'The Last Wagon' (1956) / 'Last Train From Gun Hill' (1959)
Feb 4, 2018 1:28:31 GMT
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Post by petrolino on Feb 4, 2018 1:28:31 GMT
'The Last Wagon' takes place in 1873 in Arizona Territory. Lone Comanche warrior Todd (Richard Widmark) is hunting down the four Harper brothers in an act of vengeance. His capture by racist serial rapist Sheriff Bull Harper (George Mathews) leads to a test of endurance on the trail when the men are picked up by military officer Colonel Normand (Douglas Kennedy) whose wagon train is heading to Tuscon. An attack by the Apache Tribe leaves a small band standing whose only hope for survival is to trek through the Canyon of Death.
'The Last Wagon' is a liberal western in which violence is an essential part of struggle and isolationism leads to fear. Richard Widmark gives a towering performance as social justice warrior Todd, a one-man army intent upon building a one-man state. Todd is stricken with grief and out for justice, a deadly tomahawk specialist who's fully prepared to dominate anyone he needs to and doesn't really know any other way. The prejudice that greets Todd only makes him stronger. Widmark receives strong support from Felicia Farr and Tommy Rettig as honest Christian siblings, Susan Kohner and Stephanie Griffin as embattled step-sisters and Nick Adams and Ray Stricklyn as destitute soul rebels.
Delmer Daves' splenetic western builds a poetic meditation from a barbaric backstory and pushes its disparate characters through social change. It's a paean to living and dying in which everybody's forced to compromise and seek common ground. The great outdoors looks remarkably free as Todd teaches the travellers to feed through shrubs, snake pits, eagle nests and rabbit holes. Film professor Martin Scorsese told his students at New York University to study the westerns made by Daves to learn the intricacies of film process, 'The Last Wagon' serving as a prime example of Daves' genre art.
'Last Train From Gun Hill' details the efforts of Matt Morgan (Kirk Douglas) to bring murderous rapists Rick Belden (Earl Holliman) and Lee Smithers (Brian Hutton) to justice. Morgan takes on a massive gang of gunslingers led by Rick's corrupt father Craig (Anthony Quinn), a wealthy cattle baron who presides over the township of Gun Hill and runs operations using a railway line that passes directly through it.
'Last Train From Gun Hill' is a sturdy western from action supremo John Sturges who mounts some extraordinary set-pieces in the second half. During one extended set-play, Matt Morgan climbs a tree to enter a saloon through a window, being careful not to disturb a poker game being played by hired heavies down below. He knocks out his prey with imagination and then carries him down a staircase while engaging in a full-scale stand-off that leads to gunplay. It's easy to see why action icons Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger hold Kirk Douglas in high regard when you see a sequence like this and he's been doing them his whole career. If you were to combine the strength and athleticism of Burt Lancaster, the agility and acrobatics of Tony Curtis and the granite machismo of Charles Bronson, you'd probably get the Kirkinator who comes modelling arguably the most famous cleft chin in Hollywood history.
The action sequences in 'Last Train To Gun Hill' work brilliantly thanks to John Sturges' expert direction. There's also an exhilarating musical score from Dimitri Tiomkin that features a chattering orchestra using call and response techniques like a flock of birds. I think the writing is a touch too basic and the story set-up owes a debt to Delmer Daves' taut western '3:10 To Yuma' (1957) but 'Last Train From Gun Hill' is an entertaining action picture with a dynamite climax.
"Always it's taken two Apache to kill one Comanche."
Richard Widmark
Richard Widmark
'The Last Wagon' is a liberal western in which violence is an essential part of struggle and isolationism leads to fear. Richard Widmark gives a towering performance as social justice warrior Todd, a one-man army intent upon building a one-man state. Todd is stricken with grief and out for justice, a deadly tomahawk specialist who's fully prepared to dominate anyone he needs to and doesn't really know any other way. The prejudice that greets Todd only makes him stronger. Widmark receives strong support from Felicia Farr and Tommy Rettig as honest Christian siblings, Susan Kohner and Stephanie Griffin as embattled step-sisters and Nick Adams and Ray Stricklyn as destitute soul rebels.
