Post by petrolino on Oct 22, 2017 0:58:53 GMT
'Drums Along The Mohawk' is a western set in the 18th century. Gilbert Martin (Henry Fonda) is getting married to Lana Borst (Claudette Colbert) who comes from a wealthy family in New York. It’s the summer of 1776 and they are heading out to Gil’s farm in Deerfield in the Mohawk Valley. Revolution is in the air so Gil joins a militia to repel British colonial forces and their allies from the Seneca tribe.
John Ford's western 'Drums Along The Mohawk' is ostensibly about the fight for American independence but it depicts this battle by examining the cycle of struggle faced by a community of homesteaders. Their livelihood is bound to certain core values such as showing fortitude in the face of adversity, maintaining every inch of ground granted them by God and never giving up no matter the odds. Newlyweds Gilbert Martin and Lana Borst are emboldened by hard work and able to overcome personal tragedy. Funny thing is, Lana's transformation begins when Blue Back (Chief John Big Tree) offers her husband a spanking rod as a wedding gift. There's alot of kooky side characters.
There's some effective scenes in 'Drums Along The Mohawk' including a breathless chase through the woods that influenced Michael Mann when making 'The Last Of The Mohicans' (1992). Henry Fonda firmly establishes himself as Ford's preferred leading man with this picture and 'Young Mr. Lincoln' (1939). It's well shot in luxurious colour and would make a good double bill with Kurt Neumann's western 'Mohawk' (1956).
'Day Of The Outlaw' is based on a novel by Lee Edwin Wells that was published in book form in 1955 and also as a serialisation. Ruthless cattleman Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) is furious with his neighbours in Bitters, Wyoming. The focus of his feud is local farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshal), a lily-livered nobody whom Starrett believes deserves to die for putting up a fence and denying access to his land. Hal's wife Helen (Tina Louise) approaches Blaise to strike a deal but things turn awry when former Cavalry man Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) and his band of thugs take the town hostage.
A sign of things to come in 'Day Of The Outlaw' is our introduction to Helen Crane. Walking through the snow cloaked in a heavy black robe, Helen resembles the tall, slim trees in the distance in a moment of visual panache that's typical of director Andre De Toth. 'Day Of The Outlaw' is filled with such moments. Take for example, Blaise Starrett's angry, revealing speech delivered as he's ascending a staircase; cinematographer Russell Harlan and his camera crew shoot from several different vantage points within a small interior space and the sequence is staged like great Brechtian theatre, perfectly on point and masterfully orchestrated. Later, a panning shot performs a 180° semi-circle while surveying an impenetrable army of trees that guards a treacherous mountain range, providing a physical impression of the "wall" everyone fears and fights about in the story - De Toth then has the camera pulled back inside a building through a pane glass window by using shifting focus to blur the cut. These examples of adventurous technical filmmaking are made all the more impressive by the fact that 'Day Of The Outlaw' was under-budgeted.
Russell Harlan's crisp monochrome compositions capture the mise-en-scene in ways that appear to lift the props out of the frame. I've read that De Toth worked on this technique of pick-up shading when filming in black and white. A disturbing, swirling dance sequence that changes the direction of the narrative features blocking and camerawork that pre-empts the dizzying dance sequences of dramatic films like Vojtech Jasny's 'All My Good Countrymen' (1969), Miklos Jancso's 'Private Vices, Public Virtues' (1976) and Bela Tarr's 'Werckmeister Harmonies' (2000). Alexander Courage's music begins boldly with strong, courageous chords but dissipates slowly as the hushed sounds of the mountains take over. What's left is a dark, elegiac western powered by an existential mind game in which everybody is forced to ruminate on their future.
Robert Ryan is terrific as Blaise Starrett, especially when he's driving on through thick snow during the final chapter. There are only four women in the town which causes frustrations for Bruhn's gang, with Tina Louise giving an appropriately measured performance as Helen Crane and Venetia Stevenson floating like a ghost as the decidedly spooky Ernine. The entire ensemble plays its part and there are finely etched characterisations by Nehemiah Persoff as gentle foreman Dan, Elisha Cook Jr. as alcoholic barber Larry Teter and Dabbs Greer as versatile veterinarian Doc Langer. Burl Ives is gripping as Jack Bruhn, a Cavalry officer with a past, his gang capably portrayed by David Nelson as newest member Gene, Jack Woody as old timer Shorty, Jack Lambert as uncompromising brute Tex, Frank DeKova as cold-hearted psychopath Denver, Lance Fuller as slimy sex offender Pace and Paul Wexler as quickdraw specialist Vause.
