The Wreck of the Mary Deare

The Wreck of the Mary Deare (Michael Anderson, 1959) It was intended to be an MGM production for Alfred Hitchcock—he'd liked the best-seller and he'd wanted to work with Gary Cooper since Foreign Correspondent in 1940—but screenwriter Ernest Lehman found it pretty dull  with an extended, dry courtroom scene at the end, and Hitchcock decided to "come up with something else"—which turned out to be North By Northwest.

We are all the better for it. 

As it is, The Wreck of the Mary Deare is an odd picture with a great mysterious opening and a dry-as-dust finale, try as scripter Eric Ambler and director Anderson might to make a suitable action closer to it.  In turbulent seas in the English Channel, a tug, captained by John Sands (Charlton Heston), finds a ghost-freighter marooned and adrift, nearly colliding  and destroying his ship.  Pulling alongside, Sands grabs a dangling line and laboriously clambers onto the ship.  The rusting hulk, the Mary Deare, is without power, a large gash in its side that is slowly flooding the engine room, with no sign of life on-board...at least initially.

One man has remained—First Officer Gerald Patch (Cooper), a merchant marine eking out an existence on the ship, recently abandoned, and desperately trying to scuttle it before it sinks.  With the reluctant help of Sands, Patch gets the boiler-room going, the ship under power, and the Captain-by-default's mission accomplished.

All of which is great stuff—the conflicts, the questionable sanity of Patch, Sands' greediness in wanting to claim the salvage on the ship—which would have made a great film if it ended there.  Unfortunately, that's only thirty minutes of it.  It would have been a great short subject, though, but the movie trundles along over the investigation and trial over who owns the boat and the conflicting testimonies between Patch and the eventually-found crew (ring-leadered by Richard Harris, who can't seem to eke out an interesting performance out of the material, try as he might).  Both Cooper and Heston are good, in what seems to be dueling portrayals of earnestness.  But, ultimately, the secrets that Patch is keeping just aren't very interesting, and although some attempt is made to salvage it at the end, the movie is, like its namesake, something of a drifting hulk. 

Juggernaut

"Juggernaut" (Richard Lester, 1974) With the letting loose of the whirlwind that is "2012" this week, I thought I'd pay homage to a neglected, but sterling example of the "Disaster Movie"—the modestly budgeted, very smart "Juggernaut." Made in the shock-wave of such star-culling epics as "Airport," "The Poseidon Adventure," "Earthquake," and "The Towering Inferno" that had the gall to ask: "Who Will Survive?" in its posters, "Juggernaut" played the same game. See? All the stars are lined up like ducks in a gallery reading to be pinged, just like those other all-star slaughter fests.

"Juggernaut" plays the game differently, though, while maintaining the conventions. This film is as soapish as the others in terms of interpersonal relationships. But in other disaster movies, people are collateral damage to the epic depiction of crumbling masonry. Lester's film is all about character—the "disaster" is man-made, the people at-risk are portrayed intimately, if not by stars, by strong character actors (Clifton James, Shirley Knight, Michael Hordern, Cyril Cusack, Julian Glover, Roy Kinnear—Lester's favorite buffoon is given a part to shine in this film—Ian Holm, a pre-fame Anthony Hopkins) you begin to care about. The cast is filled with faces who would become more familiar in later roles, but the two leads are Omar Sharif at his dyspeptic best as the Captain of the threatened ship and Richard Harris, who was never better than he is in this movie.

The cruise ship SS Britannic is half-way across the Atlantic Ocean when the line's president (Holm) receives a phone call from "Juggernaut" saying there are seven barrels of high explosive rigged to go off the next day at a predetermined time. Unless a ransom is paid, the bombs will go off and the ship will sink. With the ransom, instructions to defuse the bombs will be sent. Any attempt to defuse the bombs will casue them to explode. Holm's president wants to pay the ransom quickly, but the British government threatens to pull his operating subsidy if he negotiates with terrorists. While Hopkins' Scotland Yard detective attempts to find "Juggernaut," bomb expert Tony Fallon (Harris) and his crew are sent out to the Britannic, dropped in the ocean, and clamber onto the boat.

The focus shifts to Fallon, who sees all defusing jobs as a form of psychology—he's not trying to figure out the bomb, he's trying to figure out the man who made the bomb, and the tense scenes of Fallon examining one bomb to relay instructions to his crew are a whispered monologue of a man on the edge of death attempting to read the mind of the puzzle-maker in a battle of wills.

For director Lester, who is fond of games and puzzle solving, the film is one of his obsessions brought to life with the bomb design being particularly devious. Given its nature, one is put immediately into the Fallon mind-set that he is battling a man and not a bomb. And it is this interplay, where one man must rely on his skills and his knowledge, rather than the tides of Fate, that make "Juggernaut" sail past the other films in the sub-genre.

