Arrowsmith (1931)

Rating 2/4

Art is at its best when it isn’t rushed. Otherwise what could be great becomes merely mediocre. And that is precisely what happened to John Ford’s 1931 picture, Arrowsmith. It’s a sad what-could-have-been with fine acting and excellent cinematography mired by a fast pace that comes at the expense of the story.

Based on the Sinclair Lewis novel, Arrowsmith tells the story of an ambitious country doctor (Ronald Colman) who struggles to balance his career fighting infectious diseases with his marriage to his longsuffering wife, Leora (Helen Hayes). She’s spunky, enthusiastic, and charms him with her wit. He’s noble, eager, and humble in his dealings with European professionals who seek his talents fighting plague in the tropics.

We first meet Martin Arrowsmith studying up on Gray’s Anatomy being told that the best doctors need only that book, the Bible, and Shakespeare to be well-rounded in their craft. It’s silly advice and Arrowsmith never takes it in the movie and the character who says it to him never reappears again. He later (and by later I mean in the very next scene) introduces himself to eminent bacteriologist, Dr. Gottlieb (A. E. Anson) who tells him he won’t take him on as a research apprentice until he finishes school. Years later (once again in the very next scene) he is finished with school and ready to serve. He meets Leora, a young nurse scrubbing hospital floors as a punishment for smoking on the job. He asks her out on a date and at the restaurant he proposes to her. If this seems a bit hasty, don’t worry, in a few moments the dialogue reveals they have been already dating for a couple of years.
And here is where I started seeing the problem that persists throughout the whole picture. The film constantly jumps ahead in time with only hasty dialogue explaining the passage of time. When it is not simply confusing it is robbing the story of any dramatic tension.
His life with Leora is always saccharine and happy and every moment of strife or conflict; any obstacle and hurdle they encounter is immediately rectified and resolved by the very next scene. Sometimes even in the very same scene.

Martin declines Gottlieb’s offer to work under him as a researcher in New York because the salary is not enough to support him and his wife. He goes into the country to work as a practical physician: pulling children’s teeth, treating sore throats, and even developing a serum to cure sick cattle. I never saw him charge payment and whenever the subject is brought up he nobly says “don’t worry about it.” I really don’t know why he declined Gottlieb’s offer then.
After his wife miscarries and becomes unhappy in the country he takes his family to New York after all, where his talents as a bacteriologist lands him in the tropics to test out a serum for bubonic plague on the population. What follows is a poorly written third act that tries to tackle research ethics in a way that I found offensive. He is instructed to test the serum on a selection of the population and withhold it from the other half to test its effectiveness. This is profoundly illogical. All of these people are ill and withholding the serum would prove nothing. The ethical question of experimenting in this fashion is brought up and then dropped with a whimper. What we get instead is a diabolical white savior plot that tells us that those who were outraged by the experiment were just being unreasonable. When the “big bad city folk” who opposed the experiment show up at his camp to receive the serum themselves they are portrayed as sycophantic hypocrites who got scared and came running to our hero. This is some of the most reprehensible moralizing I have seen in a movie. Tacked on to this is an implied affair Martin has with a woman named Joyce (a sadly wasted performance by Myrna Loy) that comes out of seemingly nowhere and is easy to miss and misinterpret. We get a scene with Martin in beautifully shot low-key lighting smoking a cigarette outside her room. She changes into a nightgown before the scene cuts to black. Another leering glance from her and a brief parting scene at the end is all that is further developed from this.

I mentioned the lighting above because that is where Arrowsmith’s strengths lie. Low-key lighting, sihouettes, and shadow terrifically capture the characters’ moods in moments of doubt. Ray June’s cinematography here was nominated for an Academy Award and it is merited.
Another strong point is the acting. Helen Hayes is terrific in here. Portraying exuberance, wit, love, grief, and humor; I could see the woman Martin fell in love with. She did not win or even get nominated for her acting in this movie, but I cannot complain since she still won that year for her role in The Sin of Madelon Claudet anyway.