"If I described to you a noted film director who was born in the first decade of the twentieth century in California, made his first (pro-Indian) Western in 1950, used James Stewart as his star, made his last Western in 1958 with Gary Cooper in the lead, and in between made some first class pictures, though never Oscared, a director who composed his pictures beautifully and was noted for the cinematography, whose Westerns were uncompromising and tough, well, you’d probably guess I was talking about Anthony Mann. I’m describing Delmer Daves. Like Mann, Daves made ten or so Westerns in the 1950s (depending on how you define a Western). They were of more mixed quality than Mann’s (i.e. some weren’t that good) but overall they were top class and some were supreme examples of the genre."
- Jeff Arnold, 'The Westerns Of Delmer Daves'
- Jeff Arnold, 'The Westerns Of Delmer Daves'
"Delmer Daves was a westerner. He was born in San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, educated at Stanford, lived and worked in Southern California, and came to specialize in the western movie genre, for which he was suited by temperament, upbringing, and knowledge. Daves’s grandfather told his grandson many stories about his days as a wagon master and the multiple crossings he led along the Oregon Trail in the interval between the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroads. According to Bertrand Tavernier, Daves’s great critical champion, a sizable percentage of his vast personal library, which included his grandfather’s diaries, was devoted to the history of the West. Between 1950 and 1959, Daves made nine westerns, constituting almost half of his body of work as a director and, as he claimed, a virtual composite of the region’s history. Daves possessed a unique mixture of talents and attributes. He was one of the most visually gifted directors in all of American cinema (he had training as a graphic artist), and he had a strong documentary bent that gives a special flavor to all of his films, setting his westerns, in particular, apart from those of his peers. To watch those westerns in the order of the time periods they cover is to come away with a rich sense of the evolution of the West, the look of the towns and the houses, the hotels and the bars, the way of living, the loneliness. The most striking element of Daves’s filmmaking, however—and perhaps the principal reason for his current lack of renown—may be his steadfast dedication and moving attunement to the very best in people. In his cinema, there is no pure malignance, only misguided jealousy, ambition, and envy. Resignation, cynicism, and paranoia—among the most common characteristics of postwar American movies—are almost entirely absent. In certain cases, this results in a dramatic quandary: some of his malefactors and villains are not much more than the human equivalents of railroad switches, so little feeling does he have for malice. But there’s a trade-off. Daves is an absolute rarity in cinema, an artist of the good. All of these qualities resonate throughout his films."
- Kent Jones, 'Jubal : Awakened To Goodness'
"What first impresses the viewer is Daves's attention to landscape, to nature, expressed in shots that intimately and sometimes inextricably mingle lyricism and realism. He actually insisted on personally supervising the kind of material many Hollywood filmmakers would leave to second-unit directors—extreme long shots, transitional moments filmed at dawn or twilight. For one setup in To the Victor (48), he spent a whole night on the Trocadero Esplanade in Paris, and, as he wrote to me, “it was worth the trouble.” One recalls from his work an immense and spectacular variety of landscapes, sometimes within the same film—and not only in the westerns but in a lyrical melodrama like The Red House (47), an urban film noir like Dark Passage (47), or Parrish (61), a soap opera whose one redeeming feature is its use of exteriors. Jubal (56), for instance, derives part of its power and originality from its diversity of locations, ranging from the dramatic bareness of the opening shots to the elegiac forest of the Felicia Farr sequences, with each new locale appearing to modify the approach and construction of the narrative and shape feelings and emotions. Landscape is not just a setting for the action—it becomes part of it, its secret driving force. I have never forgotten the underbrush, the craggy slopes, the torrent of The Last Wagon (56), the parched, cracked soil in 3:10 to Yuma (57), the Modoc camp in Drum Beat (54), the beach graveyard in To the Victor, the gold-mining camp overlooked by Gary Cooper's small cabin in The Hanging Tree (59). All these locales are pregnant with meaning (more poetic than symbolic), filmed with a lyrical, emotional power but totally devoid of the picturesque. Daves's is not a tourist's eye—his ambition is to weave an organic link between a scene's inner feeling and its location. In Bird of Paradise (51), the black, gleaming sand of the beach where Louis Jourdan lands seems to foreshadow the dark, painful mood of his encounter with Everett Sloane, a magnificent Stevensonian character. Later in the same film, the basalt-colored rocky spur on which Jeff Chandler confronts the high priest imparts genuine solemnity to the scene. In Drum Beat, the windswept plateaus provide a visual counterpart to the thorny discussions surrounding the peace treaty. Doc Frail's cabin overhanging the small mining town in The Hanging Tree, connoting exclusion, reclusion, and domination, speaks volumes about the contradictions that tear him apart. Nature in Daves's films is is not imparted with the grandeur, the epic theatricality so admired in Ford, who manages to convince us that one could farm and raise cattle in Monument Valley, a thoroughly unrealistic proposition. Daves does not mythologize Nature but befriends it, the way his characters do, at least those who must live or survive in it. His signature camera moves—crane shots, lateral tracking shots, which show his extraordinary mastery of space—are movements of integration: of character within community, landscape, and setting—and of emotional entrenchment (unlike Anthony Mann's, whose direction, one might say, is founded on movements of opposition, dramatizing the difficulty of an ascent or the imminence of danger). As Jacques Lourcelles has noted, Daves's crane shots “which often have no immediate, logical connection with the plot, magnify the emotions which in turn help the spectator commune with the landscape.”
