Just about ready to finally close out the TCM Festival, only running a couple of weeks of weeks late. Heh. Anyway, here are some capsule reviews for the other films I saw but didn’t end up writing full reviews of, for whatever reason. I also threw the couple of shorts programs I saw in here.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

1966 Italy. Director: Sergio Leone. Starring: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef.

(4.5/5)

I’ve seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly before, but never on a big screen, and I felt that experience was deserving of my time. And it was. There’s a lot more to the movie than I remembered, and I was really struck this time by how omnipresent but yet detached the Civil War is from the main story – our bandits come into close contact with it several times (finding the stagecoach of soldiers, getting captured, becoming involved in the standoff over the bridge), but it’s almost always a mere obstacle in their way. It’s kind of a fascinating juxtaposition, really, between all these men fighting a futile war out of duty and our anti-heroic outlaws double-crossing their self-serving way to a treasure. Anyway. I think that kind of thoughtfulness and depth is what makes this movie great, but what makes it awesome is the score, Clint Eastwood’s implacable smirk, Eli Wallach’s desperate maneuvering, and the languid pacing that knows exactly when to pick up. That last showdown scene has some of the best editing ever in film. Oh, I was also a little surprised to note how close a lot of it is shot. Sure there are a lot of wide vista shots, but for a widescreen western, there are a TON of closeups of faces and eyes – far more than you see in 1950s widescreen films, I think. There are times when it’s positively claustrophobic, which makes for an interesting effect on a giant screen in a huge cinema.

A few more capsule reviews after the break.

The Big Trail

1930 USA. Director: Raoul Walsh. Starring: John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall.

(4/5)

The Big Trail was the first sound film shot completely on outdoor locations – for that alone, it’s interesting. Add in John Wayne’s first role, an early widescreen format, and some jaw-dropping set-pieces, and there’s a lot to recommend the film. Director Raoul Walsh isn’t quite as well known now as he probably should be, but he’s one of those directors who can pretty much always be counted on to deliver a solid picture. This time he pulled no punches and took hundreds of extras, a solid dozen or more covered wagons, a few thousand head of livestock, and who knows what all else out on location to shoot this thing, and though the sound quality is a little muddy at times, everything else is definitely solid. Wayne is a trapper who tags along with a wagon train going down the Oregon Trail partially because he’s after a trio of men in the group who he thinks killed a buddy of his and partially because he’s stuck on one of the girls heading out west. Their relationship is rather refreshing for the time, honestly – it’s wittily written, and gradually developed throughout the film so that it never feels forced or takes up too much screen time. Both sides of the story (romance and revenge) develop organically over the weeks and months of the trail. But beyond that, you’ve got magnificent set-pieces – challenging river fordings, the obligatory Indian attack, and my favorite, a scene where they come to the top of a bluff and lower all the wagons and livestock one by one over the cliff on ropes. That was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on film. The one thing that detracted from the film, and this is partially due to the time it was made, is that the music is very programmatic and doesn’t always fit well with what’s going on. It makes the climactic scenes rather flat – which in one way works, because I did like the rather mundane quality that some of the river scenes had, as if this is just the way it is, we’ll get through it, no need to make a big deal about it – but also tends to make the film as a whole feel all the same. There’s not a good sense of rise and fall that would help drive the film along, something an original score (which wouldn’t really be written for films until 1933′s King Kong) would’ve helped a lot. (My rating would probably go to 4 1/2 stars if the music were better, in all honesty.)

Jubal

1956 USA. Director: Delmer Daves. Starring: Glenn Ford, Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, Valerie French, Felicia Farr.

(3.5/5)

Yet another western I caught (I love westerns; those and musicals are my blind spots – I like almost anything in either genre) that I hadn’t seen before. This is on that apparently played a lot on TV in the early days of TV, but has suffered from a highly faded print over the years and this is the first time the color has been restored to its original glory, and I will say it looked quite good. Glenn Ford is the title character Jubal Troop, a drifter who snags a job for a good-hearted rancher played by Ernest Borgnine. The plot thickens when Borgnine’s sexy wife starts trying to seduce Jube, prompting jealousy not from the unsuspecting Borgnine, but from her previous philandering partner, ranch hand Rod Steiger. So we got ourselves a nice love quadrangle with a fairly blatant femme fatale – you could almost argue that this is a film noir set of characters in a western setting, which is pretty cool in and of itself. The story plays out with some unexpected twists and turns, and overall I quite enjoyed it.