I would have appreciated Arrowsmith more had it not been for the pacing and plot. The third act is morally questionable and quick and convenient resolutions to every conflict take away any investment I could have had in the story.

I read somewhere that producer Samuel Goldwyn allowed director John Ford – best known for his work with John Wayne – to helm Arrowsmith on the condition that he not do any drinking during production. Apparently Ford deliberately rushed through making the film so he could get back to it. I hate to say this, but maybe Goldwyn should have let him have a cheat day.

Star Wars (1977)

Rating 4/4

Star Wars since its release in 1977 has become one of those quintessential films like The Wizard of Oz or Snow White which everyone has seen and has entered into the collective consciousness of people all around the world. It’s as recognizable as Hamlet and Tom Sawyer and Hercules and Moses. And being a life-long die hard Star Wars fan and after the brand has expanded upon itself the last 40 years with sequels, prequels, comics, and novels it’s not easy to just review it purely as a movie from 1977. Star Wars is now a phenomenal mythic enterprise and viewing the film simply as a late seventies sci-fi hit created by the director of American Graffiti is not needed anymore.
Which is why I am not going to review it at all. What I would rather do instead is take a few moments of your time and discuss the phenomenon that this movie became and hopefully convey what it means to me personally.
I was 15 years too late to see this movie when it first came out in theaters; seeing it for the first time as a second generation fan in the early 90’s when I was about six years old. I have no recollection of that first viewing experience and as far as I am concerned Star Wars has always been around.
In my earliest memories Star Wars was already a near and dear thing to me. I played with the Kenner and Hasbro action figures, illiterately leafed through my uncle’s collection of comics, and eagerly picked up as much knowledge of the lore as I could. With the amount of affection I had for Star Wars, and how much space it took in my playtime and imagination; first seeing this movie must have been as close to a spiritual experience as I am willing to believe in.
I could drone on some more about how much Star Wars changed everything, but I would be being disingenuous. I never saw it change anything. Things had already been changed by it around the time I was born. The adults and teens who first saw it 47 years ago probably cannot understand how much my generation takes it for granted. It’s like the existence of automobiles, going to church, or just the presence of movies in general. A point in time in which it did not exist is beyond my comprehension.

But Star Wars did change everything. They say hindsight is 20/20 and I don’t disagree. I especially agree when I wasn’t even around back then in the first place. It baffles me how so many people in Hollywood had such little faith in Star Wars’ production. A quick glance at any of the making of features in print or on film will show constant references to risk-taking and predictions of failure. When I look at this movie I wonder how anyone in their right mind could have thought it was going to be a flop. Living in a time when movies like Star Wars are a dime a dozen and oversaturate the box office it’s hard to imagine the late 70’s when more serious pictures were being produced and science fiction/fantasy movies were frequent critical and financial failures. Believe it or not, sci-fi movies used to not be guaranteed blockbusters and many of them were your typical tax-shelter projects similar to what we are seeing being produced for the SyFy channel and Netflix today.

I won’t waste any more words on Star Wars changing cinema since we all know it did. What I find more interesting and less talked about is how much it changed George Lucas himself.
If one were to patiently sit through his early student films from the 60’s followed by his debut, THX 1138, you see the obvious influences and overall tone of his work. Lucas was making films for the anti-war counter-culture youth of America: fed up with Vietnam, fed up with Watergate, fed up with segregation and Jim Crow laws, and just plain fed up with The Man altogether.
He made THX as a Huxley-esque attack on authoritarian government and American Graffiti was a revisit to teenage life in California before Vietnam.
Star Wars was something different. Something special. Yeah, there is an echo of anti-imperialism in it, but much of it was written and produced with a more basic and ergo more important motivation. With his third film, Lucas left counter-culturalism in the background and sought instead to revitalize for younger moviegoers spirituality and myth in a language they could understand. And miraculously its success overshadowed its ambitions. Star Wars has achieved George Lucas’s goal more than he could have anticipated when he first began writing it in 1974. Probably even more than he anticipated when he was actually making the film which was fraught with budget problems, uncooperative cinematographers and crews, cynical execs having no faith in its success, supply problems, and labor difficulties of every kind…
But successful it was. Like the myths Lucas was drawing from, Star Wars became a natural part of our culture. The Force, wookiees, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, the Millennium Falcon, and even Jar-Jar Binks are as familiar and recognizable to us as Thor, Zeus, and the Garden of Eden. Many of its characters, creatures, planets, and technology have become proverbial and require no exposition when used to make a point or reference. Many of my generation learned “May the Force be with you” before we learned to say “Amen.” The lightsaber is as iconic as Excalibur or Mjolnir. It would be self-indulgent to go on, but I could for a thousand more paragraphs if I wanted to.

