Jour de Fête

Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1949) Tati's first feature length film, featuring the protagonist, François the rural postman (played by Tati), and many of the jokes re-bicycled from his 1947 short The School for Postmen.  Tati expands it with the story of a town's preparations for a big festival, and all the dangers for mayhem that accompany a feature of fun.  

Francois is on his daily rounds, done at their usual leisurely pace, but even more so for all the trouble the slightly officious fâcheux of a mailman can find to distract himself. But, the next day, inspired by an newsreel of how Americans are improving the speed of their mail delivery, he endeavors to increase the tempo of his route.

That's it in a nutshell, but the details, as with most silent comedies (although Jour de Fête isn't silent), are where the enjoyable bits are.  François is a more manic character than Tati's laid-back Mr. Hulot, and has a puppy-like fascination with just about everything and a cat-killing curiosity that gets him into both hot and cold water.  He is everybody's dork with a title, sure of himself and the only one in the room who is.  But his intentions are good.  His results are variable.

Tati filmed Jour de Fête twice, one version in black and white, and another using a color process called Thomson-color, a dicey system and lab that, unfortunately, went out of business before the film could be processed.  The black and white version was released to success, but Tati's dissatisfaction.  In 1962, he re-released it with a sub-plot about a sketch artist making pictures of the festival, and as the artist added colors to his black and white drawings, the colors would appear in the film, hand-tinted onto the film (this is the version of it I saw).  Increasingly, as the day wears on, more and more parts of the fair are tinted, sometimes surprising in what the choices are. 

Thirteen years after Tati's death, his daughter Sophie and French cinematographer Françoise Ede (who'd made a documentary about Tati's Playtime) managed to find the color elements and restore the Thomson-color version for the 1995 DVD release in France. 

It has yet to be released in the U.S.

The Three Lives of Jour de Fête

Black and White

Tinted

Color

Thieves' Highway

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949) A revenge story based in the wild and wooly world of wildcat truckers (also explored in A.I. Bezzerides' similarly themed They Drive By Night).  Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) comes home after a big score and showers his family with presents.  He's so full of himself that he doesn't notice the obvious:  Dad's missing his legs (which makes the slippers he bought him a very poor choice).  It seems while Nick was away, Dad got rooked on a vegetable run, taken for a long drunk, and had a bad crash in his dilapidated truck, crippling him. 

Worldly-wise and hardened in combat, Nick decides on an assault on the man who crushed his dad's dreams, one Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), a bad apple who'll spoil the whole bunch right down to the bottom of the barrell.  He partners with the wild-catter who bought Pop's truck (the great Millard Mitchell) to deliver two loads of golden delicious to Figlia's produce wholesaler in San Fran'...if they can get through a gauntlet that includes duplicitous rival wild-catters, a truck with a bad universal (and not much good!), 36 hours straight on the road without any sleep, and worn tires (a sequence that Dassin turns into a thrilling montage of overlapping images).  

Except for the loading of apples, all this takes place at night, and no one could dredge the dark as well as Jules Dassin (as he was always proud to announce, that's pronounced "Da-ssin," from the U.S.).  Dassin always had a flair for the street and the twisted culture of film noir, and Thieves Highway is gritty and street-smart: no one in this movie is naive or innocent, everybody has an agenda or an angle, and Nick has to keep his head on straight (tough to do with a neck injury received when a truck collapsed on him while changing a tire), whether negotiating with Figlia or dealing with the street-frail (Valentina Cortese) hired by Figlia to entertain Nick while he works the angles.

It's an education, one that toughens Nick up and makes him see that there's more than what he imagined in his existence before.  Sure, he's earned a living and survived the war, but...  It's one thing to avoid death, it's quite another to embrace life.

The Fountainhead

"The Fountainhead" (King Vidor, 1949) Ayn Rand's ideological tome about the individual's right to see their vision through without compromise is its own worst argument as a movie. Her stance—what we now call "objectivism," a nice oblique term—makes perfect sense for writers and painters, but in collaborative media like, say, architecture—and the movies, despite the auteur theory—it just seems like impractical hooey. And elitist fascist hooey, at that. Elitist because Rand can't have her way without establishing an adversarial relationship with what she churlishly calls "the mob," the very "mob" that is the core of democracy. The anti-communist Rand looks down her nose at the one thing that separated democracy from autocratic rule—the opinion of her "mob." I guess autocracies aren't so bad when you're the autocrat (which sounds suspiciously like a politburo, either way the shallowness of thought is breath-taking).

