea Witch would say, "Pa-thetic!" 

Hawks has made dozens of films over his long career but Buttons represents a 'new' kind of character for Hawks, one so foreign to his 'isolated men in a group' dynamic here's no defense against him, like an invasive species. The closest thing to an antecedent is perhaps Major Horace Applegate (Charlie Ruggles) in Bringing Up Baby's or the US Army as a collective whole in I was a Male War Bride. But those were pure comedies, with major stars in the forefront and veteran support who knew their job was to give the stars room to breathe rather than forcing them off camera and sucking the air out of their lungs. 

Perhaps we can understand late period Hawks well by contrasting his two tame leopard-in-a-bathroom scenes, the one in Bringing up Baby (1938) and the one in 1962's Hatari!. In Baby, savvy Susan Vance, lounging in her cool NYC apartment, pretends she's being attacked by a leopard in order to get naive David (Cary Grant) to charge over to her and 'save' her (he doesn't yet know it's a tame leopard and she doesn't tell him). In Hatari!, smarmy Red Buttons takes advantage of a naive journalist's natural fear of a leopard walking in on her in the bath (unaware it's a tame leopard) to charge in with chair to pretend save her. But while Grant's over-acting was--and he knew you knew--a front, a grown man play-acting in a Cavellian comedy of remarriage, in Hatari! Red overacts and gesticulates as if an amphetamine-spiked Mickey Rooney crash landed in the middle of Rio Bravo and tried to turn the whole thing into an Andy Hardy picture before Hawks came back from the bathroom.

Anyway, the real problem is sex. The way Buttons cockblocks Wayne constantly, interrupting his woo at the worst times, is forgivable the first time. But by the second it's downright obnoxious, and the third, fourth, fifth... etc. completely toxic. Someone must have found this funny. But it's not. Perhaps. with Viagra still decades off, Hawks had lost all interest in sex's non-farcical aspects. But it's ridiculous and annoying that we're not supposed to wish Buttons would wind up gored by a bull so bidness could get down to. Wayne has to marry the girl (offscreen) at the end just so they can get a hotel room together in town, but then their bed is literally crashed by her three baby elephants, and Red of course, opening the door for them to come in and trash the place. Haw Haw.

Sorry to vent, but I've always hated cockblockers. I HATE THEM SO MUCH! Sex is hard enough to arrange on its own, especially in an uptight country like America. We don't need any more interruptions than we already have. I'm from the school of thought where when you see a buddy hooking up you don't interrupt, you quietly fend off the other suitors, dive on any grenades if needed, or otherwise just give him some room and leave him to it. I always thought Hawks felt the same, and I'm sure he did once. But just imagine if Bacall's attempted seductions of Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944) were continually undone by Brennan's drunk character randomly barging into the room without knocking, lighting her cigarette before she can ask for a match, asking for change or talking about the dead bees, over and over and over... for three hours. Never giving them a chance to be alone together. But Brennan would never do that. Not ever. 

Anyway, Wayne has enough problems without Red as it is. Smoking cigarettes and getting older with every drag, the red sand radiation from The Conqueror mutating his cells, he seems always at risk of stretching his cowboy actor legs once too often in taming of wild animals, like he could wind up like Clark Gable in real life after that mustang in The Misfits (1961) and break something in himself that his body's too old to repair. Hawks and Wayne would be better off back in Hollywood, or on location someplace with an ocean breeze, instead of the animal dung and tsetse fly-ridden dust of Kenya before the rainy season. At this stage in his life, Hawks should be like John Ford, presiding over pointless Irish brawls in paradise instead of racing around after rampaging rhinos and wildebeests or giving a coiled Irish ham like Red Buttons an inch of improv leeway. 

