Maybe Not Fit For The Primetime Hallmark Channel- Gary Cooper’s “Peter Ibbetson” (1935)-A Short Film Review

Maybe Not Fit For The Primetime Hallmark Channel- Gary Cooper’s “Peter Ibbetson” (1935)-A Short Film Review    

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Peter Ibbetson, starring Ann Harding, Gary Cooper, 1935

Hasn’t the Hallmark Channel except this time of year add in some Christmas carols and a few decorated trees, etc. already done the plotline to this film, this 1935 film Peter Ibbetson, starring a mustachioed Gary Cooper in the title role and Ann Harding as his flame Mary. (He last seen in this publication in a review, a debunking expose of the legendary American Old West outlaw Link Jones who must have had a pretty press agent to beat the rap as a bad guy by self-proclaimed legend-slayer young Will Bradley). I know of whence I speak since Laura Perkins, yes, the Laura Perkins who writes here and my long-time companion is “addicted” to this channel’s television products this holiday time of year and some days I heard the plot-line as background when I am working or reading.

Let me outline, with Laura’s key input and approval, the plot and see if except the last almost surreal end minutes this couldn’t have been one of the long line of similar Hallmark presentations and saved the channel some money for screenwriters (although they probably only spent about six dollars on that expense from the dialogue and stories that I have overheard but please don’t tell Laura that). Some young professional woman returns home (for Christmas but any holiday would do) having either dumped or been dumped by some unworthy guy who didn’t see her positive qualities, or he didn’t have any as the case may be. During that home stay, and this is the important connector to the film under review, she runs into, one way or another “the boy next door,” some guy from her youth growing up in splendid small-town America. Either she had a crush on him or him her when they were young and that sets the “drama” for the rest of the production. Until that last clinching kiss after one or the other, or both have tried to avoid destiny call.            

Fast forward, no, fast backward. Peter and Mary are the children of English ex-pats in the 19^th century who live in some splendor in Paris-and are next door neighbors. And are fast friends despite their childhood predilections. Young Peter’s mother though dies of what probably was consumption then, tuberculous now and he is shipped back to England with some ne’er-do-well uncle. Before parting they swear undying devotion to each other. (Interestingly we see neither Peter or Mary’s father so maybe that ex-pat business had to do with their mothers as we called it in the old Acre working class section of North Adamsville where I grew up “going to see Aunt Emma,” leaving town or in this case country to have a child out of wedlock, to be pregnant, to bear illegitimate children no big deal now but very big then.)      

That promise to reunite is what drives the second part of the film when Peter as an adult has taken up the profession of architect and Mary has landed on her feet very nicely by marrying an older man, an English Duke of the realm and loaded with dough and love of horses if not of Mary. And she him, the not in love part. The reunion, the dragged out reunion, between the pair gets resolved when up and coming architect Peter is commissioned by the Duke and Duchess to build a new stable for the horses, a job he will supervise for a couple of months without either him or Mary figuring out the basis of the growing attraction between them. Naturally the relationship between the two former neighbors grows putting everything in doubt once the Duke, who may have loved horses and not loved Mary, still was no fool and saw what was going on between them. Saw and had enough jealous rage to plot their murders. Except in the melee the Duke was killed by Peter. No good could come of that.

Frankly, Peter should have gotten himself a better lawyer because what was clearly a case of self-defense got him convicted of a murder rap in very protective of nobility England. Here is where things veer off from a Hallmark script. Essentially Peter and Mary are so much in love that they have a mystical bond between them which lasts for the rest of their lives despite being apart. Peter in some hell-hole Dickens Dartmoor dungeon and her in tortured splendor at her estate (she always seems to land on her feet unlike Peter who takes it on the chin always). I suspected they like Thomas de Quincy and Sam Coleridge were doing some very strong drugs but that is mere speculation. In any case when Mary dies Peter passes away as well although they will be united for eternity wherever they wind up. You know maybe I am wrong, maybe this one has too much drama, too much melodrama to pass muster on the Hallmark Channel. Laura agrees.   

