7/9/14: Horse Waits, Tom Tries

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'80s films, Amber Bauer, Bill Pullman, cinema, Cold Feet, comedies, cowboys, double-crosses, estranged siblings, film reviews, films, greed, horses, Jeff Bridges, Kathleen York, Keith Carradine, Movies, odd movies, psycho killers, Rip Torn, Robert Dornhelm, Sally Kirkland, stolen jewels, Tom Waits

Tom Waits is such a weird, cool, enigmatic bad-ass of a dude that whenever he shows up in movies, he usually steals them right away from the rest of the cast. Like a thief in the night, Waits slips in, does that thing he does (acting? living? just being?) and slips out, leaving nothing but bare walls and floors in his wake. He’s truly an amazing actor in that, like similar odd-job Crispin Glover, he so readily becomes whatever character he’s portraying: it’s always impossible to tell where the character ends and Tom begins, which makes each and every performance both thrilling and a little terrifying. Needless to say, Waits’ by turns hilarious and frightening performance in Robert Dornhelm’s weird ’80s oddity, Cold Feet (1989), is not only the best, most interesting performance in that film but probably one of the best, weirdest performances of that whole year.

Monte (Keith Carradine), Maureen (Sally Kirkland) and Kenny (Tom Waits) are three small-time crooks with a big-time plan: they’ve stolen a small fortune in emeralds and had the bright idea to have them surgically implanted in a horse. After wack-a-doodle Kenny unceremoniously blows away the crooked vet who performs the surgery, the trio make their escape, hitting the high road and handily by-passing law enforcement.

Trouble comes to paradise when Monte double-crosses his partners (even more grievous since he was actually engaged to Maureen, who appears to be as loose-screwed as Kenny is) and hightails it for his square brother’s horse ranch. Monte hasn’t seen brother Buck (Bill Pullman) and his wife, Laura (Kathleen York), in quite some time but they didn’t exactly part on the best of terms: Monte is desperate, however, and really does want to save Infidel (the horse) from getting gutted by the increasingly ruthless Kenny. Monte also wants to reconnect with his estranged 9-year-old daughter, Rosemary (Amber Bauer), who’s just back from a “survival school.”What better place to hide a horse than a horse ranch, he figures?

As Kenny and Maureen haul ass across the country in a stolen motor home, Monte tries to convince his suspicious brother that the reasons for his surprise visit have more to do with familial love than ulterior motives. Laura would love to see Buck and Monte become close again but is this too little too late? Once the local sheriff (Rip Torn) gets involved, you just know that the whole thing is gonna get awful crazy awful quick. There’s no fury like a woman scorned, however, and Maureen is going to make sure to get her pound of flesh, come hell or high water. And Kenny? Well, he just wants to keep eating them Turkish dates, man!

Similar to the Crispin Glover-starring oddity Twister (oddly enough, also 1989), Cold Feet is about 10 pounds of weird in a 5-pound sack. The movie is all over the place, an almost complete mess tonally: it’s a light-hearted comedy right up to the point where Kenny blows somebody away in cold-blood, then goes into slapstick territory before becoming a “brothers-in-crisis” drama, a crime thriller and a romance. The whole thing is shot through with a garish, neon ’80s sensibility which is completely jarring when juxtaposed with the numerous nods to Westerns and rural living: call it the “Rhinestone (1984) factor” but there’s something about the neon-’80s and cowboys that just don’t go together.

Acting-wise, you’ve got a pretty mixed bag: Pullman plays it dead-serious, Carradine hams it up, Kirkland plays it like a dinner-theater version of Madea stoned on nitrous, Rip Torn is Rip Torn and Waits is, as can be expected, suitably amazing. It’s no surprise that Kenny ends up being not only the most interesting character in the film but, despite his obvious insanity, the most relatable character: he’s not interested in any games, he doesn’t have any agendas…he just is, dammit, and to hell with any of you squares who tell him otherwise! Whether he’s doing bizarre calisthenics in a moving car, reminding Maureen that sex with radium miners will make her ass glow, eating Turkish dates by the bagful or surviving the kind of shit that would kill the Terminator, Kenny is, quite simply, the man and Waits is absolutely magnificent. Despite any other issues with the film (and boy are there issues), folks could be forgiven for stopping by just to check out Kenny: Waits’ performance really is that much fun and he gets a sizeable chunk of celluloid dedicated to him.

Another highlight for me, albeit a fleeting one, was a pretty superb cameo from Jeff Bridges as a grinning, shithead bartender with a, itchy trigger finger: even for his few moments of screen-time, it’s painfully obvious how equally bad-ass Bridges is. I can’t help but feel that a true Tom Waits/Jeff Bridges collaboration might blow the planet off its axis, ushering in a new ice age…we should probably never find out.

Without a doubt, Cold Feet is definitely a curiosity. Director Dornhelm (still working today) has mostly stayed in the realm of television, so I’m guessing that this didn’t end up being a springboard to bigger and better things. The film never achieves anything approaching a consistent tone or sense of purpose but is still filled with some truly great moments: Sheriff Rip Torn scamming new boots…pretty much anything involving Maureen and Kenny’s cross-country ride…absolutely anything involving Tom Waits. There’s an awful lot of dead space going around, however, and the main storyline about Buck and Monte’s reconciliation is pretty long in the tooth. The film also has a tendency to slip into really silly slapstick (Maureen’s fight with Rosemary’s teacher is really stupid) which sits uncomfortably next to Kenny’s moments of actual violence.

