Present At The Creation-When Luke, Leia And Han Could Say To Be Young Was Very Heaven-George Lucas’ “Star Wars” (1977)-A Film Review

Present At The Creation-When Luke, Leia And Han Could Say To Be Young Was Very Heaven-George Lucas’ “Star Wars” (1977)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne (somehow the editorial assistant, obviously a stringer, in a few of my previous recent reviews didn’t believe in spell-check or in inquiring to me personally how to spell my name and did so with the incorrect “LeMoyne” which drew a tell-tale red line under the incorrect spelling and should have been picked up.)     

Star Wars, starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher (Eddie Fisher, he of the flyaway to Elizabeth Taylor reputation and jilted former girl next door Debbie Reynold’s daughter), Harrison Ford (he of the sullen Valley boy post-World War II hot rod “chicken run’ at midnight set in future star-studded American Graffiti ), and a cast of odd-ball characters from wizard Alex Guinness to Darth Vader aka James Earl Jones he of the authoritative-or else-voice and all the refuge of the galaxy wars and whatever techno-props were available at the time of film shooting) directed by George Lucas, 1977      

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Seth Garth of this publication (and formerly for a long time of the prestigious American Film Gazette which impressed me no end since I had been spoon-fed on that publication, on-line of course from my young girlhood) is a beautiful man. Is a guy who has helped me out ever so much in trying to establish myself as a writer, a journalist really in this my first real job since I got out of journalism graduate school at NYU (we won’t count the couple of years spent as a waitress, ah, waitperson at Zack’s in the Village, a barista at you know where and as a cashier at Whole Foods although maybe eventually once I get established and get my own by-line I can use the material I gathered at those locales to fill out a few columns when I need something in a hurry like every writer since Homer’s time has done when deadline approaches).

Let’s settle this right away before the Internet rumor mills churn their grist and spew out the usual scandalous misinformation, no way, since I already have a companion whom I met as a barista at you know where, are Seth, the older seasoned writer who has seen it all and I, who still has star-dust in my eyes, sleeping together. That little literary trope has been done to death both in real life with the likes of the late Norman Mailer and others of the male-heavy literary establishment of a generation ago, now too as it turns out with the rise of the #MeToo expose movement, and their “young female met at some publishing event” so-called acolytes or in fiction most recently as part of the novel Asymmetry reviewed in the New York Review of Books.  Christ Seth has daughters older than I am and moreover as much as he has helped me he is “damaged goods” in the romance department having like half the older guys around here been married at least three times and is adamantly no longer interested in the marriage ceremony. I am the “B” of LGBTQ” so marriage is a hope especially if to another woman not that we can do that. I am very interested in that prospect once I earn my keep in the literary world, or at least can write reviews for cold hard cash.         

Seth has helped me in ways that matter as a matter of being a mentor to me, nothing more. Teaching me the ropes in this dog eat dog business where truly you are only as good as your last piece hitting publication and then the wolves begin to howl, especially if you are any good. And especially by those will fall by the wayside and can’t write and will earn their cold hard cash keep trashing those of us who can, who want to, as “film historians,” culture critics, book review essayists from whatever rock they have make their short climb. Teaching me things that they have never taught in any journalism class because if they did then many more people would be perfectly content to end their days as baristas at you know where. The biggest thing Seth has taught me which came in handy recently when I had my first real set-back in the business was that you had better yell loudly, very loudly when some cowardly editor succumbs to office politics and takes a plum assignment away from you.

Along with that very sound advice Seth also said, hell, since I am only a stringer anyway and life is precarious down at the bottom of the publishing food chain that I should take the opportunity when it presents itself to publicly write about what is what inside the fish bowl. Basically to dare any editor or fellow writer to cut me off at the knees and not let it be published (and laughingly Seth said what the hell you are getting paid by the word so stretch things out to pay the rent anyway-another good piece of advice especially when you submit your piece just before the deadline and that empty space you were supposed to fill is empty and the first smells of panic take flight from the offices upstairs). Again it is good to know the animal you are dealing with, fangs or licks. Seth told me that Greg, the guy who hired me and the guy who has taken that plum assignment away from me was put in charge after a vote of no confidence in the last site manager and so is actually something of a usurper, a guy who got his job on the rebound. Moreover, Greg is responsible to an Editorial Board and no new guy wants to lock horns with that crowd so Seth said I should write whatever comes into my thoughts and dare Greg and/or the Ed Board to not publish the piece.   