        

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Again-Don’t Believe All That Dime-Store Zane Grey Nonsense About How The West (Western United States) Was Won-Gary Cooper’s “Man Of The West” (1958)- A Film Review, Of Sorts

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Again-Don’t Believe All That Dime-Store Zane Grey Nonsense About How The West (Western United States) Was Won-Gary Cooper’s “Man Of The West” (1958)- A Film Review, Of Sorts

By Will Bradley

I must admit that when I started out back in late 2016 feuding back and forth with fellow film reviewer Seth Garth over the overblown reputation of English private investigator or whatever he called himself back then Sherlock Holmes (since exposed as a master criminal who was responsible for half the crime in greater London in his time whose real name was Larry Lawrence, no relationship to our own Lance) that I would have never believed that I could gather a following in my lonely attempts to destroy, eliminate, banish or whatever word you like some pretty bad characters. Guys, and it has been mainly guys thus far, maybe reflecting his-story not her-story on the evil side of life in the past and elsewhere who must have had pretty good press agents, publicity guys, who wrote whatever drivel the hard-pressed populations would believe just to keep their guys in the limelight. Keep their reputations all bright and shiny when the reality was quite different.

I have already given the example of the shoddy Holmes, oh, Lawrence and his dear friend Doc Watson (I don’t want to get into that “gay” Homintern business that Seth tried to run by a candid world which didn’t buy his take for a minute after my expose about Larry and Doc’s serious criminal enterprises which helped deflate those bastards’ reputations forthwith). There has also been since I began my work a noticeable decline in the reputations of others I have exposed like cheapjack slave-driver, sorry tenant farmer, peasant, serf, yeoman-driver Robin Hood, besotted Don Juan (real name Jose Rios out of Aragon who gained his “fame” via some convent beauties’ depraved fantasies while held captive those unholy dungeons, impotent, yes impotent we now have some scientific evidence for what for years was mere speculation, imposter Casanova and the wicked chattel owner Captain Blood out of Jamaica slavery markets working night and day to expand the fucking empire.

Strangely the only one who I have not been able to bring down is the so-called legendary early aviator and aeronautic innovator Johnny Cielo who claimed his whole worthless life to have invented flight despite the fact that he was born in 1910 several years after the Wright Brother joined Icarus in the legendary category down at Kitty Hawk. Maybe it is because he is a more modern example of bloated reputation which people are more inclined to believe but if anything people I run into despite the reams of documents proving he was nothing but a bush pilot, never ran guns to Fidel and the hermanos in the old days, never knew Rita Hayworth either have elevated this heel to some kind of god or something rather than bum of the month. Despite my documentation, despite the manifest on that last flight telling the whole candid world, or even the non-candid world, that he was taking high-end passengers between Key West and Naples down in Florida and had perished in the Gulf of Mexico not in the Caribbean heading toward Cuba with a shipment of guns as the legend has it.  I will have to see who his press agent was, is. He or she should get a ton of money for their commissary at whatever prison they should wind up in.                   

After all that foreplay today we are going big again, going down and dirty with what in America is something like the holy of holies-the Old West, the Wild West when men, mostly men settled things with iron and plenty of slugs-bullets and whiskey. From Jesse James to the famed and underrated Johnny Young just before World War I which is really the last time you can talk about the Old West. You didn’t have to be Professor Turner over at Harvard to know that once you got to the Pacific your chances that the frontier was vanishing were pretty strong. Yeah from Jesse and Johnny and everybody in between these bums have gotten a free ride, have been made legends out of whole cloth. Got their respective legendary starts from some guy in New York writing dime-store novels from the comfort of his room at the Brown Hotel-in New York City. That in any case is how I was able to track down the legend of a guy named Link Jones who went by a million other names in his stealing, thieving murdering time like Dock Tobin, Billie Ellis, and I think Gary Cooper, stealing the rangy homespun actor’s name even before he had it although I couldn’t definitely confirm that last one.

