Odin's Last Stand: WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

A great experimental film premiered on TCM last week from Nicholas Ray, which he shot in the late 1960s-early 70s with his film class while teaching at an upstate NY school. Along the way Nick may not have made a real film per se, but he created a communal spirit. He pulled his entire class out of their other courses and into his decaying orbit--for better and worse--drank in excess, smoked "quantity," had affairs with coeds and generally--as was his wont since the beginning of his long tortured career--alternated between being a benevolent pied piper and a manipulative tyrant towards his crew and coterie. His younger wife sums it up eloquently in her accompanying documentary, and I paraphrase: Nick had passion and an obsessive focus on the project at hand. That focus that never wavered, even when the project was clearly not working--even if it was never going to work--even if it was an unsalvageable train wreck. And that's the difference between an artist and a non-artist (is the ultimate message here). Most of us just walk away from lost causes. For guys like Nick Ray, lost causes are the preferred kind. But is that Quixote-esque madness true courage or fear? Does he worry about the post-film depression experienced by so many filmmaker, the being forced to confront the empty page, the empty budget, the empty house, once more?

As time goes on, Nick and his class's ambiguously semi-finished collaborative collage WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (1973-ish) becomes a self-reflexive right place / right time black hole. An old Hollywood outsider inspires and infuriates and exhausts an upstate New York crew of campus semi-radicals - and films same, and is in turn filmed by the class and his girlfriend, footage of which is swallowed back up into the thing itself (like mounting a serpent on the wall even as it's in the midst of swallowing you). There's smatterings of Ahab, Manson, Colonel Kurz, and Long John Silver in Nicholas Ray's inexorable creative drive as he charges boldly into the abyss of 'semi documentary' ala MEDIUM COOL, GIMME SHELTER, BILLY JACK, I AM CURIOUS YELLOW and so on. He's the kind of film teacher you both hope for and fear, since he has you convinced that if you fail to follow him over the lip of madness then you must not really want to be filmmaker. He'd be great if you needed an ennabler - someone who'll always be drunker and up later than you, and yet never is late to the cutting room (since he never leaves). Whether pretending to hang himself or coaxing tears and anguish from his actors he's always a little bit Norman Maine from A STAR IS BORN, ever a stone's throw from the long swim as he grooms the next generation with a love born of mortal desperation. Left to his own devices, he'd be editing and re-editing this film forever, it's a maze he created just to get lost in, and like therapy, you know you've graduated when you've worked up the nerve to leave him to it. You graduate when you learn to do the one thing he can't teach you, to fucking quit.

Maybe that's all art is, in the end, a moment in an ever-changing maze, where you either say hello or goodbye to the guide who'll either get you lost (if you're stagnant in your foundhood), or found if you're lost too long. Maybe it's because the insane need to always have an ending, a way out, open to them, at least in their imagination. And for Nick, the end is that of a rope or a gun, far less terrifying than the thought of not having a project to distract himself with. Left to his own devices he would be like Orson Welles, tinkering with the edits and sound on each and every film post-KANE until it's snatched from his hands by impatient producers and hacked back into some semblance of order by a sane, orderly film; or drunken De Kooning in his early years, painting over and over on a single canvas simply because he has neither the money nor sobriety required to judge it finished and/or the ability to replace it with a blank one. 

This kind of compulsive behavior when harnessed to genuine art is unstoppable. And it can't fail because it avoids judgment - it's the work in progress - the "previews" for plays, the test screenings for films that would die ignobly if opened up to critical judgment.

The unfinished work fills the void no amount of sex and possessions ever could. Nicholas Ray's film is a success because he worked on it long enough that he could distract his mania for over a year. It's a success because he was dead before he could finish it. It's a success because it's still not finished. It has no terms to be accepted by. It's simply a a con game, wherein a wily old visionary cheats the eater of souls, one last time.

Does the finished product of WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAN amount to anything? Compared to what? The only ideal way to see it would be at four in the morning at a small university projection room with the people who made it; a thick haze of pot and tobacco smoke revealed in the beam of the projector, and co-eds in thick beards and glasses sitting cross-legged in the aisles, passing jugs of wine, with Nick Ray sitting behind you, yelling at the projector or the screen, entering and exiting the room to compliment and juxtapose metatextually his entrances and exits in the film--sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose--and with actors onscreen showing up with beards one reel, then shaven the next, then you see the same actor in the audience, with a half-full beard. 

On TCM in your living room, on your modern day utopian sofa, the film's relevance will depend on where your own head is at: are you a filmmaker yourself, one who perhaps chooses self-reflexivity and post-modern metatextuality as your mise-en-scene, since it ensures the sets are always free, the actors always present? If you come for that, you may find what you're looking for. If you come for political insight, forget it.

