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.           

A Slice Of Life-French Style-Beauty Galore In The Days Of Old-Maybe-Cary Grant’s “Kiss And Make-Up” (1934)-A Film Review

A Slice Of Life-French Style-Beauty Galore In The Days Of Old-Maybe-Cary Grant’s “Kiss And Make-Up” (1934)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Kiss and Make-Up, starring Cary Grant, Helen Mack, Genevie Tobin, 1934        

New Introductory note by Sarah Lemoyne: I want to thank site manage Greg Green for manning up to what had happened to me in losing the coveted Hammer Production psychological thriller six-film series due to what he confessed was office politics and the cruel realities of the cutthroat publishing business. I had intended on leaving but his offer of giving me both the Star Wars and Marvel Comic studio film reviews was too good to pass up. Read below to find out just how treacherous this journalism business really is-stuff they don’t have a clue about in journalism schools.

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Admittedly, as I have freely admitted in my bracketed introduction to my first film review, I have a lot to learn about journalism, the ins and outs of journalism, and the internal politics of who and why certain personalities get, or don’t get, certain reviews. That naiveté on my part got me caught in a vise right after my second review of the six-part Hammer Production psychological thrillers when wizened and gnarled ancient Sam Lowell unceremoniously grabbed the series from under me on the basis of some good old boy connection. In that sense I learned fast that you make your own breaks in this world and that you had best defend your turf in this cutthroat business. I get that. What I don’t get is when a turkey of a film, well not a turkey but one that could have been left on the cutting floor and nobody would have cried one single tear, like this Kiss and Make-Up is assigned to me and I am clueless about what to say about the thing except I am fully confused by the point.               

That is when my newfound friend and mentor Seth Garth gave me some pearls of wisdom that he had learned at the feet of that same gnarled Sam Lowell who I refuse to talk to these days as one can understand. Seth told me Sam told him that when all else fails always go to a “slice of life” hook informing a new younger audience of what these old- time films showed about life in those periods. That will be my hook here although in a quirky way.

(By the way I am not talking to Sam especially since I have heard a rumor that the old cretin in taking over my Hammer series has decided that he had to give his take on my first two published reviews in order to make the series his own. Being from all observations practically senile he is looking for me, for Sarah Lemoyne, to write those reviews and basically trash my own reviews as so much insignificant babble since as a stringer I am at the beck and call of this mountebank. He had, has, a well-deserved reputation for either, at least in the old days, just doing a recopy job on the press releases the studios handed out or having a stringer like Leslie Dumont, who clued me in of on Sam’s having stringers write the stuff under his name, write it for him   

Probably for some women, maybe more in the past than now, although maybe I have been sheltered a bit by being around professional women, personal beauty and appearance drives their lives. That is the premise the studio was working on in this wacky sent-up of the very lucrative beauty business where handsome Cary Grant is in Paris as a doctor specializing in make-overs for the rich and ugly women who need all the help they can get in his temple of beauty. (Why the film had to be set in Paris, per se, instead of London or New York since nobody including French Nationals speaks French except I heard that Paris was, and still is, one of the beauty and fashion centers of the world with people like Coco Chanel and Christian Dior running amok). What the good doctor was trying to do is laughable by today’s plastic surgery standards where a tuck here and a pinch there will do wonders, thank you, exercise and diet standards but we will chalk this up to the times and let the chips fall where they may.

Now Cary, whom along with Clark Gable, was my grandmother’s idea of manly handsomeness and to an extend I see her point is not only running this beauty temple but sampling the wares of his transformations, especially one Madame Caron, who has not only been transformed but has become the bane of her husband since she came under Cary’s care. The solution, for the cuckolded husband anyway: sue for divorce with Cary as the co-respondent, the alienator of affections, in those tough divorce times especially in Catholic France in the 1930s when the Church still had some sway. That done Madame and Cary get married and run to the French Rivera for their honeymoon but find they are incompatible since she had become a beauty maven. (By the way what passes for beauty, genuine or bought, in those days would be hard-pressed to even get a date out in today’s meat markets since today pretzel thin upper body with long thin legs and long hair un-permed, or the appearance of un-permed hair is what is considered attractive by fashion magazine and cinematic standards.)           

   

Of course that was only the “front” story. Handsome Doc, who apparently had sold out his professional credentials for filthy lucre after medical school rather than making some research breakthrough that could lessen the ills of humankind, in the end sees the error of his ways. Made to see those errors by his smitten (with him) secretary and chief fixer Anne who is dewy fresh and who could today get dates without lifting a finger both as to looks and brains. Seth tells me this is an old Hollywood “hook” in the storied history of cinematic boy meets girl lines which have salvaged half the films ever made. If you don’t follow the bouncing ball you lose the fact that everything is heading toward some final romance between this pair, despite Cary’s ill-advised marriage, despite the playboy affect, despite the blindness to a genuine companion against some floosy affair.

In the end after being kicked metaphysically in the head Cary finally gets it. If that doesn’t give enough of a slice of life about what was fashionable in a previous age then let me throw this out. This is film is touted as a pre-Code film meaning after the enforcement of the Code came into play that each and every possible connotation of sex, sexual desire, even sexual knowledge was under pressure from the religious crazies and zanies banned from the screen. This included any nude scenes, profanity, erotic touching and the like. Those later post-Code films, especially with scenes of  married, happily married, couples in separate marital beds, certainly could provide a slice of life for the times but what passes for the sexually provocative in the pre-Code period would be laughed at today by eight- year olds with a computer and access to the Internet. How is that for slice of life.        