This one defies belief, belief that an admitted stone-cold killer and robber like Link could throw sand in our eyes and go straight after a lifetime of crime, that should have set alarms off right there. (Admitted his transgressions to Jackie Jenkins, the famous, make that infamous New York World reporter who did more than his fair share of bulling us about these “men of the west” who downplayed the bloodthirsty part to make Link readership worthy) But see old Mister Grey, Louie Le Marr, Cormac McCormick, Larry Murphy and their ilk did their jobs well, sold a million copies of the bogus book, books really detailing the bush-whackers, tramps, bums and sociopaths who really populated the West back in the day all prettified and there you have it. Like I said without leaving Manhattan. Nice work if you could get it, right. Reality check: you had to have chewed up your chances in the East, had to have been on the run or had no other recourse to pick up stakes and head West to drought, famine, desperadoes, “injuns,” now indigenous peoples or Native American depending on where you are, coyotes, avalanches, sod-busting, range wars, grifters, water wars, coal dust, cannibals, train smoke and dreams, poison wells, buffalo stampedes, social diseases, do I have to explain that, drifters, con men and women and craven insects and tumbleweed.         

With all those strikes again success old Zane and his crowd really had their work cut out for them although since they were writing for city-slickers who were not heading west, not going to the aforementioned hazards except in books naturally the guy, here one Link Jones, had to be ramrod straight in the saddle, long and tall, with that “aw shucks” manner and slow-rolling drawl. Christ they cookie-cut these guys except maybe the real deal Sam Shepard who really was long and tall and slow-draw talking (not slow at shooting though as many a man found out). Sam could have been on the cover of old Professor Turner’s opus, could have shown rum brave Link Jones a thing or two.

Of course today a million sociologists, and maybe half a million psychiatrists, will defend Link, will say it was a dysfunctional homelife, no mother, a bastard of a “father” figure in Dock Tobin, whose real name after my research was Cobb, wanted in six states-dead or alive as was Link- and his natural sons, Jack and Slim, plus a couple of stray villains in the mix, who taught him every evil known to man, woman too. Bullshit. Link, at least according to legend which we will bust quickly below, broke loose one day, repented, went straight after serving some time in some purgatory town out in the prairie somewhere, got married, had kids. Nice story right. More Grey-like malarkey.     

Here is the legend in all its glory with my refutations. Link, supposedly “reformed” was sent on a mission from his Podunk town to go to Forth Worth down in Texas to get the town a schoolteacher and had enough money to pay the required year’s salary to get her to leave everything in a big city (for the time) to teach a bunch of wooden-headed kids out on the prairie. Reel them in. Christ Link couldn’t spell teacher never mind get one. Truth: he took the dough alright but spent it all in a couple of days in Dallas on some whore named Billie, Billie something, although the only one I was able to find who spent time with Link was a whore named Julie who in the end ran off with the last of his dough when he was running low after another blood-simple kill streak. Even better, with no dough and nothing better to do he just happens to borrow some dough from some grifter with a sad story and took a train ride to Fort Worth which just happened to get robbed by Dock Tobin, remember Cobb, and his boys. Just happens to take some Judy, Julie, some woman met on the rebound, there were almost as many desperate to leave the East as men who figured to make a killing selling themselves and then maybe see what happened when the dust settled, Billie if you like to the gang’s hiding place, just happens to “play along” with Dock to the rob the El Dorado Bank of their dreams and when that flushed down the toilet wastes the whole lot of them after they had ravished Julie, his woman.       

Believe all that at your peril. Real deal, Link masterminded the robbery, had planted himself on the train in order to get to Dock and his own worn-out dreams and only wasted the gang, wasted Dock and the boys because they had wasted his time on a freaking ghost town exploit. Had it planned he would take all the dough and was pissed off when Dock hadn’t done his homework on the real situation in El Dorado. Killed one cousin just for the hell of it. By the way all that reformed married and kids’ stuff was just a cover when women “took a shine to him” like this Julie. He might have begotten kids but he wasn’t claiming them, not supporting them. The real Link would finally face the hangman in Colorado after about six more cold-blooded murders and a dozen more bank and train robberies. Julie fell by the wayside some time before Link’s end taking what was left of his and was never heard from again probably went back to whoring in Denver when they became a big cattle stockyard. Women like her always landed on their feet. I hope to high hell that Link Jones doesn’t like Johnny Cielo prove to be “Teflon man” just because half the American populations is enthralled by Old West nostalgia bits and pieces.