The Day of the Triffids

1962 UK. Director: Steve Sekely. Starring: Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore.

(4/5)

I had barely even heard of this movie before reading about it in the program, though if I were more up on my 1960s sci-fi I’m sure I would’ve; it’s a genre I’m starting to get a lot more into so I jumped at the chance to see it at a midnight screening. And I wasn’t disappointed. A strange and beautiful worldwide meteor shower has two effects – it causes everyone who saw it to go blind and it creates maneating, mobile plants called triffids. The few people who didn’t see the meteor shower try to survive, save as many others as they can, and avoid getting eaten along the way. There are few truly scary moments (the triffids are pretty slow, so outrunning them isn’t a problem until there just get to be too many of them), but there’s kind of an underlying dread that’s pretty effective, and a couple of characters vie for the scream queen title pretty vociferously. It’s quite enjoyable for fans of sorta cheesy sci-fi/creature features. I mean, come on. How can you not love a movie with a poster like that?

Shorts Program

One thing I tried to do when I could was get to the programs of films that I knew would be harder to see any other way, a category that a short program definitely falls into. Also, this scheduling worked out so that I could eat lunch, which I have learned becomes an important consideration at festivals. These shorts, curated and introduced by Leonard Maltin, included everything from a pair of musical numbers performed straight at the camera by Ruth Etting (memorably portrayed by Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me) to the Oscar-winning Robert Benchley comedy How to Sleep to a cheesy but fun spoof on Philip Marlowe-type detective stories called So You Want to Be a Detective. I enjoyed pretty much all of these shorts; the Benchley one I’d seen before, because it’s fairly well-known, but it’s so funny it’s always worth seeing again. There was also a conspiracy theory short suggesting the possibility that John Wilkes Booth didn’t die shortly after assassinating Lincoln as the history books claim, but lived to a grand old age – this wasn’t particularly interesting in and of itself, but it’s directed by Jacques Tourneur, pre-Val Lewton and Out of the Past, but already showing his distinctive moody cinematographic style.

• Ruth Etting Perfoms – not the same short, but I did find a clip of Etting performing: YouTube
• The Pip from Pittsburg – Hal Roach sound two-reeler starring Charley Chase, a lesser-known silent comedian (IMDb)
• Star Night at the Coconut Grove – 1934 film testing Technicolor with an excuse for musical/comedy performances (IMDb)
• How to Sleep – YouTube (see below)
• The Man in the Barn – the Tourneur film (IMDb)
• Movie Pests: A Pete Smith Specialty – one of a series of Pete Smith-voiced comic shorts (IMDb)
• So You Want To Be a Detective – one of a series of “So You Want To…” parody shorts (IMDb)

Fragments Program

I only saw half of this program of surviving fragments of largely lost films, but I’m glad I made the effort to catch some of it. Seeing these clips is a somewhat bittersweet experience. On the one hand, it’s really special to be able to see them at all, but on the other hand, as the UCLA Film and TV Archives representative put it, you “can’t view a fragment without being acutely aware of what is missing – and what is irrevocably lost.” That is, something near 80% of all silent films and as high as 50% of pre-1950 films. They showed a few surviving sections of two Clara Bow films (Red Hair and Three Weekends, both based on stories by Elinor Glyn) – the surviving reel of Red Hair was actually in pretty good shape except for some roughness around the edges, and honestly, was enough to make me want to seek out the Bow films that do survive. They also had one reel of The Village Blacksmith, a 1922 John Ford film that had long been thought completely lost until an archivist discovered this final reel on a shelf somewhere in between two nature documentaries. These are the kinds of things that make me wish I’d listened to myself that one time in college when I thought “you know, maybe I’ll go into film preservation.” But I didn’t.