Now, writers take their chances and only have themselves to blame if their books don't sell (that is, if you leave out complicating factors like publishers, press-agents, and a good cover designer). But a writer for the collaborative art of film must interact with a lot of artisans (who you'd think also have their right to a vision in their craft) to make it to the screen.*

Not so Ayn Rand. Her contract—a good one—stated that not a word of her screenplay was to be changed, excised, or tampered with. Once she finished her own final draft, it was set in stone.

Of course, a writer's vision is passed through many filters in the movies, the art directors, the cinematographers, the director, the actors, etc. Interpretation of "The Word" is all that's left of movie-making after the writing. It seems a little myopic to make that request as it might apply to the dialogue, but the stage directions, descriptions, everything excepting dialogue is always open to interpretation by "those others."

King Vidor had been an established director, starting his career in silent pictures, and, being there at the beginning, contributed to the "language" of film more than most directors working in 1949. He knew what worked on film and what didn't (or else why had he been working for so long?). And yet, when he tried to shorten Rand's rambling court-room speech, he was shot down. What about his film-maker's vision? Certainly his arguments and expertise in film-making had more credence than Ms. Rand's.**

And so, we have what could have been an interesting film with a compelling take on the world that is ham-strung by the purple prose written by its author, done in a style that recalls the locked-in-concrete work of Leni Riefenstahl. Her philosophy in context is merely pretense and an apologia for shooting one's self in the foot in the practical world of film-making or other collaborative media.

But it's all surface tension, anyway. In "The Fountainhead," her characters have no motivation than what Rand thinks is important, which is her ideology, even though their actions in particular circumstances seem to run counter to their ideals. Look, I'm with her on architecture—if I see one more greco-roman portico on a McMansion, I may go live in a yurt, but it wouldn't compel me to shoot myself in the head over it, or dynamite it...or, for that matter, fly a plane into it.

But, like the bear in the joke said, "This isn't about the hunting, is it?" Rand's arguments bog down in practical real-world terms in architecture, but one senses there are other issues at play here. The film is one big "edifice" complex, with throbbing jack-hammers and impressive erections (including "the biggest one in the world!") That the big clinch between Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal is a rape scene complete with ignoring of resistance or saying "no," and then Neal's character, Dominique, runs off, marries another man, whom she doesn't love (Raymond Massey as a publishing king-pin in a performance that can only be called "animatronic") and then races to do architect Roarke's bidding at the drop of a housing project. It doesn't speak well for the character's self-respect, consistency, or even mental health, qualities that one would expect, all things being egomaniacally equal, in the Rand-world.***

I'm all for keeping what's yours for yourself.

But I wish Ayn Rand had kept her neuroses to herself (by the way, despite being the one who adapted it, she is said to have "disliked the movie from beginning to end." I guess you can't accuse her of having bad taste or being that thing she loathed—a bad critic.)

* Perhaps Rand is the best writer for radio. One of my favorite stories about writers is the one about Rod Serling who was asked which medium he preferred to write for, radio or television. His answer was writerly-complicated: "When I write 'there's a castle on the hill' for television, I turn the script in and if they want to keep the castle on the hill, they work it into the budget and then the Art Director designs the castle on the hill. His designs are given to a drafter who makes up the plans which are given to the carpenters and masons who make the castle on the hill, then it's painted and detailed and set decorators put in the flora for the hill, and when it's all done I've got a castle on the hill. One castle on the hill."

"But, when I write 'There's a castle on the hill' for radio, the announcer reads it and suddenly I've got a million imagined castles on hills. And they're all different."

** Supposedly, though, Jack Warner, a conservative and whose company was paying for "The Fountainhead," trimmed the speech a bit, because he didn't want to lose money. Rand squawked, but apparently didn't blow up Warner Brothers. See, there's the Real World and then there's someone's ideological Fantasy.

*** Things turn so abnormally fraught that the film falls into that sub-genre of drama so histrionic that the wife and I call "Why doesn't everyone get a good night's sleep and start afresh in the morning?"

Criss-Cross

"Criss-Cross" (Robert Siodmak, 1949) You can't tell a grown man what to do. That's the problem. Even though he's old enough to know better ("old enough to vote for two presidents") and even though he keeps saying that he's over all that, Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) comes back to L.A. and manages to get hooked up with his ex-wife (the wide-eyed Yvonne De Carlo) all over again.

And she's trouble. His mom knows it, his police lieutenant pal Peter Ramirez (Stephen McNally) knows it. Even his bartender (Percy Helton) knows it! On top of which, she's been seen stepping out with local hood Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). And before you know it—boom!—she marries the bum.

So what are Thompson and Dundee doing planning an armored car robbery together? Dimes to donuts Anna Thompson Dundee is at the center of it all.

Bet her maiden name was "Conda."