To get back to the girls in Hatari!, all two of them, and all their lack of sex appeal. Now, pop culture has taught us a bit about eating disorders since 1962, I've had anorexic friends in AA point out all the telltale signs, like teeth that look like they're trying to crawl out of your mouth before they dissolve. So it's easy to see that, unless she was suffering from yellow fever while on location (which is probably and maybe even the cause), Italian model-turned-actress Elsa Martinelli had an eating disorder that pains one to look at her in the same aghast way one used to look at Ally McBeal. I could overlook that if not for other sins against Hawksian nature she commits, like when she declines a drink after her first long bumpy, dusty hard safari animal-wrangling jeep ride. In a Hawks movie, when you're all sore as hell from being bounced around, you just don't refuse a first-rate analgesic like alcohol! It's like saying your head hurts too much to take an aspirin! I can abide anything but that kind of idiocy. Bet that Agnes of yours wouldn't turn it down, as Cannino says to little Jonesy in The Big Sleep.  This is frickin' Hawks country you're in, Elsa, not frickin' Texas Female Baptist College on a Blake's bus tour! These people are men!

And I wish to god I was with 'em.

Unless they were in goddamned Africa.

Center: the normal-height human who won Ann Darrow

---

RED LINE 7000

1965 - **1/2

This saga of interwoven young racers and the women who chase them is one of Hawks' harder-to-find and hardest to like later films. Shot in a full frame (1:85) ratio (at least that's the only version available), which is odd for a 1965 racing movie, it's on Amazon streaming finally and the stock car races are thrilling in a dusty STP sign and authentic stock car race kind of way, with great fiery spinouts and crashes so seamlessly interwoven into the storyline you'll swear the real actors are in the wrecks. Was Hawks' camera just hanging around waiting for crashes or were these stunt men? Or did he take stock footage of crashes and then reverse engineer them (paint a car to look like one that had already crashed, and then put one of his stars in a mock-up, etc.)? Knowing Hawks, all three and then some. A lifelong race car driver, he was one of the stunt drivers for the film (at age 69!) and unlike 90% of racing movies there's never a doubt which character is in which car.  The sound is so solid you can feel the engine throbbing in its exhaust RPM through your couch, even without a subwoofer.

It's been called a loose remake of Hawks' earlier racing pic, The Crowd Roars (1932 - see my review here), which is also distinctly 'lesser Hawks.' But Red Line is really part of the 'interwoven young lovers revolving around a cinematically-intriguing profession' genre, with its roots in trashy beach reads reaching as far back as Cinemascope jet trash like How to Marry a Millionaire (1957) The Interns (1962), The Carpetbaggers (1964), and still going strong by the late 70s. There was also a then in-vogue thing for stock car racing, traceable in drive-in product of the era, like The Young Racers (1963), Viva Las Vegas (1964), Spin-Out (1966), Fireball 500 (1966), Jack Hill's Pit-Stop (1968) and bigger budget stuff like Grand Prix (1966) and Le Mans (1971). And of course this genre peeled out into the 70s in a lot of directions: the Easy Rider / Wild Angels biker genre; the Convoy / Smokey and the Bandit trucker genre; and the Monte Hellman Two-Lane Blacktop existential pink slip genre. So in a way, films like Red Line 7000 are the connecting thread between How to Marry a Millionaire and Mad Max. 

Red Line is Hawks down to its rims, but it lacks an axle; the wheels just spin right off the car and off into the gutter. None of the women are exactly Hawksian (Charlene Holt aside), they're far too masochistic and self-abasing (they're just racing groupies- with no other career or interests), and the men are all unattractively stunted on some level when it comes to women. Misogyny has always been anathema to Hawks except in his two racing pictures, where the men seethe with contempt over any girl turned on by their speed. Red Line includes the first time ever in Hawks' canon where a 'good guy' hits a woman. Worse, it's James Caan! He gets jealous over his new girlfriend (Hill) while shouting "Slut!" at her because she slept with his on-track rival, albeit before meeting him. Usually that's enough right there to warrant a man getting killed, or at least pistol-whipped into releasing Walter Brennan. Here the girl seems to be more concerned with the condition of her man's knuckles than her black eye.  These women soak up abuse, and then hurry to mop their blood off the floor so their man won't slip on his way to another woman's boudoir. 

That, in the end, is what's left over from The Crowd Roars, the ugly core of why I don't like that movie either. This antagonistic relationship between the groupies of the racing circuit, their slavish devotion arouses the self-hating drivers' death wish contempt. As one who's known and loved rock groupies as a youth, I sneer at the misogynistic sneering of these Hawks racers!

