Authors: Jefferson Robbins Archives - Page 4 of 5

The Pacific (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

January 20, 20112000s, 2010, 2011, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Television, War

Image A Sound A+ Extras A-

by Jefferson Robbins The Greatest-Generation worship that Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks share is appreciable and understandable, but by the close of their latest collaborative HBO miniseries, "The Pacific", you sort of hope they've got it out of their systems. That's not to say the story encapsulated here didn't warrant telling–the flash conceptualization today is of World War II as a European war, where "rules of combat" may still obtain. The fiercely bloody Pacific campaign–very much a gazing-into-the-abyss kind of conflict, making monsters of men–has become a near-afterthought. So a big-budget TV treatment, in line with the star producers' 2001 "Band of Brothers", seems natural.¹ But by remaining "true" to the experiences of the U.S. Marines who fought their way from Guadalcanal to the doorstep of Japan, the story comes across as a thing of half-reconciled parts, periscopic views of the larger picture. I mean, more than a miniseries usually does–like it's two miniseries grafted onto one another.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hammer Horror – DVD

December 14, 20101950s, 1960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Vampire

HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
***/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barry Andrews
screenplay by John Elder
directed by Freddie Francis

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B
starring Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster
directed by Terence Fisher

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)
***/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins As one of the twin stars of the original Hammer Films horror canon, the precise and skilful Peter Cushing had the task of portraying both villain (Dr. Frankenstein) and vanquisher (Dr. Van Helsing). His co-star Christopher Lee, on the other hand, seldom got to be the good guy: when he wasn’t baring plastic fangs or crusted over with dried-prune makeup, he usually embodied a more human evil. Lee’s unmasked performances were assertions of will–his Dracula, for instance, overwhelms with force of presence and a hungry smoulder in his eyes. Cushing could not disguise his native gentility and bladed intelligence, but he could turn those qualities towards sinister or humanitarian ends as needed.

Party Down: Season Two (2010) – DVD

December 8, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image A- Sound A- Extras D+
"Jackal Onassis Backstage Party," "Precious Lights Preschool Auction," "Nick DiCintio's Orgy Night," "James Ellison Funeral," "Steve Guttenberg's Birthday," "Not On Your Wife Opening Night," "Party Down Company Picnic," "Joel Munt's Big Deal Party," "Cole Landry's Draft Day Party," "Constance Carmell Wedding"

by Jefferson Robbins Hitting its sophomore stride just in time to meet the axe, the Starz sitcom "Party Down" tries its damnedest to make an arc out of its concept: catering staff with frustrated dreams of fame passes out shrimp rolls to the Hollywood elite. Off-putting and cruel in its first season, the ensemble comedy hits its rhythm this time around, even managing to develop a theme beyond "workaday despair."

Mars Attacks! (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

November 29, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Jack Nicholson, Satire, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A- Sound C
starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by Jonathan Gems
directed by Tim Burton

by Jefferson Robbins When Tim Burton calls in his Hollywood chips, it's usually, to our benefit, to facilitate his darker impulses. 1989's Batman gave him free reign to make Edward Scissorhands, for instance, and Warner Bros. incubated the bitter confection of Sweeney Todd after raking in more traditional bucks on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I daresay one of those Burton Unbound documents is his A-list romp Mars Attacks!, which today gives off strange vibrations that echo forward as well as back. It's a '50s UFO-invasion flick farce, of course, based on a 1962 trading card set illustrated by, among others, comics great Wally Wood. It's anarchic, unexpected ("Wha? Trading cards?" we all said at the time), and darkly funny. It plays in the massive footprint of the same year's Independence Day, and in its more biting moments, it somehow speaks to the great collapses of the subsequent decade.

Bored to Death: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

November 22, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B Sound B Extras C+
"Stockholm Syndrome," "The Alanon Case," "The Case of the Missing Screenplay," "The Case of the Stolen Skateboard," The Case of the Lonely White Dove," "The Case of the Beautiful Blackmailer," "The Case of the Stolen Sperm," "Take a Dive"

by Jefferson Robbins With its accomplished but psychologically malformed boy-men, the first season of novelist-screenwriter Jonathan Ames's "Bored To Death" feels like a Judd Apatow joint transplanted to Tom Wolfe's outer boroughs. Its characters all want to be Masters of their particular Universes, but they're either hamstrung by their own neuroses or carting them along like luggage in spite of success. We know we're watching an HBO comedy, though it's often hard to discern where the comedy is supposed to be located. In Woody Allen nebbishism? In misdirection and error? In slapstick? In satirizing the hip, self-satisfied artistes of millennial New York's most fashionable burg? Barring a few episodes that succeed on the other points, the latter feels most likely.