I read that a retrospective of Andre De Toth's work is being planned for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. The audience are in for a treat, especially if they include a screening of 'Day Of The Outlaw', one of the great ballads of the badmen.
"Do you like me as much as your old farm?"
Henry Fonda & Claudette Colbert
John Ford's western 'Drums Along The Mohawk' is ostensibly about the fight for American independence but it depicts this battle by examining the cycle of struggle faced by a community of homesteaders. Their livelihood is bound to certain core values such as showing fortitude in the face of adversity, maintaining every inch of ground granted them by God and never giving up no matter the odds. Newlyweds Gilbert Martin and Lana Borst are emboldened by hard work and able to overcome personal tragedy. Funny thing is, Lana's transformation begins when Blue Back (Chief John Big Tree) offers her husband a spanking rod as a wedding gift. There's alot of kooky side characters.
"Drums Along the Mohawk is an exciting and fascinating depiction of a period in history rarely represented on film; it takes place just prior to the Revolutionary War in the late 18th century. It even fits readily into John Ford's Western repertoire, but roughly a century earlier, when the frontier was still just the western areas of the original colonies. Henry Fonda plays a young pioneer farmer who brings his city-bred bride (Claudette Colbert in an uncharacteristic role) to the wild Mohawk Valley in upstate New York. Their efforts to endure the hardship of frontier life are complicated by marauding Indians, stirred up by ruthless British commanders bent on undermining the growing independence movement in the colonies."
- Rob Nixon, Turner Classic Movies
“Steven Spielberg has always been a big fan of John Ford: in several interviews, he has talked fondly (and with a bit of awe) about the time he, as a 15-year-old aspiring filmmaker, met the legendary director of such Hollywood classics as The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers. He recently stated that “Ford’s in my mind when I make a lot of my pictures”; many critics found Spielberg’s latest movie, The War Horse, very Fordian in its look and themes. The kissing scene E.T. watches — and makes Elliott re-enact — is from Ford’s The Quiet Man, a wonderful bit of rom-com blarney in which an American (John Wayne) returns to Ireland and falls in love with a fiery spinster (Maureen O’Hara). The young blond girl Elliott kisses is Erika Eleniak, who would go on to find TV stardom playing lifeguard Shauni McClain in Baywatch.”
- Wook Kim, Time Magazine
- Rob Nixon, Turner Classic Movies
“Steven Spielberg has always been a big fan of John Ford: in several interviews, he has talked fondly (and with a bit of awe) about the time he, as a 15-year-old aspiring filmmaker, met the legendary director of such Hollywood classics as The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers. He recently stated that “Ford’s in my mind when I make a lot of my pictures”; many critics found Spielberg’s latest movie, The War Horse, very Fordian in its look and themes. The kissing scene E.T. watches — and makes Elliott re-enact — is from Ford’s The Quiet Man, a wonderful bit of rom-com blarney in which an American (John Wayne) returns to Ireland and falls in love with a fiery spinster (Maureen O’Hara). The young blond girl Elliott kisses is Erika Eleniak, who would go on to find TV stardom playing lifeguard Shauni McClain in Baywatch.”
- Wook Kim, Time Magazine
There's some effective scenes in 'Drums Along The Mohawk' including a breathless chase through the woods that influenced Michael Mann when making 'The Last Of The Mohicans' (1992). Henry Fonda firmly establishes himself as Ford's preferred leading man with this picture and 'Young Mr. Lincoln' (1939). It's well shot in luxurious colour and would make a good double bill with Kurt Neumann's western 'Mohawk' (1956).
'You're The One That Taught Me How To Swing' - Dolly Parton
'Day Of The Outlaw' is based on a novel by Lee Edwin Wells that was published in book form in 1955 and also as a serialisation. Ruthless cattleman Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) is furious with his neighbours in Bitters, Wyoming. The focus of his feud is local farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshal), a lily-livered nobody whom Starrett believes deserves to die for putting up a fence and denying access to his land. Hal's wife Helen (Tina Louise) approaches Blaise to strike a deal but things turn awry when former Cavalry man Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) and his band of thugs take the town hostage.
"I guess every fool has his reason."