Still, I like Red Line gallons more than Hatari! For one thing, most people are on the same page, i.e. they're American and able to tap the Hawksian esprit d'corp. The one foreign accent here belongs to Mariana Hill--as a yeh-yeh vivant French racing groupie--but it works because she's actually American doing a French accent. A member of the Actor's Studio, Hill offers a classic example of what I meant earlier about American actors doing foreign accents being better than foreigners speaking English as far as overlapping screwball dialogue (ed note: I edited that out from the Hatari review, but you get the gist). There are also a lot more girls than in Hatari!, and they're way better looking. Also the boys aren't terrorizing any animals. They're not exactly doing anything heroic, just racing around in circles, but they're hurting only themselves, their tires, and eventually the ozone layer.

Like Hatari, Red Line operates in a day-night cycle, with nights at the motel and its nearby restaurant / tavern owned by Lindy (Holt). These bar scenes could have been the heart and soul to the film, but Hawks dulls them with some terrible royalty-free country-tinged electric rock, and way too-many weird-looking (presumably) real-life racing figures doing walk-ons. Lindy talks about knocking down a wall in her place, to make room for a band and dancing, now that Holly (Gail Hire)--a recent 'racing widow' dating Caan before swapping with Gabbi for Dan (Skip Ward)--has become a partner. Got all that? What the film really needs though, more than a rock band or a knocked-down wall, or romantic triangle entanglements, is a rewrite. There's no Leigh Brackett or Charles MacArthur or Jules Furthman or Ben Hecht to add the right sense of wit to the repartee. Asking a guy you're having a one-night stand with to: "tell me about the other girls" is an example of the kind of numb-nuts dialogue they would have tweaked to be witty and wild and sharp and alert, cutting through the layers of crap instead heaping them on. Even Hawks might have changed it to "Who was the girl, Steve?" instead of something so dull and flat "tell me about the other girls" --i.e. acidly curious about why he's such a shit instead of being a blank Westworld automaton eager to take notes of all the geisha-like submissive states that please her prospective new beau. As I wrote awhile back about The Crowd Roars, one came away realizing that Anne Dvorak and Joan Blondell were teaching not only Cagney about women, but Hawks as well. But in this film one gets the impression he forgot all over again, but no girl present was up to the challenge. Blondell and Dvorak would have put these men in a headlock and beat sense into them with their heels. 

And as always with Hawks, music is more than just a lull in the action, it's as essential to the bonding of the group as cigarettes (though there are but few of those this time), pouring drinks (again less emphasis than usual with Hawks), and sitting down to dinner at restaurant tables where you know everyone in the place on a first name basis, including the owner/waitress. But then there's the fake band playing fake 'rock' (ripping sax solo and no sax player, drummer barely even hitting his skins, etc--no relation whatever to the music) and the dancing all starts to resemble some terrible AIP beach party freak-out. 

Far better use is made of motel patio pool and a Pepsi machine, the strip of rooms and lights on the pool all paint a very vivid and familiar portrait to anyone who's ever been drunk at a motel and been out trying to find the ice machine while seeing double and getting picked up by a girl you hope is not a prostitute or a shakedown honeytrap. Gabbi comes onto Caan out there while he's getting a Pepsi and it's a groovy scene. Gabbi's supposed to be Dan's girl, so why is she pouring it on? 

It doesn't make sense but what does? And Holly thinks she's unlucky, a kind of black widow of the race track, so wants to avoid Dan's love so she doesn't jinx him. The team owner's tomboy daughter (Laura Devon) champions the towheaded oaf played by John Robert Crawford (he seems way too big and heavy for a racer, like a 200 pound jockey), who throws her over as soon as he wins a single race. But don't worry, though they went on one date and he blew her off after winning his first big race, she goes running to his hospital bed after he's back on the bottom. It's sickening, the kind of thing Hawks never stooped to before.