Major Dundee

"Major Dundee" (Sam Peckinpah, 1965) Semi-restored version of "Major Dundee" that's a bit closer to the idea Sam Peckinpah had in mind when producer Jerry Bresler took the film over, edited it with a meat cleaver and threw on a wildly inappropriate score (a ranch massacre with bodies littering the desert and the main house on fire until it collapses is set to a bouncy Mitch Miller tune?* Say, what? Peckinpah has been accused of bad taste in his movies, but he'd never have pulled something as agregious as that!).

Peckinpah's first big-budget movie has a great story. A hard-nosed Union Major, Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston)** side-tracks a bit from the Civil War to capture or kill the marauding Apache chief who torched that outpost. To do so, he must cross the border to Mexico in a mission that doesn't officially exist. His requisitioned army of nobodies employs cut-throats and horse-thiefs, Confederate Rebels and Buffalo Soldiers. No one asks: Can't we all get along? It's just assumed that they can't, but a sense of order and hierarchy is maintained within the groups, while the groups test and prod each other en route.

The cast includes Richard Harris as leader of the Confederates (who has a past with Dundee), a small band made up of Peckinpah irreg'lars Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones and John Davis Chandler. Brock Peters is in charge of the Buffalo Soldiers. Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor are two of the criminals, R.G. Armstrong as a vengeful preacher and in Dundee's command are Michael Anderson Jr. (who narrates), Mario Adorf, Jim Hutton (whose character arc is almost as interesting as Harris' character's) and crusty scout James Coburn.

That's a great cast. And the film is full of detail (you want to see it on a big screen). There are some extraordinary screen-caps from the film below that show Peckinpah's innate ability to fuse landscape and character, not unlike John Ford, whom Peckinpah seems to emulate while presenting either a celebrational rabble or a ceremonial piety but infused with a more cynical rough-hewn presentation. I don't think John Ford would have had a soldier swatting flies away from a war wound, but I could be wrong.

Heston is a bit of an odd man out in the film, his acting rhythms are slower than Peckinpah is able to deal with in his cutting style (in fact, there's a couple places where Peckinpah cuts in the middle of Heston's reaction shots just to speed the man up a bit) and the clashes show. In an interview, R.G. Armstrong calls Heston "a poser," (which is certainly true, but also calls him "the nicest guy in Hollywood"—Heston gave up his salary to keep an embattled Peckinpah as director***), but Heston loosens up quite a bit in this film than he had in any previous one, setting a tone for his subsequent work as less heroic, more recognizably human presences.

But the movie falls apart somewhat, when the troop liberates a starving town from the French; everyone looks impoverished (even the dogs outside town are skin and bones), the exception being the widow Santiago (Senta Berger)**** whose nursing duties among the starving citizens hasn't reduced the glow in her cheeks or made her any less voluptuous. Her presence and the subsequent romance with Dundee just doesn't sit well with the grit of the rest of the movie, and so Peckinpah wounds Dundee and sets him on a rehabilitating toot that manages to negate a lot of the nobleness of the character, and undermines a couple other parts as well.

Production began before a suitable third act was constructed, and Peckinpah was convinced that once filming had begun, the script would be hammered out. But production delays and disputes between the director, the studio and the producer ate up a lot of that valuable work-time. And Peckinpah began to drink, most days towards the end, showing up drunk on the set.

Still, up until the romance, it's a gritty, atypical Western story with integrity and a nice mature brusque edge to it. Studio interference would hamper this film and dog Peckinpah for the rest of his career.

Figures in a landscape:A broken arch does not connect (and thus dooms any romance)
between Major Dundee and Teresa Santiago (Senta Berger)

Peckinpah gives shape to Richard Harris' Captain Tyreen caught between
his sense of honor and loyalty to the Confederacy.

The remains of Dundee's command escape the French across the Rio Grande.
A shot with such depth it approaches 3-D.

* The opening credits run over the shot of the house burning, and the structure collapses when the director's credit comes up. Peckinpah liked to do things like that.

** To give you a flavor of the writing by Peckinpah and Harry Julian Fink (Dirty Harry), Dundee is characterized as a "$70 red-wool, pure-quill military genius or the biggest damn fool in Northern Mexico."

*** When asked by a reporter if that would set a precedent among Hollywood actors, Heston said, "It's not even going to set a precedent with ME!" A great line.

**** Peckinpah was dissatisfied with the romance storyline imposed on the script but not the actress: Senta Berger would work with Peckinpah again (and James Coburn) in the director's fine Nazi war film "Cross of Iron."