Tina Louise
A sign of things to come in 'Day Of The Outlaw' is our introduction to Helen Crane. Walking through the snow cloaked in a heavy black robe, Helen resembles the tall, slim trees in the distance in a moment of visual panache that's typical of director Andre De Toth. 'Day Of The Outlaw' is filled with such moments. Take for example, Blaise Starrett's angry, revealing speech delivered as he's ascending a staircase; cinematographer Russell Harlan and his camera crew shoot from several different vantage points within a small interior space and the sequence is staged like great Brechtian theatre, perfectly on point and masterfully orchestrated. Later, a panning shot performs a 180° semi-circle while surveying an impenetrable army of trees that guards a treacherous mountain range, providing a physical impression of the "wall" everyone fears and fights about in the story - De Toth then has the camera pulled back inside a building through a pane glass window by using shifting focus to blur the cut. These examples of adventurous technical filmmaking are made all the more impressive by the fact that 'Day Of The Outlaw' was under-budgeted.
"Andre De Toth's great theme is betrayal--not single betrayals by individuals but networks of betrayal that implicate most of his characters. In de Toth's moral universe, the majority are susceptible to compromise, and the minority who remain pure--such as the rabbi who exhorts his fellow Jews to fight the Germans in None Shall Escape (1944)--wind up dead or otherwise ruined, their lives altered forever by the treachery they've survived. Indeed, the phrase "None Shall Escape" could serve as a motto for de Toth's entire oeuvre. Born in Hungary, de Toth directed several films there and elsewhere in Europe before emigrating to the United States in 1940--on a ship, as he recalls, that sank on its next voyage. It's hard to know how his worldview originated, but perhaps it had something to do with coming of age amid the complexities of Europe between the wars, and having witnessed and filmed the 1939 German invasion of Poland. De Toth brings his vision to life in imagery that can vary from the starkly entrapping to the more subtly incriminating. A crowd of enraged townspeople is seen marching on a Nazi schoolteacher's home in None Shall Escape in a brief montage of images that grows steadily more oppressive--yet no image is more terrifying than the first, in which the crowd appears as a tiny dark shadow through the teacher's window. The rhythm of these images is a regular staccato, almost like the raps of a judge's gavel, culminating in a shot through an outside stairway of legs. It seems they will give no quarter--and these are the "good guys," since the teacher is a rapist. The camera movements in the last section of Day of the Outlaw (1959) are far subtler, slowly reframing fleeing bandits against an unchanging landscape of mountains and snow. But their cumulative effect is if anything even more entrapping, as each twist and turn of the camera and trail reveals not the sought-for pass but only more snow."
- Fred Camper, The Chicago Reader
"That was 'Ramrod,' my first Western. Jack Ford knew that I wanted to make a Western. But again, it’s not the boots or the “spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle” that make a character a human being. In the future, I know, we’ll be able to mix and match faces by changing them electronically. I would love to make a test picture, where everything is the same except one fact that you change electronically. It would be interesting to see the changes. I often used to challenge actors to give me different emotional readings just by saying numbers. You start with nothing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Then you change [pitch and cadence] to suggest surprise, anger, uncertainty: 1, 2…3, 4…5? 6, 7!"
- Andre De Toth, Film Noir Reader
- Fred Camper, The Chicago Reader
"That was 'Ramrod,' my first Western. Jack Ford knew that I wanted to make a Western. But again, it’s not the boots or the “spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle” that make a character a human being. In the future, I know, we’ll be able to mix and match faces by changing them electronically. I would love to make a test picture, where everything is the same except one fact that you change electronically. It would be interesting to see the changes. I often used to challenge actors to give me different emotional readings just by saying numbers. You start with nothing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Then you change [pitch and cadence] to suggest surprise, anger, uncertainty: 1, 2…3, 4…5? 6, 7!"
- Andre De Toth, Film Noir Reader
Andre De Toth, Veronica Lake & Preston Foster
Russell Harlan's crisp monochrome compositions capture the mise-en-scene in ways that appear to lift the props out of the frame. I've read that De Toth worked on this technique of pick-up shading when filming in black and white. A disturbing, swirling dance sequence that changes the direction of the narrative features blocking and camerawork that pre-empts the dizzying dance sequences of dramatic films like Vojtech Jasny's 'All My Good Countrymen' (1969), Miklos Jancso's 'Private Vices, Public Virtues' (1976) and Bela Tarr's 'Werckmeister Harmonies' (2000). Alexander Courage's music begins boldly with strong, courageous chords but dissipates slowly as the hushed sounds of the mountains take over. What's left is a dark, elegiac western powered by an existential mind game in which everybody is forced to ruminate on their future.