The Prowler (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

November 11, 20101980s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Farley Granger, Vicky Dawson, Christopher Goutman, Cindy Weintraub
screenplay by Glenn Leopold and Neal E. Barbera
directed by Joseph Zito

by Jefferson Robbins Was it that the flicks got less suspenseful, or that I got savvier? Joseph Zito's The Prowler boasts an intimidating slasher (although "stabber" or "puncturer" is more apt, since he tends to pitchfork and bayonet his victims to death), a complement of gore F/X from the estimable Tom Savini, a compelling backstory that touches on the legacy of war, and a Final Girl (Vicky Dawson) who's fleet, smart, next-door pretty, and resourceful. Its closest equivalent is probably Friday the 13^th Part 2, released just six months prior, which likewise coped with horror passed down through the generations. What it lacks, though, is tension and surprise–at least in retrospect. There are no real shocks to be had, beyond the graphic nature of the killings and the choice to open a scare flick with stock '40s newsreel footage.

Dead Cert (2010) – DVD

November 10, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Vampire

*/**** Image B+ Sound D+ Extras C
starring Craig Fairbass, Dexter Fletcher, Lisa McAllister, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Ben Shillito
directed by Steve Lawson

by Jefferson Robbins That single star is for the concept–London gangsters vs. vampires–which, apart from some very fine lensing and decent actors, is probably the only thing that got Dead Cert any kind of release. In a genre thickly dotted with piles of shit, this thing is shit stacked high but glazed with modest visual sugar and a great high-concept. It barely merits a single viewing, yet you keep hoping something will switch on and provide a reason to persevere.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD

October 27, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy

**/**** ImageA- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George Effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD

October 26, 20102000s, 2010, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy

**/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras C
screenplay by Joe Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir
directed by Bradley Raymond

by Jefferson Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call the Curious George effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening. But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to status quo.

Tombstone (1993) – Blu-ray Disc

October 14, 20101990s, 2010, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Western

**/**** Image D+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston
screenplay by Kevin Jarre
directed by George P. Cosmatos

by Jefferson Robbins Achingly traditionalist, with an overstuffed cast, George P. Cosmatos's Tombstone is badly-served by its Old Hollywood instincts. Riding forth during one of those cyclical revivals the western seems to endure every decade, it had the bad fortune to eat the dust of Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood's dolorous drama, concerned to its core with the cost of bloodshed, was a case of an icon reminding us of what Anthony Mann did so well. In Tombstone, Cosmatos (he of Rambo: First Blood Part II fame, remember^*) was handed essentially the same opportunity, but he decided he'd rather be Henry Hathaway.

Hamlet (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

September 5, 20101990s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Shakespeare, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras B-
starring Kenneth Branagh, Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Kenneth Branagh, based on the play by William Shakespeare
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Jefferson Robbins You could tell it was an epic: it had an intermission. Kenneth Branagh's four-hour version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet may be the last mainstream film to feature an honest-to-goodness, seriously-I-gotta-pee-now pause-point in its theatrical release.¹ How daring was that, in a period when studios demanded 90-minute runtimes to crowd more asses in seats? When just a year later, people would unironically say "epic" and mean Titanic?

Soul Power (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

August 31, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte

by Jefferson Robbins There's a double filter of nostalgia on Soul Power, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's assemblage of decades-old footage from the Zaire '74 music festival. The Kinshasa-based event opened the fabled Muhammad Ali-George Foreman bout "The Rumble in the Jungle," where Ali reclaimed the world heavyweight championship–back when the thought that music and sport could change the world seemed less far-fetched. But while the concert showcase captures stirring performances from some of soul music's greatest figures, it still winds up being only half a documentary. The miles of film accumulated in Kinshasa–shot by Albert Maysles, among other notables–sat in storage until it got aired out for Leon Gast's rousing sports doc When We Were Kings in 1996. That piece is a valuable curation, recording exactly how Ali-Foreman (mostly Ali, by seizing the narrative early) energized a nation oppressed first by Belgian colonialism, then by Mobutu Sese Seko's dictatorship. That's not to mention how the fight (again, via Ali) reasserted ties between African-Americans and their ancestral continent, and was billed (by Don King) as a triumph for American black pride.

Daria: The Complete Animated Series (1997-2002) + Party Down: Season One (2009) – DVDs

August 2, 20102000s, 2010, Animation, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Teen

DARIA: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED SERIES
Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
"Esteemsters," "The Invitation," "College Bored," "Café Disaffecto," "Malled," "This Year's Model," "The Lab Brat," "Pinch Sitter," "Too Cute," "The Big House," "Road Worrier," "The Teachings of Don Jake," "The Misery Chick," "Arts 'N' Crass," "The Daria Hunter," "Quinn the Brain," "I Don't," "That Was Then, This Is Dumb," "Monster," "The New Kid," "Gifted," "Ill," "Fair Enough," "See Jane Run," "Pierce Me," "Write Where it Hurts," "Daria!," "Through a Lens Darkly," "The Old and the Beautiful," "Depth Takes a Holiday," "Daria Dance Party," "The Lost Girls," "It Happened One Nut," "Lane Miserables," "Jake of Hearts," "Speedtrapped," "The Lawndale File," "Just Add Water," "Jane's Addition," "Partner's Complaint," "Antisocial Climbers," "A Tree Grows in Lawndale," "Murder, She Snored," "The F Word," "I Loathe a Parade," "Of Human Bonding," "Psycho Therapy," "Mart of Darkness," "Legends of the Mall," "Groped by an Angel," "Fire!," "Dye! Dye! My Darling," "Fizz Ed," "Sappy Anniversary," "Fat Like Me," "Camp Fear," "The Story of D," "Lucky Strike," "Art Burn," "One J at a Time," "Life in the Past Lane," "Aunt Nauseam," "Prize Fighters," "My Night at Daria's," "Boxing Daria"

