The Great Escape

The Great Escape, by John Sturges, 1963

I have a long history with not seeing John Sturges' The Great Escape. It has been sitting unwatched in my DVD collection for over a decade now. I bought it as a gift for my dad, maybe in 2000 or so, and sometime after that, he died, and I absorbed it back into my own collection. I never watched it, at first because it made me think of him, but as years passed and the pain dulled, it was really just because it was hidden away in a book of old caseless DVDs and when I did notice it, I didn't have the time or patience for a three hour movie.

Well, I finally watched The Great Escape, and as I expected, it's kind of the ultimate watch-with-your-dad movie. For those few of you who may not have already watched it, it's about a bunch of tough-guy P.O.W.s in Poland in World War II, who hatch an elaborate plan to dig a tunnel right under the Nazis' eyes and burrow out of their prison camp. Steve McQueen leads the team, in the role that made him a star. James Garner, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn are there. Donald Pleasance is there, but true to form, he's not a tough guy, he's an expert forger losing his eyesight.

The movie is great fun, though it's perfectly comfortable being serious when the story demands it too. The three hour running time rolls by unnoticed. The score is another classic by Elmer Bernstein (whether you've seen the movie or not, you definitely know this score), who also wrote the influential score for Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, among many others. Those are the only two John Sturges films I've seen so far, but that guy knew his stuff, didn't he? Both are great, large-scale stories with tons of action, drama, and comedy, and huge ensemble casts playing great, memorable characters. I never liked war movies or westerns when I was young, but now I totally enjoy them, and Sturges made movies that are among the very best of those genres.

My dad wasn't a big movie guy, really. He liked a lot of great movies, but that was a side effect of growing up in the 60's and 70's when great movies were coming out left and right. He had some amazing stuff taped off HBO when I was a kid, and that's what opened the doors for me to love movies in the first place. So I guess what I'm saying is, you should totally watch The Great Escape, or The Magnificent Seven, or The Godfather, or even The Lord of the Rings, or anything else, especially if it's something he likes, with your dad. I didn't get to do much of that, and I regret it.

The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven, in addition to being a rollicking good adventure, holds a place of importance in the landscape of world cinema. Or at least, I think it does. In 1954, with his Seven Samurai, director Akira Kurosawa redefined the samurai movie genre by infusing it with the visual style and values of a John Ford western. Six years later, in 1960, Hollywood would come full circle by remaking a Japanese Western into a Western Western.

The world of cinema was getting increasingly smaller, as international films had an increasing influence on filmmakers of the time. The directors of the French New Wave looked to Hollywood auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock for inspiration. Not long after, the next generation of Hollywood directors, (Coppola, Malick, Scorsese, Lucas, etc.) would look to Kurosawa and the French New Wave. Nowadays, directors draw their influences from around the world and throughout the last century.

Directed by John Sturges, The Magnificent Seven follows the structure of Seven Samurai fairly closely, though in a faster paced, more truncated way. While Seven Samurai is an epic, The Magnificent Seven is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of popcorn entertainment. Sturges clearly has a lot of reverence for Kurosawa, and shows it in his work, with many direct nods or homages to his source material throughout the movie.

The seven in question are led by Yul Brynner, probably cast just as much for his bald head as for his screen presence (the character in the Japanese version shaves his head). He is recruited by a farming village in Mexico to form a posse to help rid them of an army of 40 bandits bent on stealing their crops. Rounding out the posse are such icons of manliness as Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson (the youngest I've ever seen him, still looks 70), and James Coburn.

The movie doesn't try to mimic Seven Samurai entirely. The seven don't all have the same motivations and personalities as their counterparts, for example. Also, the bandits are given more of a presence; rather than just being faceless bad guys, they are led by Eli Wallach.