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Actions-Gary Cooper’s “Beau Geste” (1939)-A Film Review

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Actions-Gary Cooper’s “Beau Geste” (1939)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor

Beau Geste, starring Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston, Susan Hayward, 1939

As a kid I never wanted to be a French Foreign Legionnaire. Period. Never liked the idea of being out in the freaking hot desert with a bunch of dead-end guys whose only common trait is that they had to hightail it from some place-usually fast. In my neighborhood there were dead-beat guys hanging on the lamp posts in every street and I knew most of them, had been on a few capers which are better left unspoken about at this time since I have been clean for many years but some silly relative might this and putting two and two together try to blackmail me.

Okay, I wanted to be at times a cowboy defeating Indians (now Native Americans or indigenous peoples), a knight around King Arthur’s Roundtable, a swashbuckling pirate a la cinema’s Errol Flynn or a Three Musketeer but unlike the older boy Beau Geste character in the film under review of the same name never a Legionnaire. And not from any scruples like I developed later when I got political and would have seen this cohort of desperadoes as front-line agents of French imperialism, colonialism against the native peoples of the various colonies they lorded it over. If I had watched the film as a youth I would have been put off by those dry endless desert expanses and that was that. Now I would be put off more by the fact that the Arabs massed armies had no speaking parts, that the whole thinking beyond the plot-line was strictly from the Western and French perspectives.

That said the Foreign Legion exploits and desires just kind of an adventure backdrop to the front-end story which is what happened to an expensive piece of jewelry which went missing from its location in a box in the house, manor house really, of Lord and Lady Brandon in Merry Olde England. Problem: none of the three young charges, the Geste boys will own up to the theft, will claim responsibility. These three are had been orphans in the charge of Lady B. Lord B was some kind of spendthrift who would have sold the jewel to pay for his profligate ways leaving nothing except debt and craziness for Lady B. Next morning Beau, played by High Noon sheriff Gary Cooper, split for parts unknown. So did Digby, played by Music Man Robert Preston and subsequently the third pseudo-musketeer John, played by lost weekend Ray Milland. The former two had left confessions so who the hell knows who stole the freaking jewel.           

This is where the French Foreign Legion part makes a certain among of sense, at least for the guy who committed the heist. Get far away from manor houses, from England, from civilization. Wrong move though one late arriving John joins up and the three are in for a dime, in for a dollar. Enter a Sergeant Markov one hell of a bitch of lifer who has dreams of going up the food chain to officer land and medals by keeping his foot on the heads of all his underlings. Not a nice guy, no way. His idea of discipline, fun, was to send two guys who had deserted, and were captured back out into the desert without water to die. Even my sergeants in Vietnam would have been hard-pressed to top that for guys who were on the same side, tough as those latter guys were. Since all the Legionnaires were desperados and not out in the freaking desert  for the waters one guy started mutiny talk once they find out Sarge is going to be in charge.

Sarge was able to put down that mutiny with the help if you can believe this of Beau and John. Digby is in some other hell-hole fort miles away. Before this some stoolie told Sarge that one of the guys, Beau had a valuable jewel so he was dead meat if Sarge had his way. So no love lost between them and no love lost either when Beau and John refused to be the execution squad to murder the mutineers. Save by the bell any way since the restless “natives” started an attack just as all hell was breaking loose in the fort. The massed attacks came in waves and ultimately most of the soldiers in the fort were killed. This is the kind of guy Markov was though to create a feign for the enemy he had dead soldiers looking out on the attackers making it look like there were more guys than there were. Before the end of the attacks though Beau was killed.

