JUNIOR BONNER (Sam Peckinpah, 1972)

In Sam Peckinpah’s heart-grazing Junior Bonner, Steve McQueen, achingly sweet and complex, gives the performance of a lifetime as Junior “JR” Bonner, a rodeo circuit cowboy visiting hometown Prescott, Arizona, for its Fourth of July Frontier Days, which gives him another shot at lasting eight seconds on bucking Sunshine and at seeing his estranged parents, Ace and Ellie, and younger brother Curly, who is riding a bull of his own: the future; the New West. Curly is bulldozing homes, including those of his parents, for the sake of his Reata Ranch mobile home enterprise, an opportunistic grab at wealth. “You’re as genuine as a sunrise,” Curly tells Junior, hoping to commoditize his brother’s sincerity to sell his mobile homes.
     Peckinpah had followed his violent The Wild Bunch (1969) with the genial The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), which he followed with the horrifically violent Straw Dogs (1971), which he followed with the genial Junior Bonner. (Did Peckinpah consciously realize that Straw Dogs, about a husband’s revenge for the gangbanging of his wife, metaphorically addresses the violation of The Wild Bunch, which was studio-butchered for its initial release?)
     Ace Bonner (Robert Preston, vivid), ever the dreamer, hopes that his favorite son can complete payment for his relocation to Australia and the search for gold there. “I hear you’re doin’ well,” Ace tells Junior. Junior replies laconically, with an edge of self-deprecating humor, “Where did you hear that?” These two men, each past his prime and barely holding onto an outdated Western ethos, dearly love each other, but shy, quiet Junior has “[gone] down [his] own road” at least in part to escape the measure of Ace’s dazzling self-confidence and boisterous personality. Similarly, Curly struggles in his brother’s shadow.
     Ida Lupino is brilliant as proud, vulnerable Ellie.

MAGNIFICENT DOLL (Frank Borzage, 1946)

For as long as I have been that I can remember, I have adored Ginger Rogers. She is one of the best Hollywood film actresses, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. However, Ginger was not infallible, and she gave some bad performances. Perhaps the most terrible one can be found in Magnificent Doll.
     The story is ridiculous. Ginger plays Dolly Payne. In this version of history, Aaron Burr and James Madison vie for Dolly’s hand. Guess-who won. Thomas Jefferson, according to script, benefited from Dolly’s activism; then her spouse did. (Where were Fred and Cary, one wonders.) Aaron carried a burning torch. (Well, Dolly looked like Ginger Rogers!) Whence derives such a cockeyed story? Irving Stone is the author of the script. All agony here; no ecstasy. (Or should I reverse that?) Dolly narrates, so there’s no doubting what’s what. Doris Kearns Goodwin need not apply.
     Post-Hamilton duel, Dolly convinces a crowd not to hang traitor Aaron—with political sentiments of which, post-speech, James approves. Problem: As Ginger plays the key scene, no one could possibly have been convinced. Get the rope. Get two ropes.
     In the old days, David Niven, who plays Burr, was given credit for the one good performance. (Burgess Meredith plays James Madison.) In truth, there is no “good performance.” But Ginger is a little worse than everyone else. Flimsy. Glamorous. Adorned with Lilly Daché hats!
     Frank Borzage, who had won two Oscars, directed. Only six years earlier he had made his masterpiece, The Mortal Storm (1940), in which Margaret Sullavan gives one of the greatest performances in cinema. (Borzage had directed Sullavan superbly a few times earlier; a fundamentalist Christian, he directed The Mortal Storm from the heart; it was one of the earliest Hollywood films to address Hitler’s brutalization of Jews.) What happened with Ginger? Well, Borzage by this time was lost in alcoholism, and Ginger, a Christian Scientist, disapproved. It was probably the case that Borzage could not give Rogers competent direction and that she in any case could not take it. Pity.
     This is comic strip historical cinema. But it’s watchable—and laughable.

GINGER ROGERS’ TEN BEST PERFORMANCES IN DESCENDING ORDER OF PREFERENCE:

Primrose Path (Gregory La Cava, 1940)
Roxie Hart (William A. Wellman, 1942)
I’ll Be Seeing You (William Dieterle, 1944)
Black Widow (Nunnally Johnson, 1954)
The Major and the Minor (Billy Wilder, 1942)
Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952)
5th Ave Girl (La Cava, 1940)
Tom, Dick and Harry (Garson Kanin, 1941)
Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935)
Kitty Foyle (Sam Wood, 1940)

STORY OF G.I. JOE (William A. Wellman, 1945)