"Andre De Toth is mostly discussed as a maker or master of B-movies but his output is more internally consistent than this suggests, and the intimate scale of his often psychologically focused, distanced and domestic films, is less predicated by budget than design. (For example, the less-than-spectacular trappings of the A-grade Springfield Rifle – including its choice of rather generic locations – are a matter of aesthetic choice rather than economic constraint.) De Toth made films that are obsessed by the complex psychological impact of violence, betrayal, and exterior and interior space upon characters. It is in this respect that de Toth’s films can often seem so remarkable, or, in some respects, so mundane. The director’s best work combines an underlying ferocity with a surface muteness, a churning underbelly with an implacable, almost somnambulistic surface, a kind of slowness and attentiveness to the details of intimacy seldom associated with the action genres he predominantly worked within. Despite many similarities, the garish, histrionic and eye-popping landscape of Robert Aldrich’s genre-busting cinema contrasts with the equivocal, drifting quagmire of secrets and betrayals that characterises many of de Toth’s films. Martin Scorsese classes de Toth as a ‘smuggler,’ a director who imported unusual and questioning ideas within the framework of Classical Hollywood cinema. This description is predominantly true as de Toth’s films rarely radically transform the genres they exist within. Nevertheless, they often do perform a transformation of a subtler and less spectacular nature. For example, Pitfall (1948) is amongst the most unusual of all domestic film noirs."
- Adrian Danks, Senses Of Cinema
"If we are to believe even a fraction of what has been written by and about the film director André de Toth, then his life was even more exciting and varied than the plots of his movies. Having met him a few times in his 80s, I can only vouch for his extraordinary energy, passion and earthy humour, and the conviction with which he delivered his anecdotes. These included stories of when he was taken for dead during a student riot in Vienna and woke up in the morgue; and how, when his girlfriend fell pregnant and her father whisked her away for an enforced abortion, de Toth saved her when he discovered her father visited male prostitutes and threatened blackmail. There was also the story of how during the war he fell in love with an anti-Nazi jewellery courier who had a passport made under the name of Mrs de Toth before embarking on a dangerous mission, and how the passport was returned to him covered in blood. Another told of how, while scouting for locations in 1973 in Egypt, he was kidnapped and interrogated by a group of young men who, because of his eye patch, thought he was Israeli minister of defence Moshe Dayan, until he revealed, literally, that he wasn't Jewish. Curiously, the one-eyed de Toth was married for eight years to Veronica Lake, whose "peekaboo" hairstyle gave the impression that she had only one eye, and he directed House Of Wax (1953), the first horror film in 3D, the effects of which he couldn't have seen. The last time I saw him was at the cinema centenary celebrations at Lyons in 1995. With his black eye patch, his shaven head and his neck in a brace (he broke it four times, first in a skiing accident), he made a striking, somewhat scary, impression. However, after proclaiming, "Lyons is to film-makers what Bethlehem is to Christians," he presented the other famous guests with a statuette he had sculpted himself. He then announced that his favourite director was Satyajit Ray - a surprise because most of the films de Toth directed were incisive, small-scale Westerns, including six with Randolph Scott."
- Ronald Bergan, The Guardian
- Adrian Danks, Senses Of Cinema
"If we are to believe even a fraction of what has been written by and about the film director André de Toth, then his life was even more exciting and varied than the plots of his movies. Having met him a few times in his 80s, I can only vouch for his extraordinary energy, passion and earthy humour, and the conviction with which he delivered his anecdotes. These included stories of when he was taken for dead during a student riot in Vienna and woke up in the morgue; and how, when his girlfriend fell pregnant and her father whisked her away for an enforced abortion, de Toth saved her when he discovered her father visited male prostitutes and threatened blackmail. There was also the story of how during the war he fell in love with an anti-Nazi jewellery courier who had a passport made under the name of Mrs de Toth before embarking on a dangerous mission, and how the passport was returned to him covered in blood. Another told of how, while scouting for locations in 1973 in Egypt, he was kidnapped and interrogated by a group of young men who, because of his eye patch, thought he was Israeli minister of defence Moshe Dayan, until he revealed, literally, that he wasn't Jewish. Curiously, the one-eyed de Toth was married for eight years to Veronica Lake, whose "peekaboo" hairstyle gave the impression that she had only one eye, and he directed House Of Wax (1953), the first horror film in 3D, the effects of which he couldn't have seen. The last time I saw him was at the cinema centenary celebrations at Lyons in 1995. With his black eye patch, his shaven head and his neck in a brace (he broke it four times, first in a skiing accident), he made a striking, somewhat scary, impression. However, after proclaiming, "Lyons is to film-makers what Bethlehem is to Christians," he presented the other famous guests with a statuette he had sculpted himself. He then announced that his favourite director was Satyajit Ray - a surprise because most of the films de Toth directed were incisive, small-scale Westerns, including six with Randolph Scott."