This gave Sarge an opportunity to grab the jewel and use Beau as massed enemy rifle practice. John disagreed and Sarge went down for the count. John blew town, or rather hit the desert -with water in hand. Digby showed up with a troop of reinforcements from the other fort, finds the dead Beau, gives him a warrior’s send off and as he blows town, or rather hits the desert he runs into John and they are ready to head off except those pesky natives launch another attack and Digby falls on his sword. John is the only one left to go back to Brandon Manor and sad news Lady B. and with the jewel. Except there is no jewel, nothing but a fake jewel since Lady B. to keep the household running sold the damn thing years before. Beau had witnessed the transaction and to protect Lady B. from hubby and/or the law staged this schoolboy theft.  Strange film about strange guys turning into strange soldiers. Watch it though as the three amigo brothers go through their paces. 

How the West Was Won-Well The Part Down South Of The Border, Down Mexico Way, Anyway-Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper’s “Vera Cruz” (1954)-A Film Review

How the West Was Won-Well The Part Down South Of The Border, Down Mexico Way, Anyway-Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper’s “Vera Cruz” (1954)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Renan Saint John 

Vera Cruz, starring Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper and usual ensemble of cowpokes and Mexican nationals who populated Tex-Mex films south of border, the post-Mexican War, post Gadsden’s Purchase border if anybody is asking, directed by Robert Aldrich, 1954 

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Don’t ever get Lance Lawrence started on the Wild West, the American West of the 19^th century not today’s modern cowboy silliness gone awry where they rudely ride in Piper Clubs and swill their booze in exclusive country clubs where no braceros, you know Mexicans, or injuns, ah, Native American need apply, need to know anything but where the servant’s entrance is, down in Sun Belt land where the only vestiges of the by-gone days are tourista ghost towns and abandoned Hollywood locales. For one thing if you start up with Lance about any ancient West you will never get out of the barroom and not any exclusive country club watering hole by some publican’s pub, away from the water cooler or out of your “take him home to his house after he has had a few too many” car alive. And for that one very simply reason I am the one who has been assigned by site manager Greg Green to do this review of the 1950s Vera Cruz version of part of the Western saga since even infinitely patient Greg does not want to hear everything from the first trail west by Daniel Boone and others coming out of Appalachia when a man, and his womenfolk, could not breath in the shuffling Eastern seaboard cities until the last cowboy round-up about 1910 and maybe a smidgen later if you decide you want to add guys like Gay and his misfit brethren from Arthur Miller’s The Misfits to the list. I have heard Lance go either way on that possibility depending on who was buying the drinks. Smart man, that Greg, very smart.    

Of course, if you really wanted to know in depth the background to the plot of this film then Lance would be your man since this story does not take place directly in the Old West that we of a couple of generations back “learned” about through lying television and dime store novels which only made the publishers rich. So we are not talking about the previously unexplored parts out in the places where the states are square and you had better have been as well or you might find the town name of Tombstone a little too close for comfort me Rn the part stolen from Mexico in various land grab wars and skirmishes like Jimmy Polk’s folly that guys like Henry David Thoreau and young Congressman Abraham Lincoln got in a snit about and a so-called negotiation called the Gadsden Purchase. Information which should give one pause desperate Mexican immigrant are coming over the border to, well, to their homeland if you think about it.

This oater, a term cribbed from a crossword puzzle answer once, centers on the port of Vera Cruz and on the short not so sweet reign of one Maximillian who declared himself in as emperor of Mexico for no other reason that his boss, Napoleon III of France, a tin despot in his own right who a guy named Karl Marx, you might have heard of him if you are not too young skewered in a couple of pamphlets he wrote about France in the Napoleonic second-coming, the farce part not the tragedy coming. This throne grab happened, as a lot of things did when guys wanted stuff, wanted influence in the whole wide world back right during the American Civil when everybody was looking elsewhere. This new land grab by experienced European thug rulers was nothing new but did run afoul of the vaunted Monroe Doctrine that Jimmy M, he of the one-time Era of Good Feeling as the history books had it, before all hell broke loose over slavery, over white supremacy, which is still with us today, put together to keep the damn Europeans out of America’s sphere of influence, out of the Americas. Apparently from the historic record old Max, Max I if anybody insists since he was the first Max to hold the title, in Mexico anyway, didn’t have to be asked twice whether he wanted the keys to the kingdom.