George Lucas would not direct another film again until 1999 with the release of The Phantom Menace. In the meantime he produced and wrote less of the counter-culture material that characterized his earlier work and focused more on writing the remaining movies of the Star Wars trilogy and Indiana Jones as well as championing the progress of special effects in cinema with ILM. In 1997, two years before the release of his first prequel, the Star Wars trilogy was re-released in theaters in the form of Special Editions with the films’ negatives cleaned up and restored, enhanced special effects inserts, and occasionally a few cut scenes put back in. Many of these changes were controversial and ironically helped create some new proverbial myths of their own. “Han Shot First” has become nearly as recognizable as “May the Force be with you.”

You may have begun to notice that I have been so far speaking more about Star Wars as a saga and critically successful franchise than I am about the 1977 picture itself and there is a reason for this. Any review I could write about this movie would add nothing that hasn’t been already said and said better than I can. To be frank, if you haven’t seen Star Wars, nothing in this piece is directed to you. Which is why I must reiterate this is not a review. There are not enough people living under a rock for such a review to be useful and if they emerge I am not so vain as to think they would come flocking to this blog to see if Star Wars is worth watching or not.
It is, and you should go watch it again sometime. Not because I said so, but because you and I already both know that you should.

American Graffiti (1973)

3.5/4

Jack Weinberg once told us “Don’t trust anyone over 30”; and watching the majority of high school coming-of-age comedies that have been released over the years I believe he was right. Most of these types of films are made by men well over thirty who have forgotten what it was like to be truly young. For them youth means the sort of lechery, booze, and boorishness that made Bob Clark’s pictures so popular.
George Lucas was 29 when American Graffiti, his second film, was released to American cinemas. It counts. And if there is anyone who can recapture in a bottle what it was like to be a teenager on the cusp of the adult world it is the man who would later give us Star Wars.

American Graffiti is not a film with a plot that can be adequately described and explained without losing some of its heart and appeal. The movie is a slice of life kinda picture showing the last night of freedom for a group of high school graduates about to go out and get jobs and go to college.
Set in the summer of 1962 with an atmosphere of 50’s diners, music, and cars American Graffiti perfectly and often hilariously portrays its characters living their best lives before the ravages of adulthood begin to take over.

Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) wonders if he really wants to go to college after all and goes on a wild excursion searching for a beautiful girl he saw passing by only to get entangled with a group of greasers whom he helps commit a few petty crimes to avoid getting beaten up by them.
His friend Steve (Ron Howard) is hormonal and immature; pressuring his girlfriend into sex just hours after telling her he wants to be free to see other people while he is away at school. As someone who actually is over 30 I know this is a really bad move.
Steve loans his car to the geeky bespectacled Terry (Charles Martin Smith) who uses it to impress Debbie (Candy Clark), a pretty blonde miles out of his league only to have everything fall apart when Steve later takes the car back. The romance between Terry and Debbie is absurd, charming, and comedically unrealistic in how much she puts up and puts out for him.
Milner (Paul Le Mat) is tricked into taking out a friend’s 12 year old relative, Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) out on a date and their petty bickering and her wit while he tries to pass himself as her babysitter make for some of the funniest moments in the movie. They both know she is too young for him and she takes every opportunity to embarrass and annoy him while she enjoys a night on the town. At the end they part ways with a reluctant mutual respect.
Milner’s rival, Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford) is a brash and immature tool who never quite grew up and has a hankering for street racing high schoolers. He is all ego and bravado who has no qualms over stealing Steve’s girlfriend, Laurie (Cindy Williams). When I was younger I may have felt something for Steve about this, but once again as a man who is over 30 I sympathize more with Laurie’s decision to leave and I was less than satisfied with her resolution with Steve; not being convinced that he really took responsibility for his actions that drove her away in the first place. This, and an unnecessarily tacked-on postscript which tells us what happened to a few of the other characters are the only weak points I found in the movie.