The number one villain in this dog eat dog saga is one Sam Lowell (who as he told me to do in the interest of full disclosure also happens to be a friend of Seth from the old days when they were in high school and hung around the same forlorn corner in the small town where they both come from and which tells you how really cutthroat this business is despite high tone glossy presentations and nice manners at cocktail parties and awards galas). Yes, that Sam Lowell of the big film review by-line back in the day who won his spurs in the profession by doing an incredible job of analyzing the history of film noir. That work is still the benchmark by which anybody who has come after has to consult if they don’t want to be laughed out of the room. A powerful man, a fixture, a force of nature if he wants to be, even if he is well past his prime and when I met him seemed to be a little wizened and not the florid-faced big shot I had expected to meet. But more on that later. For now though what has me pissed off, what had Seth pissed off for his own reasons about “passing the torch” and of plain orneriness from their long-time sometimes prickly relationship, is that Sam took without a murmur from anybody but Seth my Hammer Film Production six-film series of psychological thrillers from the 1950s that Greg had given to me after I had done a good on a couple of small reviews (for little money as one might expect from a stringer). Sam’s reason, if he needed one, was that he had done a couple of years ago the eight- film Hammer Film Production of film noirs from the late 1940s and early 1950s that Columbia Pictures had outsourced to them as low-cost using low production values, and unknown or has-been actors to keep the expenditures down in a time when movie attendance was being eaten away by the advent of television.

Greg immediately called me in to give me the bad news. I sat there stunned, left, and ran into Seth at the water cooler and told him my story. He said march myself right back into Greg’s office and get something in return. That is when Greg offered me this complete (so-far) Star Wars series looking back at the epic from the fresh eyes of somebody who was not present at the creation but who, truth, loved the action-packed series. Not only that but I have first dibs on any future Marvel or DC Comic studio productions with the understanding that I would have a better grip on why millions of kids have their parents pony up for high-priced tickets and expensive sodas and inedible popcorn to see this stuff that the older writers who have been drafted, mostly kicking and screaming, to write about since I love those films as well.

My blood is up though, egged on a little by Seth who has his own axes to grind with Sam or maybe just for old times blood sport sake, and I am not finished with Mr. Sam Lowell the big-time by-line columnist. I might have been, I might have let it go given what Greg had given me to get me on my way to a coveted by-line but Sam made the fatal mistake of thinking I was some carpet to walk all over. I had started two of the reviews for that Hammer Production (that outfit if you have never heard of it is English by the way, or it was back in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s when beside noir and psychological thrillers they also did low-rent horror and monster movies) and had, my mistake, shown him those rough drafts. What he said about them, that snake in the grass, my expression, that wizened old thief bastard, Seth’s expression, was that they were good, that they should be published, and he would see Greg about doing so. That part I took with some kindness and was starting to have a different opinion of the guy, starting to see that this cutthroat business was real but only on the surface when Sam said he wanted me to then, under his by-line “ghost” a couple of rebuttal reviews essentially trashing what I had written and making me out to be some holy goof who should have stayed in the service industry, have stayed a barista at that place. That done, that holy goof stuff done, Sam had the bright idea that we would have “dueling” reviews with me playing the naïve dunce and him the thoughtful and erudite film critic. With me writing everything on both sides like some sleazy lawyer, some hired gun, writing whatever paper or cyberspace would take.

This is where Seth really did put me straight, really made me realize that if I was to make it in the profession I had better know what was what or else I would be continually hammered by guys like Sam Lowell[O1] . This is what Seth told me about Sam (aided by a little independent research and some serious conversations with Leslie Dumont, who when she was younger had been put under the same Sam hammer as a stringer until she finally left and got her big by-line at Women Today and by Sam’s long-time companion Laura Perkins who nevertheless knew the pitfalls and pranks of her man). Everybody knows that Sam Lowell re-wrote the book on the meaning of film noir. Made his name and rightly so telling that new wave of film makers of the 1960s who were interested in the genre going forward what made noir so compelling, even B-film material, from plot to shadowy photography to the sublime sound tracks. Even today if one is serious about film noir your first stop is Sam’s work. I have never heard anybody, even his most vociferous detractors like Cella Dunne say otherwise. What people don’t know although if they had thought about and had compared it to academia and other professions Sam like the professors, the one note book writers, the one genre artists had one big idea which he milked forever. Got that by-line and never looked back. But aside from the million all expenses paid lectures and conferences, the pithy little pieces for half-baked journals generated by aficionados, that expensive by-line Sam never really expanded his universe. Truth.