Hawks' films at their best offer a utopian ideal of professional competence and stalwart support that is tested against terrible danger. It's the sort of thing that, as a man, is as heartening as an evening out with your cool older brother and his friends when you're ten years-old, But in the comedies that stalwart support gives way in the wake of a wild woman and the existential terror of sex, with death revealed below like a trapdoor opening to Hades. The same mythic problems of his comedies muddles his latter adventures, like Red Line 7000; the casting, usually so spot-on with Hawks, seems here culled wholesale from a Where the Boys Are post-spring break yard sale. There's a feeling Hawks didn't rehearse them too much; that they didn't know each other that well before being thrown into a scene. And Hire is a real liability. The great Ed Howard sums up Hire's performance eloquently, getting at the fundamental problem of later Hawks, implying he was losing his Svengali ability to turn normal girls into 'Hawksian women' with deep, sexy voices, which for Hire failed though Hawks didn't seem to notice:  How could Hawks, always justly acclaimed for the quality of the performances he could coax out of nearly anyone, have thought this was acceptable?" 

Personally, her awful performance doesn't bother me that much (and I just fast forward past her song), and more than Bacall she seems to be imitating Paula Prentiss in Man's Favorite Sport? who does a kind of playful take-off on the Hawksian woman. That was fine because it was true to Prentiss' own persona, and done with real affection. With Hire and the other kids though, they either need more rehearsal time, a decent script, decent sets, or all of the above. James Caan's whole thing of how he only wants to sleep with virgins and not any 'secondhand' stuff seems like a problem made up by a man who was pushing 70 in the age before Viagra, angry at his libido for giving out right before the arrival of "the pill." Caan's obsessive Victorian era jealousy leads to a fight with Skip Ward (Hank in Night of the Iguana, where he was perfectly cast since he was supposed to be a sincere dimwit), the only guy who's not an ass, and as a result Hire goes to see him and his new girlfriend, a sexy French racing enthusiast who first shagged the repulsive cornfed oaf. That's life, man, but just seeing Hire there sends Caan into a fury. And we're somehow supposed to care? Robert Mitchum he isn't. 

I mention Mitchum of course because the presence of Charlene Holt (right) made me think of El Dorado, again with Caan, made (hard to believe) the following year. There the the star wattage of both Wayne and Robert Mitchum boosted her own charm level considerably; as their "shared" girl (she says she's more than enough for both of them --we believe her) she plays off their grounded energy marvelously, never trying to steal a scene or do more than her natural-if-limited talent allows. Here there's not a watt to be found for Holt to light up with, and the problem is Hawks doesn't know it. He's forgotten what's important as far as where to point the camera when it's not on the race track and when to recognize a scene is dead and either rewrite it, recast it, or cut it altogether. Wayne could have reminded him, Leigh Bracket would know too and only they probably had the clout to at that moment.

Luckily, there's the racing to save it: unlike so many racing movies, thanks to distinct color coding you can always tell which car is whose and what they're doing to each other, especially as the furious Caan tries to run Skip Ward into the wall. But the thing is, the shots between drinks or drinks between shots are undone since there's no male group camaraderie (only competition) though there's some scenes with the girls bonding by themselves (they're never catty or competitive, even when dating each other's 'second hand' cast-offs), there's not nearly enough drinking or smoking.

Maybe that's the key to good Hawks morale - take away the booze and the tobacco and the coolness dissipates to nothing. Maybe that's why Hawks returned to the western for his last two films, thus doubling his western output. Hard to believe he'd only made two up to that point, and that they were two of the genre's best -- RED RIVER and RIO BRAVO. 

Why they're the best has something to do with loyalty and a code of honor deeper than Fordian military school blarney and sentimental fascism, but when that current of loyalty is undercut or misused in a Hawks film, the whole enterprise begins to drift loose. It's a problem we men in general have, this weird thing where as soon as a girl comes into our lives we try to make her into our mother and then feel suffocated by what we've projected, desperately looking for a way out of a cage we're too numb to realize we built around ourselves and doesn't really exist, and so we cage ourselves twice over by trying to escape her all over again.

But Howard, most of us left this cage, long ago... the marshall came and took Joe Burdett, and we moved out of the jail back to the comfort of the hotel. We don't even pass out cigars anymore. We don't, because there's no 'where' to go once you're everywhere at once. Now the only aspect of our lives we can't duplicate with an image, a keyboard and a mouse is that feminine vice clamp flytrap magnet that pulls us ever inwards towards our projector eye self. To not blaze away from its gravity with as much horsepower as we can cram under that mortal hood takes raw courage; every second we don't press that pedal down is a victory. As Tom Waits sang- "If you get far enough away / you'll be on your way back home." Racing around in an endless oval, these maniacs avoid that risk, kind of - they don't go home, but never get far enough away from it, either, or even see a single sight. If only there was a reason for winning  that boiled down to something more than a junky's fear of withdrawal, a fear strong enough to conquer even his fear of death... or intimacy.