Cold Feet is a weird bird but I’m pretty confident that at least some viewers out there will be able to get on its frequency. While the film is messy, silly and frequently nonsensical, it’s also quite a bit of fun and features one hell of an awesome performance from Tom Waits. If you’re a fan of Waits, this should be a must-see. For everyone else, however, this may just be one of those ’80s curios that passes you by. I would really think hard about it, though: after all, you wouldn’t wanna piss off Kenny, would you?

2/27/14: Big Dude on the Little Prairie

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1950's film, Apaches, based on a short story, Best Supporting Actress nominee, cowboys, Geraldine Page, gunfighters, homesteaders, Hondo, Hondo Lane, John Farrow, John Wayne, Louis L'Amour, Native Americans, the Old West, U.S. Cavalry, Westerns

Taking a break from the barrage of Oscar-related films that I watched at the end of February, I decided to go in a completely different direction with the rather modest John Wayne oater Hondo. This was never one of my favorites as a kid but would time change my perspective? Read on, gentle folk…read on.

If there was one thing that both my parents loved when I was growing up, it was definitely Westerns. We were a very film-centric family, watching dozens of movies over the course of a typical week but Westerns always made up a good portion of the fare. To be honest, I was never a huge fan of Westerns when I was younger, although I was completely obsessed with Clint Eastwood and spaghetti Westerns, by association. I was able to find Westerns that I liked, here and there, and even one that I abjectly adored (El Dorado, still one of my top 5 favorite film ever) but I found the genre rather dull, as a whole, and found little to hold my interest. In particular, I was always less than impressed with John Wayne (aside from his outstanding turn in El Dorado, of course). He was one of my parents’ favorite actors, so I’d probably seen all of his films (at least twice) by the time I was a teenager. Despite that, there were very few that I actually remembered (who could ever forget The Green Berets…), making all of these films ripe for re-examination. After all, if I can’t recall anything about the film, it’s almost like watching it anew, right? In this spirit, I decided to give Hondo another shot and see how adult-me felt about it.

Based on a Louis L’Amour story (one of my mother’s favorite authors) and directed by filmmaking machine John Farrow (48 films in 25 years), Hondo is a modest, unassuming and fairly routine little Western. Wayne plays Hondo Lane, the kind of laconic, sharp-shooting gunfighter hero that L’Amour specialized in. He stops by the ranch of Angie Lowe (Geraldine Page) and her young son Johnny (Lee Aker), a ranch which just happens to be located in hostile Apache territory. Angie says that her husband is away but Hondo is more than welcome to stay for a spell. Sensing something more to the story, owing to the general state of disrepair around the ranch (things are obviously going to shit since the man isn’t around, doncha know) and concerned about the nearby Apache, Hondo agrees to stay on and serves as a surrogate father, of sorts, for precocious Johnny. Hondo is also part-Indian, which makes his relation to the white settlers and the surrounding Apache even more complex.

Trouble enters the picture, however, in the form of Vittorio (Michael Pate), the local Apache chief. When his raiding party comes to Angie’s ranch, Johnny ends up holding them off with a few poorly aimed gunshots, earning the undying respect of the chief and blood-brother status. Since no “blood-brother-son” of Vittorio’s is going to grow up fatherless, Vittorio tells Angie to either produce her absentee husband (even the Apaches think he’s imaginary) or choose a nice, strong Apache warrior to replace him. Producing her husband Ed (Leo Gordon) becomes rather complicated after Hondo ends up gunning down the yellow-bellied lout (he tried to shoot John Wayne in the back, so what, exactly, did he expect to happen?), so Angie replaces him with the next best thing: Hondo. Thrown into the mix, Hondo must now negotiate between the angry Apache, the blood-thirsty U.S. cavalry, a boy who needs a father and a lovely, lonely lady who could really use a fella. Too much to handle? All in a day’s work for John Wayne, son…all in a day’s work.

Overall, Hondo is a decent but largely unexceptional Western that doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the rest of Wayne’s oeuvre.   The original story’s central conceit, that Hondo is a “half-breed” caught between the world of the whites and Native Americans is fairly underutilized here, producing no more than a few throwaway moments and adding nothing particularly deep to the story. In its absence, we’re left with a fairly routine Western about a rugged cowboy protecting a widow and her kid from outside forces. Certainly nothing wrong with that, but nothing particularly ground-breaking, either.

Wayne is good in the role, as expected, although there’s absolutely nothing save for the occasional attempt at Native American-sounding philosophizing to differentiate this from many of his other roles. If anything, Wayne’s character is still the same old red-blooded, Injun-killin’ character he always played: now, he just pays lip service to a “vanishing way of life,” which seems particularly disingenuous since he’s helping to make it vanish in the first place. His ending statement, after the obligatory big gunfight between the Apaches and cavalry, is to say “End of a way of life. Too bad…it’s a good way of life.” Indeed. The film seems to want to have its cake and eat it, too: the only “good” Indian is still a dead one but at least their killers feel kinda bad about it. It’s an interesting, conflicted notion to have the Apaches serve as both the good AND bad guys: the cavalry does nothing noble whatsoever (they also aren’t particularly good tacticians or listeners), whereas Vittorio and the Apaches are shown to be true men of their word. They still get gunned down, mind you, but at least they never lie about anything.

At the end of the day, Hondo stands as a decent but largely unexceptional Western, one that probably won’t have much value beyond Wayne completists.  The filmmaking is decent, the acting is fine and film clips along at a brisk pace. Nonetheless, while adult-me has a softer perspective, he’s still pretty much in agreement with young-me:  Hondo just isn’t much to write home about.