Seth thought maybe it was because Sam like him was from hunger and that once he made his mark he quit, he let the fate sisters ride him to wherever they wanted to take him. I have mentioned this before as has Seth but Sam was perfectly happy when he was short of an idea for a review, especially if it was a not a noir to take whatever the studio publicity department handed-out, cut off the top, type his name in and sent it along. Allan Jackson, when he was walking with the king here, unaided by any such hinderance as an Ed Board was perfectly happy to publish the piece no questions asked. Meanwhile Sam was on some beach, maybe with Seth, maybe with some young woman, some Seven Sisters young woman who were his preferred acolytes and grinders, snagged from one of those high-priced lectures drinking whiskey sours and cavorting the day and night away. The other thing that Sam would do and this is where Leslie Dumont came in with her insights was to have a stringer, her mostly, write the whole thing and sent it in under Sam’s name. Even tried, the old dog, the old “controversy” gag with Leslie which Sam had tried on me. Allan was more than happy to publish the pieces in double columns. Hopefully this will get some dewy eyes opened up and not throw writers off the trial but I thought you should know what I now know courtesy of Seth Garth, a beautiful man.             

       

Now to the task at hand. As I mentioned a minute ago in the “negotiations” between Greg and I we agreed that I would do a retrospective of the entire Star Wars series now in its eighth rendition (plus a couple of outliers in the bunch to introduce new elements, a black resistance fighter and a female wannabe Jedi for starters) from fresh eyes, from eyes that were not bedazzled by the first spectacle which animated my parents’ generation back in the 1970s when they needed to have something to take their minds off of what with the international gas crisis and endless ragtag inflation eating up their dollars like crazy. This “fresh eyes” approach is important since we have just witnessed in young Will Bradley’s review of the eight installment Star Wars: The Last Jedi what were jaded eyes since Will in his own words could give a fuck about the stupid series. This from a guy who slept through the one film he did see when his parents grabbed a video from their local store and threw it in their VCR.  Greg wanted a much better take, a rationale for why new generations have gravitated to the series over the past forty or so years, young, old and in between.

I am just the gal to do this job because I too saw my first Star War film via the old VCR although it was the very first one that I am reviewing here. My parents loved the movies, had met at some retrospective at the Tattler Theater in old-time Ann Arbor, at Michigan and while their professions never intertwined with their love of films there was a constant flow of films from the 1960s to 1990s running through the house in Cos Cob. From then on I was hooked on the series unlike timid and fearful Will. I might add, and here Seth has given me another good piece of advice kick your competitor when she or he is down and Will is very down in the eyes of our supreme leader Greg. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were reviewing Saturday morning kid shows before long after that stunt with the precious A-1 review material he was given to work with and blew. In case you have forgotten Will in any case was a guy who went mano a mano with sainted Seth over the question of the homosexuality of Sherlock Holmes and Doc Watson in their long film collaboration and got it wrong, totally wrong not knowing about the dilly boys that this pair hung around with on the wharves between cases. Will got caught with what I would call his pants down not knowing of the rampant homosexuality in the English public school (private schools here). Everybody, except beloved Seth who does have a heart after all he has gone through, had a great big laugh at that faux pas, even I chuckled when I heard what he had tried to do to defend himself after Seth lashed him to the mast.        

As the Star War series has progressed we have seen many more sophisticated technological gizmos per film but I am here to tell you that the basics were all set up in that first film from the grotesques of the galaxy who no self-respecting persons not bitten by the “politically correct” bug would let in the neighborhoods to the latest in space age travel. That is however not the most important part-not the Hollywood “hook” that Seth has told me that every film and every film review needs. Usually it is the time-honored boy meets girl or these days girl meets boy or whatever other combination, hopefully “B” meeting “B” but you don’t see much of that yet the screen can produce-including inter-species love if the 2018 Oscar for Best Film is any indication. Here though and it will drag out at least through this first trilogy, the part of the saga that is the fight against the dark side, the Darth Vader side is the whole question of good and evil and what to do about it. What do good guys and gals do about it when the baddies want the galaxy and they want it now.

With that as the backdrop we have our three main players here and in the trilogy. Future Jedi warrior prince angel avenger Luke Skywalker, played by young Mark Hamill, the fairy queen Princess Leia of the royal house of whatever since apparently even is advanced space technology and future times we are going to be bedeviled by goddamn monarchies and future romantic interest Han Solo, played by hard-working Harrison Ford of the jut-jaw who is the only one who broke out of the sci-fi paydays good as they were. (Han was in once everybody figured out you can’t have incest once it turns on a dime that Luke and Leia were brother and sister and, and the children of … well see the film, oops see the trilogy). They will be guided in their battles against the fallen satanic angel gone on a vengeance run one Black Knight breathing heavy Darth Vader and his boss some mad monk who as usual wants to rule the world and needs a good gunslinger to do his dirty word. The battle is joined, the endless battles and heavy casualties on the bad guys side. This is one point I will agree with Will Bradley on for such a massive force the bad guys seem to be very ill-trained not to be able to beat a few kids and assorted amateurs. More later since I have run out of billable words.    

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.