Click images for desktop size: "IBM Keyboard" by SteamPunk
Yesterday, on the bus ride home, I ended up speaking with some of the other workers around here. We all agreed our jobs suck. One woman was happy, she had put in nearly 100 hours in the previous 2 weeks and figured to get a paycheck decent enough to take care of her bills.
Then the conversation turned to drinking beer. I got bored and put the iPod on. They each punched me in the shoulder to say goodbye when they got off at their stops.
At home I got a call from one of my kids in London. He's the tragic one - all the talent and physical specs to be a young god but cursed with psychosis which brings him fears with no compensation. He called on my mobile. I'm glad I didn't change the number.
He remembered happy times when the future looked real to him. Now all he has is a present and a dimly remembered past. He's not yet 21.
There was nothing in particular wrong. He just needed to talk with someone who was on his side, who believed in him.
Then I got an email from the electric company reminding me that I had not sent in my payment which is due in TWO WEEKS!
The embarrassing part is that I'd forgotten it completely so I can't act as outraged over this as I'd like. It also blew my budget to hell. That budget seemed too easy . . .


7) The Naked Spur - Anthony Mann
In the 60's there were the spaghetti Westerns. Everyone jumped on them for their depiction of brutality. They must have been com paring them to TV shows because in the 50's Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann and Borden Chase were rewriting the genre and making the most cynical, hard edged, physically and psychologically most violent westerns ever imagined.
I think this is one of the best, but this could as easily been "Ride Lonesome" (Coburn:"What you mean you like me? Like we're friends or something?" Roberts: "Why the hell you think I've been riding with you for 7 years?" Coburn: "I thought you'd just kind of gotten used to me or something.") or "The Tall T" ("Break him Chink."), "Winchester '73", or "The Man From Laramie". They are all superb films as well as great movies. "The Naked Spur" rises slightly above them in my mind as it makes it own rules and standards and then rises above them.
It starts with the absurdly lurid title, gathers steam until a crashing crescendo of vileness and humanity restored.
The plot is there, its interesting enough - a bounty hunter ends up with some accomplices he doesn't want. They have to escort a criminal and his girl friend back for the reward.
The plot is only there as a convenience, to help us understand the people involved here, people all like ourselves.
Jimmy Stewart is brilliant, a true psychotic sociopath. He delivers one of the greatest line readings in film history when the men are jawing around the camp fire: "I loved a woman . . . once."
He wants the reward money to buy back his ranch, a ranch he lost because the woman he loved and wanted to marry sold it out from under him so she could run off with another man. The film never excuses his irrationality or his foolishness, instead it lays it as the bulwark on which this misadventure is set.
Stewart is brilliant combining his "Every man" charm with a psychotic's refusal to admit wrong and a sociopath's indifference to the affect his actions have on others.

Click images for desktop size: "Reunion" by Unknown Robert Ryan gives one of the great villain performances of all time. His "Ben" is the only likable character throughout most of the movie. He sees all life and his evident predicament, being taken back to be hanged, with humor and detached amusement. In fact his character is identical to Stewart's, except in Ryan's mind there is no line between legal or illegal, there is only what feels good.
then there is Janet Leigh, adding to the perverseness of the group by being made up to look as if she were 12 years old. She is by turns a gamin, a tom boy and a sensual lover.
Though clearly not a criminal herself she is on the run with Ryan, even helps him throw stones that could be fatal in their own primitive way. She wants to help him escape not because she is in love with him but for more ephemeral reasons: A concept of freedom and rightness and because he was only nice to her.
The other two, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell are archetypes who's often sudden displays of humanity are jarring and dramatic. They both want Ryan for the reward. Millard is the grizzled prospector who sees more gold in Ryan than he ever found in the hills. Meeker is a lecherous disgraced calvary officer who doesn't see the Indians as human beings.
This is a small potent package of people with a mission that ensures one of their deaths.
Anthony Mann virtually created the film language of landscape as character. He explained it: "In a western you don't have a character enter stage left. The land, the environment is what makes them what they are, like a mother and father."
In previous films landscapes were jagged rocks and deserts, or high mountains and blinding snow. In "Naked Spur" it is the bucolic Rockies, tender and beautiful but with the foretelling of doom that hides in the bright sunlight.
While this film is more character driven than most westerns it does not lack plenty of physical as well as psychological action. Mann knew Chandler and followed his dictum, "If you're ever afraid of things slowing down just have someone open the door and find another guy standing there with a gun."
In westerns that means Indian attacks. The attack here is remarkable for two reasons. Firstly it is through action and response that Mann establishes character's and more importantly the character that they present to themselves and to the world, but it is through action and idleness that the character we conceal from ourselves is revealed to others.
Secondly the attack is told silently but at no time is it not understood as a tactical maneuver. We know what the Indians are doing, what our group is doing and how they each plan to defeat the other.
When Mann started work on "Spartacus" - a film he quit, his battle sequences were of this sort and stand out from Kubrick's battle sequences by the clarity with which the action unfolds. This is a smaller scale lesson to move up to that level, where people aren't just fighting but fighting to a purpose.
Mann's film is a testament to clarity and to humanity. It entertains and enthralls, bewilders and holds up a mirror.
I still think that's what great filmmaking and great movie making are all about.

Oscars tomorrow night. I'm most excited about the tech awards . . . a bad sign . . .
I'll keep trying to complete the list of the 10 best but the films keep getting better and harder to describe as merely great . . . sorry . . .

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