"You rolled, you really rolled" - ROLLERBALL and a 70s Bloodsport Overview

One of the advantages of age is added hues of golden 20/20 hindsight when discussing retro-futurism in movies and for me age doesn't factor into any retrofuturist film more than ROLLERBALL (1975). Today I finally actually watched the whole damned thing (it came on TCM), and understood it, and was thrilled by it in that low-key adultly 70s thrilled way. Why did it take me so long? There are reasons. Roll with me...

ROLLERBALL was a film that seemed to come across the TV quite a lot when I was a child but frankly it seemed far too adult for me to understand and I didn't need a film to tell me football was a violent, icky business. Why bother criticizing our penchant for media violence with more violence? To know the answer you must understand the 70s, the last decade before cable TV and the VCR changed the fabric of American life. Prior to then there were only three major networks, plus PBS and a few local stations on the UHF antenna, and most of them signed off around four AM with the Star Spangled Banner. Football would dominate the ratings any night it was on. Everyone in the family almost had no other choice but to watch it--especially if the principal breadwinner (the dad) called the TV shots-- and because it was so universal it developed a dirty kind of bourgeois cache it doesn't have anymore. It became shared culture across all classes, ages, temperaments. Once families had two TVs, VHS and cable, only the dads stuck around. The intelligentsia moved upstairs to the other TV. Suddenly ROLLERBALL had no choir left to preach to.

And anyway, it was hard to understand the appeal of both football and ROLLERBALL on analog (square) TV, no matter how big the tube. Unless the TV was huge and your eyes 20/20 you had to take their word for it there was even a ball down there. Now they put a digital yellow line to mark first down and with the big HD widescreen even I can finally enjoy it. But back in the day, sports movies and sports action was hard to keep track of, just a lot of 'half images,' and the 'editing for television' endured by the raucous (R-rated) sports movies further abstracted the story into oblivion.

In short, TV was no place for ROLLERBALL. If you wanted the real flavor of caustic satire about the NFL and glorification of macho violence, you needed to get a babysitter and go out to the cinema, the R-rated adult-aimed 'mature' cinema. Little kids like me would have to hear what it was all about second hand, by kids who'd overheard their parents talking to other parents about it.

But today I salute the sports movies of the 70s. They were wild, woolly, untamed, sexual, manic, a bit thuggish but also warm-hearted, loyal, shaggy, and drunk off their asses. Nowadays guys get kicked off the team for so much as a single toke of weed. What the fuck is the point? In the 70s, they would have pissed on your shoes before they pissed in your cup.

Perhaps the ball got rolling thanks to one of the big novels of the era: a savage insider tale of drugs, sex, and violence in the NFL called NORTH DALLAS FORTY, which in 1979 was made into a very popular movie with Nick Nolte-- then a young hunk who'd rose to fame via an early mini-series called RICH MAN POOR MAN (1976 - above right). Nolte wore a big 'stache in NORTH DALLS FORTY like Burt Reynolds, then the #1 box office star in the country thanks to the huge popularity of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (also 1976), which singlehandedly launched a craze for all things trucker-related: CB radios, diners, cowboy boots, biker bar brawls, convoys, sexy hitchhikers, jugs and speed.

smoking! today that would be a thousand dollar fine

Now I can re-examine these films from time's sweet retro distance and what I especially find healthy about NORTH DALLAS FORTY-driven sports satire popularity is the irreverent amount of sex and drugs involved vs. the sanctimonious, sober, overcoming-all-odds feel-good sober tedium in today's editions. Burt Reynolds' roster of characters may have been smarmy shitkickers at times but they were goddamned men. Even the kids got a version of this 'fuck you to niceness' in our own sports satire, BAD NEWS BEARS (also 1976).