Two of the samurai are sort of collapsed into one, in the case of Chico, played by Horst Buchholz. He takes both the role of the eager, hotheaded drifter who shoehorns his way into the group, and the young, naive kid learning the ropes who finds love with a peasant girl. I didn't really care for this. Buchholz would have worked fine as the kid, but he wasn't fit to fill the shoes of the great Toshiro Mifune, in what was possibly his most memorable and iconic role. They should have looked at that character as just as important a role as the Yul Brynner character, and found an appropriate actor.

The Magnificent Seven is as enjoyable as a streamlined remake of a longer, better foreign film can be. It's fun to watch so many superstars sharing the screen together. The score by Elmer Bernstein is tremendous and memorable, and is still referenced in Western movie scores. Also, I was glad to hear that Akira Kurosawa was a fan of the movie.

Once Upon a Time in the West

My love affair with the films of Sergio Leone is surprisingly recent. I just got the Man with No Name trilogy in December, knowing full well that I should have seen it a long time ago. Things like this used to embarrass me. When I was in high school, I would even occasionally lie and say I had seen certain movies, just because it was expected of me. It's a good thing people didn't press further.

Anyway, last year sometime, I read about a special screening of Evil Dead 2 held by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright (his name comes up from time to time in this blog, doesn't it? hmmmm...) When he asked the audience if anybody hadn't seen Evil Dead 2 before, some people in the audience raised their hand. They got JEERS from the rest of the audience, as if to say, "what are you, an IDIOT? How could you not have seen Evil Dead 2?" Edgar Wright then hushed these people and chastised them, saying that there's nothing wrong with not having seen an amazing film before, and think of how great it would be to see Evil Dead 2 for the first time in the theater with a huge, loving audience?

Anyway, what I'm getting at is, that story stayed with me, and helped me get past any embarrassment I would have once felt about not seeing The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I've been having so much fun over these last few months watching all these classic movies that I've missed and telling you about them from a fresh-eyed perspective.

So, Sergio Leone's next film after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was another Spaghetti Western: Once Upon a Time in the West. It was his boldest statement on the American western yet. He was even able to shoot scenes in Monument Valley, the Utah location where so many John Ford movies were shot.

The movie follows the G, B, and U formula with Charles Bronson filling in for Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, Henry Fonda playing completely against type as the villain, and Jason Robards as the roguish-but-likable third. Also, for the first time in a Leone film, a woman has a prominent role with Claudia Cardinale as the hooker-turned-widow upon whom the entire story hinges.

Leone's films are all very slowly and deliberately paced, and this is the slowest one I've seen yet. That's not at all to the movie's detriment, mind you. He trusts in his audience's patience, and rewards them with some of the most memorable and iconic scene payoffs they ever will see. His sequences form a dialogue with us, and give us some of the most engaging viewing experiences in film history. His tight close-ups on his actors pick up every minute detail of their faces, and every little twitch they make speaks volumes.

Charles Bronson, who apparently was born at the age of 75 and died at 150, is full of machismo and bad-assery as the ghostly protagonist. He was also made of old, rain-damaged shoe leather, judging by his skin. We don't at first know who he is, or what's in his past, but he's haunting the cold-as-ice Henry Fonda character for some evil deed that Fonda himself can't even remember. His presence is always signaled by a few melancholy notes on the harmonica he carries with him everywhere.

Speaking of the harmonica, let's talk for a minute about Leone's greatest collaborator, composer Ennio Morricone. His scores in Leone's films are an utterly unique experience. Strange, otherworldly instruments mix with 60's surf guitar riffs, and dance with the images on the screen. I feel like the music has as much dialogue as the characters do.

The ending of Once Upon a Time in the West, as Leone's films always do, features a duel. With each film, his duels got longer and more intense. Time stretches on and on and on, as we see every tiny movement the characters make, every thought that goes through their minds, and then, suddenly, they draw, and it's over just like that. I think if Leone were still making films today, they would just be three and a half hours of 16 guys standing in a circle squinting at each other, and then in the last five seconds they all shoot and 15 of them fall. And it would still be compelling.

I think you know I liked this movie. It's a classic. A.