American Graffiti makes for a highly entertaining look at adolescent life in pre-counter culture America. The atmosphere of 50s rock tunes and classic cars doesn’t lose itself in nostalgia and shoe-horned references. It’s more about the characters and their misadventures than it is about the setting. It’s kids being kids without resorting to crude jokes, keg parties, and togas. It’s a sugary slice of young American life and it earns its place as a classic piece of New Hollywood cinema.

THX 1138 (1971)

Rating 2.5/4

Director George Lucas’s directorial debut, THX 1138, is in the fine tradition of science fiction movies of ideas such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Logan’s Run.

Its world is a dystopic underground society, policed by robots and inhabited by a subjugated populace too drugged up by state-mandated medications to even realize they aren’t free or even should be. Their reality is a pale and lifeless one, both mentally and physically. The titular hero, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall), like the rest of the film’s characters; has every facet of his life regulated by an all-watching Big Brother-esque state that forces him to take medications which suppress emotions and molds him into whatever type of working drone the government wants him to be at any time.

THX lives with an assigned roommate named LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie) who rebels against her government by swapping his pills with hers causing him to develop forbidden emotions and forbidden sexual desire. This relationship and the overwhelming emotions he experiences without the drugs causes a workplace accident that lands him in prison for “drug evasion.”
He shares this prison, an all white space stretching eternally, with another dissident named SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasance) whom he had reported earlier for illegally changing shift patterns in order to get a preferential roommate. This society is efficient, if also harsh.
What follows is a daring escape in which THX and SEN evade the authorities in order to find the world’s surface where men and women can live free.

In an impressive directorial debut we get amazing visuals and special effects showing a community rendered colorless and sterile by consumerism and unquestioning loyalty to one’s government. It is a beautiful looking picture and what is even more powerful than its art direction is its editing – largely helmed by director George Lucas himself. Lucas, before he became a filmmaking icon, was a master of using editing to pace a movie limited by its budget.
A lot of THX 1138 is shot from the perspective of computer monitors and surveillance equipment and much of the dialogue and action is presented in closeups that intensify the characters’ desperation and sense of panic – especially when THX begins withdrawing from the drugs.

The movie also brilliantly portrays the impersonal attitude of authority over a populace that has been quantified and dehumanized. Religion has been supplanted by a faux-benign computer system that plays simultaneously the role of a confessional priest and an advertising man. It preaches, “Consume. Be happy,” while failing to adequately respond to the personal issues and problems of its worshippers.
In one of the film’s most affective scenes THX is subjected in prison to a number of torturous tests which is commented on by unseen tormenters who sound like bored lab techs experimenting on mice or IT professionals playing with software. His reactions of pain and stress are just data.

The movie’s weakest point, unfortunately, is its characters who provide necessarily muted performances which serve to show the affects of the state and its drugs on what is essentially a human ant farm. However, by the same token this prevents any one of them from eliciting much care or concern from the viewer. The characters are governed by only the most base emotions of fear and anxiety which carries into all three acts of the plot.

THX 1138 is a visual marvel and it is one of most intelligent examples of dystopic science fiction in cinema. What it is not, however, is a compelling human drama.