Naturally there was a little problem, no, a big problem since Mexico, having shed the bastard fetid, nice word, right, rotting Spanish interlopers a few decades before had it own set of rulers, duly elected or not and if so maybe on to short a franchise, and so there was bound to be a showdown, an all out fight really one the national feeling got aroused and Benny Juarez took umbrage and built up an army of national liberation. With that background we are set to tell the tale here, the Old West tale inside the controversy going on south of the border.

After the death and destruction of the American Civil War a lot of ex-soldiers on either side were out of sorts, could not like happened in later wars, maybe all wars go back to whatever nine to five routine they had been doing before the war. Some guys in a later war, in the Vietnam War which a number of older writers at this publication had participated in or had known people who had fought the war, wound up in alternative universe encampments like the one Frank Jackman and Allan Jackson have described in these pages under the title Brothers Under The Bridges over the years. Some guys though got their blood up permanently and that is where the connection between later wars and that Civil War comes in. Some guys and lead character here Ben Tranes, an ex-rebel, played by Gary Cooper, turned mercenary. Would go where they could get serious pay for their services, their killing fields services. Others, civilians,  would show up who were “from hunger” having gotten tossed out of respectable society and wandered to whatever kept them in cash by any mean, not all legal. Were outlaws, bad guys in the terms used in pre-1960s Westerns dragged out from the Hollywood bushes. The king hell king here to use a term learned from old friend Bart Webber was nasty Joe Erin, a mercenary of no known character except shoot first and fast if you want something, played by ruggedly handsome Burt Lancaster.    

All these forces come together in one place for one purpose-to get rich off the poor Mexican braceros’ hard scrabble gold. Three million in 1860s money and many times more by today’s standards so nothing to sneeze at. This is the way things played as everybody lusted after gold, after what ace private detective Sam Spade would later under different circumstances call “the stuff that dreams are made of,”  or with many twists and turns played out. Which in the end would make old Max I nothing but a subject for one of the French painter Manet’s (not Monet okay) mural-sized paintings about his sad ass end before a Mexican firing squad who would give no quarter (a copy of which is on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts if I recall). So nothing but the subject of an execution Mexican-style. Neither Ben nor Joe, nor their confederates and for the moment allies could give a fuck about who paid them, Benny or Max, but everything pointed to them shilling for Max. For cash.

The gag at first was to escort some French countess with greedy eyes and a taste for intrigue to port of call Vera Cruz so she could go back to Paris and buy dresses or something. Don’t believe that for a minute for she might have been nobility, but she had the hard-heart of a tramp. Had turned more than one man’s head the wrong way with that exotic perfume and that sweet smell of bath soap to guys who had been out on the trail too long. Had been playing footsie at first with Max’s right hand military man who had plans of his own which may have, or may not have, included her but definitely didn’t once he found out she had the morals of some cheap whore who could use any man to further her schemes.

This countess was a piece of work though playing Ben and Joe off each other for a while and dangling that marquis if that is what he was, that was his title, who knows half of Europe claimed some link to nobility or royalty, at the same time. Meanwhile Ben and Joe were planning their own respective parties, plans which excluded the other-excluded too that countess once Joe got his dander up when he sensed she was playing him as the strong silent type who could get her what she wanted and where she wanted to go. Old Ben, having been an honorable fighting for a cause kind of guy begins to crumble when he takes up with a fetching senorita who also happens to be a partisan of the Juaritas, the Benny’s boys, Mexican national who want their government back and their dough staying in Mexico.

That was the wild card all along which Joe never figured and which Ben saw was the only right thing to do. In the end one or the other after a million small skirmishes between them and between them and the Juarez forces had to go down. And it wasn’t High Noon good guy survivor Gary Cooper who was stretched out in some dirty back street facing a pauper’s grave. Joe, a real psycho who killed just to see a man die like that guy Johnny Cash sang about, bought the slug and good riddance. In the end the whole French caper, the whole Max deal was a joke, except to Max who like I said got nothing but a strong Academy-approved  painting of his demise for his efforts. See Lance Lawrence could never have told the tale this way-he would just be starting to warm up to the subject of Max I and the treacherous dandies of Europe at this point.