When Hammer Productions Pulled The Hammer Down-“The Snorkel” (1958)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

The Snorkel, Peter van Ecyk, Betta Saint John, Mandy Miller, Hammer Productions, 1958  

[Nobody ever said the life of a writer, make that a journalist to be closer to the nub of what is on my mind today, was easy, or was going to be easy. Take the example of Allan Jackson, the editor of this publication both in its original hard copy format and up until recently the on-line version who for years went under the moniker Peter Paul Markin but who got so wrapped up in some 1960s youth celebration fixation kind of thing that the younger writers staged a revolt and that was that. Gone, unceremoniously gone, and while he was permitted to return to write new introductions to an encore edition of the famous The Roots Is The Toots history of classic rock and roll series which he was instrumental in putting together now that that task is over he has gone back to oblivion. Some say he is running a whorehouse down in Buenos Aires and others have him once again begging at now enshrined Mitt Romney’s Republican bid to be the next U.S. Senator from Utah looking to do public relations work from his former nemesis.  

Such is the life at the top of the pyramid, the place where one mistake, which is after all the only one that Jackson made with that 1960s nostalgia business which would probably not have even been one at say Rolling Stone, puts you right back on cheap street. So you can imagine what the reality is like for a free-lancer, a stringer, taking assignments on consignment like they do with decent used clothing and having to haggle for every dime while old-time by-line writers have them do the heavy lifting while they go for long cocktail hours and spent long afternoon in hidden hotels rooms with companions not their spouses. One guy who shall remain nameless since I still like to use his services occasionally was notorious for grabbing whatever came off the AP wire and just putting his name on top. Worse, when he was doing film and book reviews he would do the same with the studio publicity department hand-outs and publishing blurbs. Christ and editors, including me, let the stuff go through were happy to have his name on the by-line.    

That brings us to the case today of young free-lancer, stringer if you like that term better Sarah LeMoyne who I had originally assigned the six-film Hammer Production thriller series from the 1950s so she could get her feet wet in the reviewing business by doing a short series connected to one studio. Then office politics, yes, I will admit office politics on this one, got in the way. Sam Lowell decided that he wanted to do the series since he had done the film noir end of what Hammer Productions had put out, and had done it well. So Sarah, all happy and such to have a nice assignment, as you can see from her short introduction to the film below, got short shrift because, well, because she is a stringer, a by the word stringer if it comes right down to it and Sam Lowell has a by-line respected in this cutthroat business where you are only as good as your by-line writers whatever talents your stringers might have. What got Sarah in a crazy mood, a kill crazy mood if you think about it was that Sam has asked her to do two things. First write the rough drafts for him of each of the six films and secondly to rewrite her own first two published reviews so they reflected his take on the material. In short to trash her own reviews to set up a fake controversy between two reviewers. Christ it was all I could do to talk Sarah out of leaving. I had to promise this introduction AND another series maybe Star Wars or the Marvel Comics studio productions. Yeah, Christ. Greg Green]            

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[I am happy today since my first film review was recently published so the world is beautiful, and I will not bore the reader with long-winded gripes or go off on a tangent like some writers here seem to think is mandatory or else their reviews don’t measure up. Read on. Sarah Lemoyne]    

Having recently been given the assignment to do this six-film compilation produced by Hammer Productions of England and distributed by Columbia Pictures in the United States I agree with Seth Garth who has turned into something of a mentor to me of late that the term “low budget” certainly applies to this one, The Snorkel, as it did to the last. By that he meant, and this runs through the Hammer horror movie and film noir compilations as well which Sam Lowell had reviewed a couple of years ago, that they used mostly unknown British and American actors, didn’t leave much on the cutting room floor and spent about six dollars on set design.   

That is all true in this vehicle as well except somehow they got an interesting story line that helps the viewer forget that the actors were over-emotive and the scenery needed serious work. I don’t know how this one fits into the psychological thriller genre but the premise is not bad. Step-father Snorkel, let me call him that, apparently tired of his wife, or merely looking to get his hands on her dough unimpeded planned and executed the “perfect” murder, or at least he thought so, by drugging her up and gassing up her room sealed while he has fresh air via an air pump tied to his snorkel under the floorboards as she suffocated to death. His alibi complete with passport entry that he had been over the border in France working on a new book or some such baloney. The whole thing was written off as the suicide of a depressed and forlorn woman. Done. End of story.

No, no, no. Enter his step-daughter, a goof teenager which doesn’t help her credibility, accompanied by her nanny, who without any evidence but also knowing her man, knowing this guy was strictly a gold-digger was not buying any of the suicide story-and lets him, and the world know it. Problem about her theory which we already know is a serious one is that freaking sealed room and no evidence of somebody somehow doing the deed. Every time teen angel gathers up a bit of steam either nanny or dad squash the thing tight but teen angel knows that this guy is a bastard. Teen angel knows that she witnessed this guy murder her father in order to marry mother dear so this guy has a track record in her mind. Most of the rest of the film is spent in that tug of war between these deadly adversaries with the nanny pushing toward Snorkel’s side once he puts on the charm machine. But despite the perfect crimes Snorkel feels the heat from teen angel and so he makes what will be his fatal mistake and tries to kill her.

Still nobody is buying her story. This though is where a little rough justice in this wicked old world as Seth likes to say comes in. In one last effort to figure out how the murder of dear mother and then herself could have happened she has a guy from the consulate check a few spots, one of them behind the very heavy cabinet. No go. No go but that cabinet was left in place right over a trap door which had been place where Snorkel hid while he was doing his dastardly deeds. While he is now hiding as they inspect the premises. He can’t move the heavy cabinet from his tight position and he is doomed.  Doomed once teen angel comes for one last look and hears his pleas for life. She walks away leaving him to suffocate. Maybe. Maybe if her stop at the police station doesn’t get the coppers there in time. Beautiful rough justice. Interesting as a perfect murder tag but don’t try this at home, okay.