- Ronald Bergan, The Guardian
Veronica Lake, Andre De Toth & Edith Head
"Revered by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, the great director Andre de Toth made some of the most gripping and unusual American films of the 1950s, and Day of the Outlaw stands as one of his finest."
- Gary Tooze, DVD Beaver
"Out of that wonderful ’60s and ’70s generation of American horror directors, no one was more blatantly indebted to the classic EC Comics, drive-in fare, and the full-color overindulgence of the Hammer and Corman schools of horror than Tobe Hooper. His movies are deliciously unsomber, unambiguous, and grotesque, without the classical taste and formal rigor of John Carpenter or the scrappy Rust Belt sociopolitical sensibilities of George A. Romero to ground them. So of course the metaphors are obvious in 'Spontaneous Combustion' (1990): the anxieties of the nuclear family explosively fused with ’50s and ’80s nuclear fears; pent-up boomer angst and resentment erupting as literal fire; inherited neuroses as a military-industrial conspiracy, complete with gloved killers, scientists (including one played uncredited by the great ’50s director André De Toth), and manila folders stuffed with secrets. There’s some telepathy in there, too, and some stuff involving radio shows and biblical imagery. But the image of flames shooting out of rips and holes in the Dourif character’s skin is a powerful one. It has a sick and sad poetry to it, like Leatherface’s skin mask. The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has to be the biggest Hooper booster in all of filmdom, loves this movie; it’s a major point of inspiration for one of his most celebrated films, Pulse. And you can almost see it in the way the Dourif character’s pyrokinesis, super paranoid backstory, and eventual descent into the realm of the blue-lit gothic overpower any interest in logic. The plot is spotty; what matters is that Spontaneous Combustion is about an angry man burning up from the inside, the people he destroys, and the combination of facades, geopolitical fears, and economic anxieties that made him. The more the fire-starting anti-hero burns, the more he looks like a decaying movie monster—a vicious, darkly comic cycle of loathing that, once started, can’t stop."
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, The A.V. Club
- Gary Tooze, DVD Beaver
"Out of that wonderful ’60s and ’70s generation of American horror directors, no one was more blatantly indebted to the classic EC Comics, drive-in fare, and the full-color overindulgence of the Hammer and Corman schools of horror than Tobe Hooper. His movies are deliciously unsomber, unambiguous, and grotesque, without the classical taste and formal rigor of John Carpenter or the scrappy Rust Belt sociopolitical sensibilities of George A. Romero to ground them. So of course the metaphors are obvious in 'Spontaneous Combustion' (1990): the anxieties of the nuclear family explosively fused with ’50s and ’80s nuclear fears; pent-up boomer angst and resentment erupting as literal fire; inherited neuroses as a military-industrial conspiracy, complete with gloved killers, scientists (including one played uncredited by the great ’50s director André De Toth), and manila folders stuffed with secrets. There’s some telepathy in there, too, and some stuff involving radio shows and biblical imagery. But the image of flames shooting out of rips and holes in the Dourif character’s skin is a powerful one. It has a sick and sad poetry to it, like Leatherface’s skin mask. The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has to be the biggest Hooper booster in all of filmdom, loves this movie; it’s a major point of inspiration for one of his most celebrated films, Pulse. And you can almost see it in the way the Dourif character’s pyrokinesis, super paranoid backstory, and eventual descent into the realm of the blue-lit gothic overpower any interest in logic. The plot is spotty; what matters is that Spontaneous Combustion is about an angry man burning up from the inside, the people he destroys, and the combination of facades, geopolitical fears, and economic anxieties that made him. The more the fire-starting anti-hero burns, the more he looks like a decaying movie monster—a vicious, darkly comic cycle of loathing that, once started, can’t stop."
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, The A.V. Club
'Shelter From The Storm' - Bob Dylan
I read that a retrospective of Andre De Toth's work is being planned for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. The audience are in for a treat, especially if they include a screening of 'Day Of The Outlaw', one of the great ballads of the badmen.