- Bertrand Tavernier, 'Delmer Daves - The Ethical Romantic'
Van Heflin, Felicia Farr & Glenn Ford
'I Am A Rock' - Simon & Garfunkel
- Kent Jones, 'Jubal : Awakened To Goodness'
"What first impresses the viewer is Daves's attention to landscape, to nature, expressed in shots that intimately and sometimes inextricably mingle lyricism and realism. He actually insisted on personally supervising the kind of material many Hollywood filmmakers would leave to second-unit directors—extreme long shots, transitional moments filmed at dawn or twilight. For one setup in To the Victor (48), he spent a whole night on the Trocadero Esplanade in Paris, and, as he wrote to me, “it was worth the trouble.” One recalls from his work an immense and spectacular variety of landscapes, sometimes within the same film—and not only in the westerns but in a lyrical melodrama like The Red House (47), an urban film noir like Dark Passage (47), or Parrish (61), a soap opera whose one redeeming feature is its use of exteriors. Jubal (56), for instance, derives part of its power and originality from its diversity of locations, ranging from the dramatic bareness of the opening shots to the elegiac forest of the Felicia Farr sequences, with each new locale appearing to modify the approach and construction of the narrative and shape feelings and emotions. Landscape is not just a setting for the action—it becomes part of it, its secret driving force. I have never forgotten the underbrush, the craggy slopes, the torrent of The Last Wagon (56), the parched, cracked soil in 3:10 to Yuma (57), the Modoc camp in Drum Beat (54), the beach graveyard in To the Victor, the gold-mining camp overlooked by Gary Cooper's small cabin in The Hanging Tree (59). All these locales are pregnant with meaning (more poetic than symbolic), filmed with a lyrical, emotional power but totally devoid of the picturesque. Daves's is not a tourist's eye—his ambition is to weave an organic link between a scene's inner feeling and its location. In Bird of Paradise (51), the black, gleaming sand of the beach where Louis Jourdan lands seems to foreshadow the dark, painful mood of his encounter with Everett Sloane, a magnificent Stevensonian character. Later in the same film, the basalt-colored rocky spur on which Jeff Chandler confronts the high priest imparts genuine solemnity to the scene. In Drum Beat, the windswept plateaus provide a visual counterpart to the thorny discussions surrounding the peace treaty. Doc Frail's cabin overhanging the small mining town in The Hanging Tree, connoting exclusion, reclusion, and domination, speaks volumes about the contradictions that tear him apart. Nature in Daves's films is is not imparted with the grandeur, the epic theatricality so admired in Ford, who manages to convince us that one could farm and raise cattle in Monument Valley, a thoroughly unrealistic proposition. Daves does not mythologize Nature but befriends it, the way his characters do, at least those who must live or survive in it. His signature camera moves—crane shots, lateral tracking shots, which show his extraordinary mastery of space—are movements of integration: of character within community, landscape, and setting—and of emotional entrenchment (unlike Anthony Mann's, whose direction, one might say, is founded on movements of opposition, dramatizing the difficulty of an ascent or the imminence of danger). As Jacques Lourcelles has noted, Daves's crane shots “which often have no immediate, logical connection with the plot, magnify the emotions which in turn help the spectator commune with the landscape.”