The mess that Thompson finds himself in is done with the best of intentions, but one of the tenets of film-noir is that good intentions done for bad people are a recipe for disaster. No good deed goes unpunished in the dark alleys and side-streets of film noir, even in blinded-by-the-light sunny Hell-A. And director Siodmak,one of the architects of noir-style, finds the shadows cast even in the noon-day sun.

"Criss-Cross" is a good minor example of the genre, with nice performances by Lancaster, DeCarlo and Duryea. And look for Tony Curtis in a brief (and silent) early appearance.

John Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy"

Fort Apache (1948)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Rio Grande (1950)

"This is the West, sir. When the Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend"

Chronologically, they're out of order. Two are in black and white. The third in glorious Oscar-winning color. Some characters appear in two of the three films. One man's story forms a character arc across two films, but you don't have to see both to know his story. They're all about honor. They're all about duty. They're all about family. They're all about the U.S. Cavalry during the move West. They're about carving civilization out of a rough-hewn wilderness.

And they're about the devastation of the Native people to achieve it. Ford would tackle the subject of the inherent racism behind that tragedy starting with The Searchers five years after the last of these films, then throughout the rest of his westerns. He touches on it in these films, in the duplicity of the white bureaucrats, military men and profiteers and you can see the crack forming in history as it occurred and History as it was presented in text...and the movies, as obvious as the crags etched into the location of all three films-the magnificent Monument Valley on the Navajo Indian Reservation.

And there is a fourth story not told in these films, but behind the scenes, of a film director bucking the studio system, and in so doing, casting a safety net to a civilization whose extinction was being chronicled, and often celebrated, in that system.


Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948) At Fort Apache, a finger of civilization has poked through the wild west. For the U.S. Cavalry, the isolated post has become home to some of the families of the men, and so tensions are high--there is unrest among the Apaches, led by Cochise--and security is a priority. Brought in to lead the way is Civil War general Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda), an arrogant ideologue and martinet, with his own vision of the West that has nothing to do with reality.

Any similarity to George Armstrong Custer is strongly suggested—this at a time when the legend of Custer was still very much in keeping with his widow's intentions of keeping her husband in the most heroic of lights, aided and abetted by fawning newspapermen, nickel-biographers, covetous land-barons, and even the Anheuser-Busch company.*  Indeed, the "legend" of Custer would extend deep into the 1960's, decades after Ford's film.

Thursday takes no prisoners and no guff from his veteran cavalryman, Captain Kirby York (John Wayne), passed over for command of the fort, and who prefers a policy of negotiation. York doesn't blame the natives for the Apaches' anger, but, instead, the double-dealings of corrupt Indian agents. After watching years of uneasy relations shattered by Thursday's inflexibility, York must grit his teeth and watch as it leads to disaster, and then defend his superior officer's reputation for the good of the Corps.

Years later, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the dictum behind York's reactions were spelled out plainly: "When the Legend becomes Fact, Print the Legend." York does what he does for the good of the Cavalry, but by promoting the myth. he is complicit in the further hard-nosed approach exemplified by Thursday and the decimation of the tribes.  The film's triumphant huzzahs to the U.S. Cavalry have a tinge of melancholy to them, as York's words are matched by a shot of riding troops in a pane of glass—a reflection.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949) Ford was encouraged by Wayne's performance in director Howard Hawks' Red River** to cast him as retiring Cavalry Officer Col. Nathan Brittles, a by-the-book cavalryman who bends rules until they almost snap. That includes personally negotiating with Cheyenne Chief Pony That Walks (Chief John Big Tree) to head off a bloody up-rising. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is full of Ford's hi-jinx and low humor, with squabbling lovers (Joanne Dru, John Agar and Harry Carey, Jr.), drunken sergeants,*** and the imminent retirement looming. Ford had worked in color before (Drums Along the Mohawk) and his set-pieces are bright contrasts to the red clay of the Monument Valley dirt. There is one unnervingly beautiful sequence of a night-time trek through Monument Valley in the middle of a lightning storm, done over the objections of the Technicolor Consultant, who subsequently won an Oscar for their "work."

Along with Carey, McLaglen and other members of the Ford stock company, a new face appeared--Ben Johnson, who in 1971, would win an Academy Award for The Last Picture Show. He was a horse wrangler and rider in Ford's productions and proved invaluable on the set. So much so that Ford rewarded him with a speaking part as Trooper Tyree, the Unit's invaluable scout, the first of many roles Johnson would play for Ford.