I wish I had Ray's mania and am glad I don't. Something inside me keeps me from ever letting go of the rope as I descend into the abyss that Ray jumps into, always, headfirst, holding onto the rope only because he can use it to hang himself if things get too grim. WE CAN'T GO HOME practically dares the audience to dive in after him, right through the screen. He even left us a wide open hole, woven open by a patchwork ring of images of social unrest. Just stick your head through, and let his old Hollywood gravity snuff your scalding flame.

Bride of Bogartstein: IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)

Spousal abuse is so demonized these days that not a single redeeming characteristic is allowed to remain in our violent men of drama. Gone are the magnetic brutes like Stanley Kowalski, gone deep but abusive artists like Dix Steele in IN A LONELY PLACE (1950). It's not surprising then that we're unprepared for how hard it has become to adapt to these characters and their sudden brutal displays. We've become accustomed to not having to think about violent men in any way other than as cardboard action targets, as objects first for derision, then hate, then vengeance, and lastly more derision. No more can they seem sexy, or have good qualities.

But Bogart is Bogart, he could play a serial killer and we'd have to like him, and since he's playing a famous Hollywood screenwriter his tantrums and blinding rage white-outs (1) go unchecked save for police intervention which his studio then works to keep out of the papers. This is the kind of guy you should just get away from, the minute you meet him, but can't since he's famous, witty and charming in a bleak sort of way --he's Bogart! He's inescapable. His fist has a gravitic drag. Thus a brute is allowed to stay brutish as a side effect of his Hollywood success, when he should be in jail, or the ring: "I've had hundreds of fights," he says to Gloria Grahame as his concerned neighbor, as if that's some sort of mark of the martyr, some mark of courage.  Many other successful men in Hollywood must go through their whole adult life without throwing a real punch, especially with the proximity of hotshot lawyers never in doubt.

While Bogart looms like an electric golem gone to gray, Grahame flexes her beautiful face into a Hollywood glamor death mask as she tosses and turns in bed, worrying that she's sleeping with a raging egotist who could fly into a homicidal rage over the slightest thing she does wrong. This keeps her awake and she starts taking pills to sleep. He might not like that, so she worries more: "This one's not going to let you go that easy," snaps her masseuse, who it is implied has given her more than one happy ending over the years. Grahame's sad eyes show that for all his violence and bossiness, Dix is the last non-loser she's likely to run into before her happiness clock expires. But he's worse than a loser, he's a thug with an expensive tux and a case of the eternal shakes.

Bogart doesn't even allow us the comfort of falling back on his Bogart charm. Instead he lets himself get creepy; his dark self-effacing wit seems strained. The Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but his Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which even his actorly charisma can be exposed as vain antipathy. Even Dix's "A simple yes or no will do very well" proposal of marriage comes off like a threat. He sees marriage as providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an face-eating chimp, temporarily cute and calm but... really, the rest of your life with this thing? One loud, sudden noise outside in the street and you could lose a limb. The only way out is to cultivate a penchant for servile masochism. As if to illustrate, Dix's battered agent exclaims to Gloria in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel, and if you want him you've got to take it all" Rationalizing the hurt, he notes: "People like him can afford to be temperamental."

Any self-respecting woman would have left Dix the moment he first snapped, just as Krasner should have left Pollock when he made his first embarrassing scene at the dinner table. But such are those few unlucky moths that are so blind they can only see the most brilliant light, the light of charismatic madness; so they become stuck on the bulb of an ego that has swollen mercilessly with the pumping eternal handshake current of exploding pockets, and the medals that come with surviving the bloody war-like business of making pictures.

I'll admit the first few times watching IN A LONELY PLACE I got a headache, partially from the unpleasant frisson of seeing Bogart so violent, but mainly from all those ringing phones! The road to Hollywood heaven must be paved with nonstop telephone calls. I guess in L.A. they are like music.  The best phone calls I ever had were from a gorgeous film writer girl in L.A. They went on for hours, for days! Phone calling is the very breathing of the biz, and you can tell Dix's line never stops ringing. Ding Dong, The dead witches are in the making. The infernal bells are enough to drive anyone mad.

"Squeeze harder! Harder!"

Director Nicholas Ray loved him some insane abusive men. The link between Dixon and James Mason's tyrannical father in BIGGER THAN LIFE is clear: Hollywood is (or was) the place where white rage fights, shooting, drugs and casual sex are wantonly indulged in, thought about, and depicted for the enjoyment of the world. Certainly Ray indulged in these things in real life--his appetite is legend--but his love makes him different than the poseurs of violence and despair. His forgiveness of his fucked up protags is his way, perhaps, of trying to forgive his own trespasses. Like Sal Mineo's tortured puppy killer in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, or Mason's cortisone-fueled madness in BIGGER THAN LIFE, Bogart's violence is considered an illness for our shocked empathy as well as fear. Both BIGGER and IN A LONELY PLACE show a man who thinks you are swooning at his brilliance and fearless spending instead of cringing in embarrassment like his abused love.