Semi-Tough

While these kind of off-the-cuff sports films weren't necessarily critically acclaimed, they were beloved by many parents I knew (parents were younger then): they had broad, causal performances, tough locker room bonding, drug-induced hotel smashing, and Jack Warden as a weary coach going up against shadowy team owners who would do anything necessary to pack the stadiums, including pumping so much cocaine into their star quarterback he could keep playing even on a broken leg.

But for ROLLERBALL, director Norman Jewison is clearly aiming for something loftier. Jeff Kuykendall theorizes Jewison was trying to ape Stanley Kubrick and turn the film into a kind of Clockwork Football:

The problem here is that one could simply summarize the premise of the film, and the message would be inherent: society craves violence and leans toward corruption. The result is a film which is frequently pretentious: grasping at profundity and failing to glance it. Death Race 2000, directed by Paul Bartel and released the same year, ironically succeeds where Rollerball fails, tackling almost the exact same story but delivering it with such over-the-top violence and comedy that the whole achieves the sublime (and on a Roger Corman budget). Perhaps Jewison should have let go of the Kubrick approach; though it’s fascinating to see what happened when John Boorman took the exact same tack for the even-more-ridiculous Zardoz. - Jeff Kuykendall - Midnight Only

So sports movies were the rage along with car chase movies and truckers, in the mid-70s: aside from SEMI-TOUGH and NORTH DALLAS FORTY there was the tangentially-related BLACK SUNDAY (1977 - terrorist blimp attack at the Super Bowl); TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976- assassin at the super bowl); SLAP-SHOT (1977 - brawling bespectacled brothers in hockey, below); BAD NEWS BEARS (1976 -smoking, beer-drinking, cursing in little league); THE LONGEST YARD (1974- prison football team); hell, even M*A*S*H (1969, but popular in the 70s) had a football game to satirize America's love of bloodsport.

And you can see the fundamental difference between today's and yesterday's sports movies with the remakes: The remake of BEARS loses the bulk of the profanity, smoking and drinking (so I hear), which mind you in the original was done by the kids; boy-man Adam Sandler replaces macho man Burt Reynolds in the remake of YARD; the remake of ROLELRBALL is a co-ed affair set more or less in the modern era on a sleazy Eastern European underground circuit, because America is so PC it's out of touch with good old bloodsport so they have to go where life is still cheap. The nanny state mentality makes it far less likely the heroes will bed numerous hotties and snort coke and shoot up steroids and more likely to cry at the bedsides of little dying kids, or scrape themselves up from poor neighborhoods, watched over by magical sober godparents. You know, like they did in the 40s, with the Catholic Legion of Decency breathing down their necks. What's our excuse?

In the 70s, you had games like this:

ROLLERBALL came out before both BAD NEWS BEARS and SEMI-TOUGH, but then again it's 'futuristic' and so is both ahead of the times as well as, now, behind them. Set in 2018, a lot of 'BALL's tropes have come true -- Caan pops in something between a DVD and an old mini-disc to watch home movies.... right there on the TV! In 1975! How did they know? And there's something like a TIVO and at one point Ralph Richardson kicks a big console computer intelligence that talks like a male version of Siri. And all the books ever written have been loaded into the computer-- though instead of being released as Kindle files they're summarized, i.e. stripped of any offending content or ideas that might run counter to the edicts of the shadowy ruling corporation and everyone knows that, um, today shadowy corporations don't control um... us.

But Jewison's 2018 is still a land without cellular technology and digital circuits so it's not that ahead of itself. They're still using punch cards and reel-to-reels and everything's huge and clunky. In the real future we get rid of all that heavy stuff, but keep the Ultimate Fighting Championship.  Roll, baby!

In between the violent sports games, John Houseman lurks and makes grim decisions on behalf of his shadowy corporation not unlike our own Dick Cheney. There's a decadent party where jet set kids blow up the last few surviving trees for sport. And everyone pops these things that come in little Sucrets-style boxes that makes people totally wasted. And like in SOYLENT GREEN, women have been reduced to chattel. James Caan is first given Maud Adams as a wife but then some high ladder salaryman whisks her away and Caan's pretty bent out of shape over it so won't retire when Houseman leans on him. Seems Caan's lone warrior rep is conflicting with the corporation's idea of the game as showing the importance of a group effort (i.e. a North Korean-style halftime show). They keep upping the violence quotient of the game namely to get him killed so his impudence doesn't go unpunished.