In the 1920s William A. Wellman’s lavish aerial war adventure, Wings (1927), took the first best picture Oscar; in the 1930s Wellman made splendid films about American aspiration and defeat: So Big (1932) and A Star Is Born (1937). But three of his four best films arrived during the Second World War: Roxie Hart (1942), a brilliant comedy testing reality against romantic idealism, and an equally brilliant satire of American criminal justice; The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a Western illustrating the perils of democracy in the form of mob rule; and “the best memorial for every ordinary soldier who fought in the war” (Gabicz & Klinowski), his Story of G.I. Joe, based on war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s observations as Pyle accompanies a U.S. Army infantry unit, first in North Africa and subsequently in Italy. (The other of the four is the Western Yellow Sky, 1948.) Ironically, Wellman came to his masterpiece most reluctantly; it took Pyle himself to convince him to get onboard. Killed during the Okinawa invasion, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist would never see Wellman’s film, in which soon-to-be-blacklisted Burgess Meredith plays him beautifully, largely silently.
     After a spate of Hollywood films that “thrilled up” and sentimentalized war for homefront consumption, Wellman’s came as a breath of fresh air; its realism captured the experience of soldiers and the world of sadness, loneliness, exhaustion and sudden death in which they dutifully waited or performed. Leaning on two of Pyle’s four books, which themselves derived from his newspaper columns, Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson fashioned a marvelous script consisting of small incidents (such as a soldier’s repeated attempts to hear his child speak on a phonograph record that his wife has sent him), snatches of rumination and conversation, and Pyle’s voiceover.
     It is an episodic script, and Wellman’s principal contributions, in addition to the excellent performances he drew (playing Lt., then Capt. Walker, Robert Mitchum is unforgettable), are the unhinging of conventional narrative that resulted from his honoring the intended episodic presentation and the bone-weary tone he brought to the material. (By comparison, Wellman’s Battleground, 1949, would prove giddy.) At various intervals Pyle is shown reconnecting with the same company when in fact he has never been shown leaving it. A major death occurs offscreen. In another episode, an awaited military order, rather than generating the presumed advantage for the U.S. infantry unit, maintains the status quo. What we have here is a discontinuous “road picture” in a dangerous foreign land. There had never been an American war film like this one; there had never been any kind of American film like this.
     Nice touch: because the company assumes the care of an adorable little dog, we anticipate the dog’s death; but this never materializes. The animal remains as a potent sign of home—the normalcy for which the soldiers long. By contrast, many men are killed. And one, monstrously fatigued, falls asleep on his wedding night.

DOWN AND DIRTY (Ettore Scola, 1976)

Ettore Scola’s Brutti sporchi e cattivi, called Down and Dirty in the U.S., is a trenchant study of hectic, noisy urban poverty, how the conditions and lifestyle that poverty imposes pervert the idea of family and the individuals comprising four generations of one particular family that live together, one on top of the other, in a flimsy shack in a rat-infested dumping ground on the hills of Rome. Scola (best director, Cannes) scores a painfully funny satire whose stinging truthfulness lies in its grasp of poverty’s insidious force rather than any mirror it holds up to reality. After all, Giacinto Mazzatella was rewarded with a substantial amount of insurance money for losing an eye; he might have used this for himself and his extended family. Instead, he hoards it, desperate to have this piece of cake rather than eat it, desirous to hold onto something he can finally call his own: literally, ridiculous; but as analysis, brilliantly astute. The complexity of insight here disputes an application of the word greed to what grips both Giacinto and those family members who are willing to do anything to divest him of the money, including adding rat poison to his dinner. All, including Giacinto, are monstrously driven to overturn a personal history of deprivation.
     In a great scene, Giacinto interrupts a daughter’s sex with her husband’s brother, but, faced with his daughter’s ripe sensuality segues seamlessly from paternal admonishment to incestuous overture as daughter protests, “Daddy!” This translates into the realm of familial relationships the confusion of rights to the money, the blurred boundaries of responsibility that are traceable back to the original deprivation or poverty. One wants to have whatever one can get because whatever one does not have magnifies the mockery that poverty inflicts.

KATYŃ (Andrzej Wajda, 2007)

In August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed their mutual non-aggression pact. A week later, beginning September 1, both German and Soviet armies separately invaded Poland; on Poland’s border the Soviets imprisoned more than 10,000 Polish officers and soldiers, all of whom they executed in April 1940. Following Germany’s invasion of Russia, canceling their pact, in June 1941, the Soviets blamed Germans for the massacre, whose date they advanced as part of the cover-up. After the war, with Poland under Soviet control, the Polish people, who knew the truth, were required to support the Soviet version of the massacre; otherwise, they might be killed or imprisoned. Andrzej Wajda has long wanted to make a film about the event. His father, Jakub, was among those whom the Soviets mass-murdered (a shot to the head by a shot to the head) in Katyń Forest.
     This film is not one of Wajda’s artistic successes. Its partial focus on Ana, who waits with her in-laws and young daughter for word about the fate of her spouse, Andrzej, a Polish army captain, is serviceable; but the back-and-forth between this aspect and the incarceration and murders themselves is unwieldy. Worse, the killings seem to be the result of Stalin’s (as Coleridge might say) “motiveless malignity.” On the contrary, the Soviets may have had reasons for their vicious act. (Historian Gerhard Weinberg’s theory of motive, for instance, is cogent and compelling.) Indeed, a major weakness of Wajda’s film is its paucity of any kind of context. While the film steadily improves, it does so only as an efficient thriller; it never deepens into any kind of contemplation of the tragic event and its aftermath. And it includes two howlers: remarks—both “prophetic,” but only one that is accurately so—that toys with our enlightened vantage. The Germany-U.S.S.R. pact won’t last, someone wisely notes; Poland will never be free, someone else predicts. All this is terribly clever—and debilitating for the film.
     Nearly seventy years after the massacre is far too late for what I am sorry to say is largely sentimental anti-Stalinist, anti-Soviet propaganda.
     Certainly, all the talk about “truth” sounds hollow and rhetorical.
     Maja Komorowska, though, is wonderful as Andrzej’s old mother.