- Bertrand Tavernier, 'Delmer Daves - The Ethical Romantic'
Van Heflin, Felicia Farr & Glenn Ford
'I Am A Rock' - Simon & Garfunkel
Delmer Daves' splenetic western builds a poetic meditation from a barbaric backstory and pushes its disparate characters through social change. It's a paean to living and dying in which everybody's forced to compromise and seek common ground. The great outdoors looks remarkably free as Todd teaches the travellers to feed through shrubs, snake pits, eagle nests and rabbit holes. Film professor Martin Scorsese told his students at New York University to study the westerns made by Daves to learn the intricacies of film process, 'The Last Wagon' serving as a prime example of Daves' genre art.
'Last Train From Gun Hill' details the efforts of Matt Morgan (Kirk Douglas) to bring murderous rapists Rick Belden (Earl Holliman) and Lee Smithers (Brian Hutton) to justice. Morgan takes on a massive gang of gunslingers led by Rick's corrupt father Craig (Anthony Quinn), a wealthy cattle baron who presides over the township of Gun Hill and runs operations using a railway line that passes directly through it.
"The human race stinks. I'm practically an authority on that subject."
Anthony Quinn & Kirk Douglas
Anthony Quinn & Kirk Douglas
'Last Train From Gun Hill' is a sturdy western from action supremo John Sturges who mounts some extraordinary set-pieces in the second half. During one extended set-play, Matt Morgan climbs a tree to enter a saloon through a window, being careful not to disturb a poker game being played by hired heavies down below. He knocks out his prey with imagination and then carries him down a staircase while engaging in a full-scale stand-off that leads to gunplay. It's easy to see why action icons Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger hold Kirk Douglas in high regard when you see a sequence like this and he's been doing them his whole career. If you were to combine the strength and athleticism of Burt Lancaster, the agility and acrobatics of Tony Curtis and the granite machismo of Charles Bronson, you'd probably get the Kirkinator who comes modelling arguably the most famous cleft chin in Hollywood history.
"Many commentators, not least Kirk Douglas himself, would trace his rebellious stance back to his upbringing. Born in the upstate New York burg of Amsterdam, the son of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants, he and his six sisters were brought up by their illiterate mother after their father (the ‘ragman’ of Douglas’s 1988 autobiography The Ragman’s Son) jumped ship. Douglas, eager to escape (“I was dying to get out. In a sense, it lit a fire under me”) and to act, talked his way into a place at St Lawrence University and worked his way through college waiting on tables. As a Jew, he found himself barred from many of the college societies. It’s not surprising then that once established as a Hollywood star, he set out to gain total control over his projects, forming his own production company, Bryna – named after his mother – in 1955. A lifelong Democrat, he favoured maverick directors like André de Toth and Stanley Kubrick, and famously helped break the blacklist that had been established during the anti-communist witchhunts of the late 1940s by giving Dalton Trumbo – one of the banned ‘Hollywood Ten’ – screen credit on Spartacus."
- Philip Kemp, 'Kirk Douglas : Hollywood Champ'
“I never wanted to be in movies. I always considered myself a stage actor. I started working in the Broadway stage. And Betty Bacall helped me. She went to Hollywood, she was living with Bogart and she said to Hal Wallis, ‘You must look at Kirk Douglas.’ Hal Wallis came to New York, and he offered me a contract. I didn’t know what to do. I needed the money. So, I came to Hollywood.”
- Kirk Douglas, Variety
"There are reasons why John Sturges isn't held in the same esteem as the movie-making legends - John Ford, Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks - he admired. His filmography covers 30 years from The Man Who Dared in 1946 to The Eagle Has Landed in 1976. But it took him a long time to find the scripts that allowed him to focus on the themes and subject matter that really engaged his passions. He spent his first decade as a director churning out forgettable production-line fodder, a cog in the wheel at Columbia studios. But his life before that defined Sturges' best work. Born in the same Chicago suburb as Ernest Hemingway and raised by a single mother during The Depression in Los Angeles, he paid for his schooling by working at San Rafael Theatre. Drawn to the moive business, he worked at RKO and was promoted to work as an editor. The advent of WWII could have cut his career short, but it was while serving as a captain with the US Air Corps that he first got his chance to make movies. He shot a total of 45 films in Africa, Italy, Corsica and England, including a feature-length documentary, Thunderbolt with Wild Bill William Wyler, a buccaneering, larger than life character who became a role model and inspiration for Sturges. Sturges's wartime experience left a deep impression on his work. Violence, fear and the search for vengeance surfaces again and again in his movies. But the actual process of making movies under pressure and under fire also informed his approach to cinema. "I must tell you," he reflected towards the end of his career, "I have always been totally nerveless. I have never found a problem that I could not solve. If I encounter such a problem, I decide I don't want it." He gloried in his reputation as "one shot Sturges", a tough, brawny, cinematic gunslinger whose athleticism was reflected in the action sequences he choreographed with steely precision. McQueen on a motorbike vaulting over Nazi barbed wire; the legendary final shoot out at the end of Gunfight At The OK Corral; or one armed Spencer Tracy's karate duel with brutal Ernest Borgnine in Bad Day At Black Rock."