As tough a warrior as he is, you can tell Caan's not very bright; he's like the kid who'd rather kill all his friends than let them play while he has to go into dinner. He mopes around at libraries and computer desks trying to get some books about the corporations but none are forthcoming. He really can't understand the motives of the corporation! He's too OLD! Dude, why can't they just say it to his face. Caan's kind of grandiose behavior wouldn't fly in Hollywood no matter how many millions he was worth.

And then Rebecca Romjin (left) in sexy pads in the remake lets us know that now the future is much less macho; it's also tied in with the Twitter generation so that the bad guys can watch their stocks in the franchise rise in value with every kill that happens live on TV. Yeesh!

So what does it all mean. Yes, the original film is still pretty boring so I'm proud I managed to get through it yesterday, partly due to nostalgia and the new widescreen HD TV I got making it easy to keep my eyes on the ball. In honor of my violist dad I also constantly mentioned aloud the names of all the classical music dirges being played by Andre Previn's orchestra on the soundtrack. Also, my subsequent drug experience allowed me to understand the goofy chilled-out attitudes of the partiers. No decade did decadent, spread-out party scenes like the 70s.

But most of all I liked the final ending, where we see Jonathan slowly skating around the corpse-strewn arena in a series of twisted freeze-frame close-ups, his face unrecognizably distorted, as if all the violence and death around him was something he'd been waiting for all this time, so he could devolve into a rabid subhuman pixelated blur. This is a man who will always be the last one standing, a veritable reverse Horatio, holding the Hamlet head of dystopia in his hands as it dies, but then morphing into Roy Batty crushing the skull of his maker.

Trouble is, nothing's ventured or gained in ROLLERBALL, just the struggles of an innocent corporation's TV ratings as an ancient prima donna tries to keep playing a young man's game. Based on the level of drug-free helicopter hovering over today's athletes, the corporate masters in ROLLERBALL seem now to be the good guys. As Houseman's shadowy corporate ruler notes of Caan's mustached sidekick after the opening game, "You rolled, you really rolled." He sure did. Houseman may be the ostensible villain, but hey - he likes a good show. Anyone try to roll like that now, boom! Tested positive for MDMA and out of the game! I say a corporation that doles out drugs and applauds all the things they profess to loathe is A-OK with me. So roll on, Big Daddy, roll on! You may have been druggy and sinister but you were part of that last gasp of the era wherein parents were allowed to be raunchy, excessive and mature at the same time. Now we don't even know how to spell half those words.

Mountain Man in the Middle: Arthur Hunnicutt

He's the craggy cowboy-faced feller who somehow grounds every film he's in--no matter how peripheral the character--with pioneer-style grace and droll aplomb. A Walter Brennan without the fogey sass and twice the steely-eyed mellow. He's just an actor who found a niche playing pioneer-types far older than he actually was, but when he's onscreen you forget you're watching a dude who dropped out of college and joined a theater troupe in Martha's Vineyard before a starring role on Broadway in a hit production of Tobacco Road brought him to Hollywood and low-key fame as a low-key stalwart in westerns. But he's so authentic and natural, he makes whatever he's in take on a fly-on-the-wall documentary air. He's Arthur Hunnicutt, and he doesn't even need our praise. Hell, if he ever got some he'd probably have to quit, he just wouldn't know what to do with it! 

One of his finest roles comes in the sometimes-shown on TCM but criminally-unavailable on DVD-- and a must-burn for Howard Hawksians--THE BIG SKY (1952, above), a poetic, ramshackle film about fur traders who love, laugh, drink, sing, swap tall tales, and occasionally shoot bad guys up in the Pacific Northwest. Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin are the handsomer leads, but it's Hunnicutt who makes it all work with his casual narration. 