Perhaps only natural bullies can make it in Hollywood; only they can climb the chain of intimidation. Or maybe all this is just a pop culture codependence and denial. Of course it would be damn nerve-wracking living with someone so violent, but Bogart was always a little menacing anyway, that's what gave his heroes their punch--those sudden eruptions--the "that means one of you is gonna get a beating for nothing!" climax of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, or that cruel mirth in his eyes when he knocks out Joel Cairo in MALTESE FALCON.

I just gave some strange writerly advice to someone: "never give it your all unless you're paid less than it's worth." Was that my dyslexia, or was this apparent paradox part of the sick queasy feeling created by seeing what financial overcompensation can do to a man like Dix Steele? When MALTESE FALCON followed LONELY PLACE on TCM (for Bogart Day), the combo seemed like a twisted freak show straight out of the Todd Browning oeuvre: I've seen FALCON a trillion times but suddenly the camera angles seemed beyond bizarre. Long takes of nothing: a phone gradually reached for and talked into offscreen; a phone on the night table; a lit cigarette. I finally realized I should be wondering whether Bogie's in bed with Mrs. Archer, or alone reading a racing form. When we finally see him again it's from low angles, looming around big hotel lobbies or taking his maternal support on the sly from Effie. His Sam Spade becomes a terrifying bully all of a sudden, just from the proximity to Ray's film on the TCM schedule.  after IN A LONELY PLACE is a monster no matter who he's playing.

It's common Hollywood history that he and his first wife Virginia Mayo were known as "the battling Bogarts." So we know this was never a man to fuck with. Such a man is maybe too quick to violence even in WW2 approved locales. Ray is able to locate the monster underneath all the newly-slathered CASABLANCA heroism and underneath the monster, the sweet poet soul in the process of being crushed by the combined weight. Once the war is over and there's no one left to legally kill, the monster in the Bogart persona starts to crack through the detective/war hero/romantic lead mask, right along the crow's feet, and his dormant Frankenstein monster starts trying to reach out to crush someone.

The fourth time through PLACE, gone was my headache over the phones, and to the floor was my jaw at the sheer intense brilliance of Bogart's slow burns and sudden lashings. When something doesn't go his way, the anger begins mounting, slow and inevitably ignored by those who are unaware they need to stop babbling and just back away. After his lashing out, every attempt to quiet him is regarded through progressively more paranoid eyes. In the end the murder mystery is solved and yet Dix has almost started a whole new one. 

Dix's ego is such that he shouldn't be allowed to be in a movie, any movie, but  Ray never gives up on any character, even when they're so foul we recoil in shock that we're seeing them at all, let alone as protagonists. His love for dangerous maniacs is contagious; their lives are his downfall, and our redemption.

NOTES: 1. I had a rage white-out once, and I can tell you it's exactly what it sounds like - you literally go blind; a kind of dissolving white noise signal clouds your vision, and you start lumbering towards your prey like a drunk Frankenstein.

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.

Lusty Men & Cockfighter

Was it mere chance or some higher intuitive cosmic thing that my Monday double bill is Cockfighter and The Lusty Men, the latter because it was on TCM today, Cock cause I finally bought it at the soon-to-move Kim's ($7). I could go on for paragraphs about the self destructive but poetic and essential male traits of competition, animal languages, gambling, booze, womanizing, slouchiness, and adrenalin addiction. But no, I'd rather talk about how LAME it is that neither of these have been restored for beautiful DVD releases. I'm glad Alpha Video put out Cock, and the print aint too bad. But I imagine it would look extra pretty shined up. The Lusty Men aint been out since some old VHS tape you can get on Amazon for $40. What the hell is up with that? Both these films should be taught in men's therapy groups and shown before fight club competitions, at the same time, what the hell's the difference?

How much do you want to bet that it's because the overpaid and therefore cowardly executives at some of these big labels want to shy away from "controversy" with the sexually connotative names? Can you hear them saying "Uh, we're not comfortable being associated with titles that have words like lusty and cock in them?" In that question mark at the end of every statement sort of way? Like they're paid to not take any chances? None? Not one chance that their label might be guilty by association?

And of course there's cruelty to animal issues. Those cocks are really fighting. And those bulls are really chasing and the broncos are really bucking. Ray is deep up in the nostrils of those bulls, and Hellman's colorful cocks look beautiful fighting in slow motion.

The result of all this big league timidity is that two classics of iconoclastic male cinema by two of the great iconoclastic male artists of their day, Nicholas Ray and Monte Hellman, are coasting around the dusty shelves while the parent companies play it safe with tepid tripe. Why isn't there a Nicholas Ray boxed set? What are they afraid of? Are they afraid that men in America might reclaim the poetic warrior beauty and love that is theirs by right and not let it continue to be sluiced into blandness by lowest common denominator CGI patronizing? Or is it just that they prefer to polish films that suck rather than having to listen to jokes about cocks and lusty men? At any rate, Lusty Men would have been perfect to piggy back on Brokeback awhile back and would look extra fine with a Criterion imprint tomorrow, and ditto for Cock, on all counts.