And it contains one of my favorite Ford moments: Wayne 's Brittles confronting the Chief Pony That Walks , played by Seneca Chief John Big Tree. In a quavering, ancient voice and shouting his dialogue, the old man still holds his own against Wayne, who usually blew other actors off the screen. "Hallelujah, Nathan! I am a Christian!" he shouts in greeting. His appearance must have given strokes to the "suits" in Hollywood. A native! Doing a speaking part! And you can't understand him! Why couldn't Ford get Anthony Quinn or something?****

And here, we interrupt to tell a tale. An aside, certainly, but on a subject more important than movies. There's a reason Ford consistently shot his Westerns in Monument Valley. Pictorially, it has a lot to do with a representation of vast, uncivilized space--rough-hewn ancient structures that show no sign of man, an unmarked slate. But, practically, it was more than that. Monument Valley sits square in the Four Corners on the Navajo Reservation. And to use that location, Ford had to pay the tribe. If he'd gone to Arches National Park a day's drive away, the money would have gone to the State of Utah. But, Monument Valley, the tribe.

On top of that, Ford and his production team used the Native's as extras, stuntmen, horsemen, consultants--money in the pockets of each tribesman. Those long lines of native riders beading the horizon in Ford westerns? All paid employees. The women and children that stuff the frames of village shots are not merely there for "color." They were all paid to get the tribe through a tough winter in one of the more inhospitable environments on the continent. And the Chief John Big Tree, though he may have had difficulty with his lines (and probably learned them phonetically) was paid the highest scale, merely for speaking lines in the script. There is a reason there is a John Ford tourist center at Monument Valley, and why he was made an honorary chief. Ford's Westerns saved more Indians than were represented to be killed. And his politically incorrect first suggestions of white duplicity in the "taming" of the West (which would culminate in his films The Searchers and Cheyenne Autumn--in which he endeavored to make a movie about "The Trail of Tears") began to seep the true story behind the "shoot-em-up's" and "Cowboys-and-Injuns" pictures which were a staple of American entertainment.

Ford's color sense and composition has a Master's eye.

Rio Grande (John Ford, 1950) To finance the third Cavalry film (after the $1.6 million budget of Yellow Ribbon), Ford turned to B-movie studio Republic Pictures. Ford yearned to make The Quiet Man there, but studio head Herbert Yates, with no confidence in the script, persuaded Ford to first make Rio Grande.

Rio Grande takes a look at the further career of John Wayne's Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke (he's sprouted an "e" on the end of his name, for one thing). Estranged from his wife (Maureen O'Hara), posted to the frontier to protect settlers from attacking Apaches, with inadequate forces to do the job, Yorke is feeling a lot of pressure, especially when Phil Sheridan asks him to cross into Mexico to confront the renegades where they're hiding. Then, on top of that, Yorke's son is stationed to his troop. Throughout the course of the movie, Yorke comes dangerously close to becoming the type of commander his old superior, Owen Thursday, was.

Ben Johnson returns as Trooper Tyree, as does Victor McLaglen as now Sgt. Major Quincannon. Harry Carey, Jr. plays another role entirely.

Ford made other western during this time period--Three Godfathers, his "Christmas Western," with Wayne, "Dobe" Carey and Pedro Armendariz, and Wagonmaster about the Mormon trek to Utah, with Ward Bond, Carey and Ben Johnson. But Ford's next film with a Cavalry presence would be "The Searchers," in which, accompanied by a jaunty Irish tune, the heroes of this trilogy would be responsible for the murder of women and children, and one of the main characters would turn to the other and question them "What'd they kill her for? She didn't hurt nobody!"

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a newspaperman tells Congressman Stoddard "This is the West, sir. When the Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend," "becomes" in the sense of casting a better light on the Truth. Ford filmed his "Cavalry Trilogy" with that maxim in mind, and had even showed its employment in distorting History. Now, in the last part of his storied career, he would tear the Legend away to expose Truth, and show Americans in their entertainment, what was lost in winning the West.

* The beer giant commissioned a painting (below) that was distributed and hung in every saloon that carried their product.

* "I didn't know the dumb son-of-a-bitch could act!" he would remark to Howard Hawks.

** Played by Ford favorite, Victor McLaglen, whom Ford directed to a Best Actor Oscar for The Informer. McLaglen's character Sgt. Quincannon appears in the next Cavalry picture, Rio Grande, as well. There is a Sgt. Quincannon in Fort Apache, played by Dick Foran, rather than McLaglen. McLaglen plays the similar role of Sgt. Mulcahy in Fort Apache.

*** It was a common Hollywood practice to give the most prominent "foreign" role to white actors in make-up, and Ford was as much a victim of the practice as any director. In order to get his "Trail of Tears" epic Cheyenne Autumn made he was forced to use "name" stars such as Latinos Gilbert Roland, Dolores Del Rio, and Ricardo Montalban, and Italian Sal Mineo. Quinn, Mexican-American, has played Latino, Arab, Greek, Italian, Inuit, etc., etc.