Cinema blogger par excellence Ed Howard notes that the central performances of Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin (in the juvenile understudy role Ricky Martin would play in RIO BRAVO) are only so-so (and weren't Hawks' first choices). But that the supporting characters are awesome:

Hunnicutt is especially great in the Walter Brennan-type old coot role. Zeb's outrageous tall tales and deadpan humor — reminiscent of the Squint character from Frank King's great newspaper comic strip Gasoline Alley — are consistently funny, especially his anecdote about sewing a friend's severed ear on backwards, so that whenever he heard something thereafter, he always turned in the wrong direction. (Only the Cinema 3/27/09)

Hunnicutt was actually nominated for best supporting actor Oscar for SKY, but he didn't win. In the meantime, he did a lot of western TV shows. But it's three movies in particular which I'll focus on, because they're all classics, and two aren't on DVD and that makes me mighty ornery. The second I'll mention is on DVD, another Hawks' pic, EL DORADO (1966, above). Hunnicutt is often overlooked when it comes to talking about EL DORADO, and that's probably because John Wayne, Robert Mitchum AND a young James Caan co-star. Ain't much room left on the marquee, 'specially if you add Ed Asner.

But while Mitchum, Wayne and Caan fill the spotlight, Hunnicutt hangs back and steals the show--again by barely entering into it til round halfway down the clock, blowin' on his trusty bugle as a farewell to Cole Thornton since he "couldn't let one of General Hood's cavalry men leave without blowing goodbye". He's 'Bull,' the deputy of drunken sheriff Mitchum, and he blows on his trusty bugle to signal danger (or "Marchin' through Georgia" shooting at church bells to de-perch tower snipers). As in THE BIG SKY, he's the kind of feller who seems too authentic to worry about actual acting; he just brings a wit dry and sharp enough to split a hair'n and a deadpan delivery method too smart to be a southern drawl, but too slow to be much else - and the whole movie breathes bigger, the way colors suddenly become brighter and more focused about halfway through a good meal when you're super hungry and tired. His is the voice of a man who's spent time enough alone in the wilderness and facing dangers both within and without that he no longer itches to go find himself, and so he has nothin' much left to prove 'sept he's lived a fair and colorful life and has a jug full of semi-true tales to tell for it. Such a man wa

THE LUSTY MEN, Nicholas Ray's underseen film from 1952, is a very Hawks-style immersion in rodeo culture, and is actually the earliest film on this list, though it seems the most modern. (the pic up top is from LUSTY, and you can see how much younger Hunnicutt looks without the facial hair). In true and beloved Nicholas Ray fashion, the film places enough importance on every minor detail that you can't be sure what is  meant to be 'foreshadowing' or just superfluous 'atmosphere' the way you can with more careless directors, who use ominous music cues to show you which of Chekov's guns are going to go off in the third. We build with great leisurely poetry the scene of intelligent good people forming an alliance based around a chance to make money rodeo-ing. When Hunnicutt appears, as he usually does, a few reels into the film, once they finally get to the rodeo, you breathe a sigh of relief; if Hunnicutt's there, you know the rodeo people will be three-dimensional good folks, regular people but not cliches. Each one will be vividly etched in the style that means, as with Hawks, each actor gets a lot of input in forming their characters; they overflow the pages of the script without wasting a single extra breath.  And through it all, Hunnicutt is our guide, like your first friend ever made within a new group of imposing strangers, the one who first makes you feel comfortable, long as you don't mind listening to his colorful tales, which are hilarious but which near everyone else in the rodeo circuit has heard already, a few times, not that they don't love him, and he'll probably end up borrowing money, but he always has a dram on the hip when you need it most. And here, with him is his cool niece or whatever relation she is, a kind of Gloria Jean to his WC Fields, a sign of his goodness in that she seems neither neglected nor misused but happy, confident and savvy yet pure. The role of the 'pappy'-style colorful sidekick to a tall gunfighter like Wayne was clearly more Walter Brennan's gig, but when you wanted the stealth third man, the 'mountain man' in the middle, a man who'd compliment Mitchum the way Brennan complimented Wayne, a man to make it all seem suddenly more real and more relaxing at the same time, a man to connect the characters and audience and earth together with an alchemical bugle blow and a funny tale about a man who shot is ear off, there was no one better than Arthur Hunnicutt.

For speculation on why the Lusty Men ain't on DVD, dig my 2008 piece o' passionate masculine brilliance, Lusty Men and Cockfighter.