- Gavin Martin, 'Action! The John Sturges Story'
Carolyn Jones
'Island Girl' - Elton John
- Philip Kemp, 'Kirk Douglas : Hollywood Champ'
“I never wanted to be in movies. I always considered myself a stage actor. I started working in the Broadway stage. And Betty Bacall helped me. She went to Hollywood, she was living with Bogart and she said to Hal Wallis, ‘You must look at Kirk Douglas.’ Hal Wallis came to New York, and he offered me a contract. I didn’t know what to do. I needed the money. So, I came to Hollywood.”
- Kirk Douglas, Variety
"There are reasons why John Sturges isn't held in the same esteem as the movie-making legends - John Ford, Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks - he admired. His filmography covers 30 years from The Man Who Dared in 1946 to The Eagle Has Landed in 1976. But it took him a long time to find the scripts that allowed him to focus on the themes and subject matter that really engaged his passions. He spent his first decade as a director churning out forgettable production-line fodder, a cog in the wheel at Columbia studios. But his life before that defined Sturges' best work. Born in the same Chicago suburb as Ernest Hemingway and raised by a single mother during The Depression in Los Angeles, he paid for his schooling by working at San Rafael Theatre. Drawn to the moive business, he worked at RKO and was promoted to work as an editor. The advent of WWII could have cut his career short, but it was while serving as a captain with the US Air Corps that he first got his chance to make movies. He shot a total of 45 films in Africa, Italy, Corsica and England, including a feature-length documentary, Thunderbolt with Wild Bill William Wyler, a buccaneering, larger than life character who became a role model and inspiration for Sturges. Sturges's wartime experience left a deep impression on his work. Violence, fear and the search for vengeance surfaces again and again in his movies. But the actual process of making movies under pressure and under fire also informed his approach to cinema. "I must tell you," he reflected towards the end of his career, "I have always been totally nerveless. I have never found a problem that I could not solve. If I encounter such a problem, I decide I don't want it." He gloried in his reputation as "one shot Sturges", a tough, brawny, cinematic gunslinger whose athleticism was reflected in the action sequences he choreographed with steely precision. McQueen on a motorbike vaulting over Nazi barbed wire; the legendary final shoot out at the end of Gunfight At The OK Corral; or one armed Spencer Tracy's karate duel with brutal Ernest Borgnine in Bad Day At Black Rock."
- Gavin Martin, 'Action! The John Sturges Story'
Carolyn Jones
'Island Girl' - Elton John
The action sequences in 'Last Train To Gun Hill' work brilliantly thanks to John Sturges' expert direction. There's also an exhilarating musical score from Dimitri Tiomkin that features a chattering orchestra using call and response techniques like a flock of birds. I think the writing is a touch too basic and the story set-up owes a debt to Delmer Daves' taut western '3:10 To Yuma' (1957) but 'Last Train From Gun Hill' is an entertaining action picture with a dynamite climax.
'Hey, procrastinators! If you’ve ever wanted to see Elton John, Paul Simon, Slayer, or a number of other living legends in concert, now is the time. We’re only a month into 2018 and numerous musicians are announcing that they’re pulling the plug (for now) on their touring careers. They’re not retiring entirely, but this could be your last opportunity to see them live. See below for seven artists and bands who are leaving (or have already left) the stage behind ...'
- Statement released at the Vulture
'Tonight' - Elton John with film composer James Newton Howard
- Statement released at the Vulture
'Tonight' - Elton John with film composer James Newton Howard