PARTY DOWN: SEASON ONE
Image A- Sound A- Extras B
"Willow Canyon Homeowners Annual Party," "California College Conservative Union Caucus," "Pepper McMasters Singles Seminar," "Investors Dinner," "Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty," "Taylor Stiltskin Sweet Sixteen," "Brandix Corporate Retreat," "Celebrate Rick Sargulesh," "James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion," "Stennheiser-Pong Wedding Reception"

by Jefferson Robbins If he hadn't helped oversee the death of the music video, Abby Terkuhle's tenure at MTV could be viewed as the network's Silver Age. "The State", "Liquid Television", "Beavis and Butt-Head"–apogees or nadirs, depending on your perspective, they defined the channel in the '90s, until "Road Rules" and "Cribs" redefined it into irrelevance. Terkuhle, the network's director of animation and overall creative chief, left MTV in 2002, but when hipsters in the decade just passed whined that such-and-such MTV show wasn't available on DVD, they were usually talking about something he'd incubated. His reign straddles the cultural shift from the Age of Irony (David Foster Wallace, "Daria") to the Age of Schadenfreude ("Mad Men", the shitty-childhood memoirs of Augusten Burroughs). We used to be able to contemplate human abasement and crack wise about it, like Daria Morgendorffer; now the abasement is our entertainment, and we sit slack-jawed before the awesome pathos of Snooki and The Situation.^*

Pontypool (2009) – DVD

May 22, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Zombie

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly
screenplay by Tony Burgess, based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything
directed by Bruce McDonald

by Jefferson Robbins Few things give me the willies like the sublimation of self. The idea that my essential me-ness could someday drain away and be lost–to injury, dementia, what have you–makes me shudder. At the extreme, there's the fear that some invading force, a me supplanted by a not-me, might subjugate my personality. Little wonder that Brian O'Blivion's monologue in Videodrome about communicating with his own brain cancer, or almost any mind-control scenario scripted for comics by Grant Morrison, can set me cringing.

The Yakuza (1975) – DVD

May 4, 20101970s, 2010, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Crime, Drama, DVD, Japan, Romance, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras C
starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Okada Eiji, Brian Keith
screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Jefferson Robbins We'll never know what might have been had Paul and Leonard Schrader's original screenplay for The Yakuza gone unmolested by '70s script king Robert Towne, or had Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma made good on threats to direct. Instead, the obvious gets overlaid on top of the mysterious, and at least one partner in this marriage of the American and Japanese gangster genres winds up shorted. Producer-director Sydney Pollack makes the mistake his best peers in the decade's American cinema dodged: he mistrusts the audience, believing we can't absorb backstory through performance and suggestion.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

April 20, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Interviews, Theatrical

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE
*** (out of four)

starring Marshall Allman, Vince Vieluf, Natasha Lyonne, Tygh Runyan
written and directed by David Russo

The scion of a constipated generation, Seattle tech worker Dory (Marshall Allman) is sampling religions like grab-bag candy when a sealed bottle floats past during his lunch-hour Bible study. The message within could be either from God or from the famously polluted Puget Sound itself, but it sets Dory on a career-destroying spiral that ends with a new job on an office cleaning crew, scrubbing johns alongside renegade "artist" OC (Vince Vieluf). One of their clients is product lab Corsica Research, where a young exec (Natasha Lyonne, long missed but giving the least authentic performance here) decides the trash-scavenging janitors are perfect test subjects for an awful but addictive new cookie. The active ingredient impregnates men first with an altered consciousness (whole concepts break loose from language and float free in the air, in electrically beautiful F/X sequences), and finally with what can only be described as an incandescent blue lungfish. But it's not so much an Alien-esque affliction as an epiphany, with each man finding peace and even enlightenment in this scatological process of "childbirth." No longer adrift, they're vessels for a new life–the only kind that can survive, it's implied, in a world where Zoloft flows from the kitchen tap and breakfast just isn't a meal without Yellow Dye No. 5. Allman and Vieluf play perfectly off each other under Seattle writer-director David Russo, whose jitter-editing and hallucination segments recall Darren Aronofsky and whose screenplay references Philip K. Dick. Russo's deployment of soundtrack music skillfully twists the knife where it counts–witness the lo-fi but enchanting version of the Carpenters' "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" (by The Langley Schools Music Project, fascinating in itself) that closes the film, as Dory deposits a new message in the water and contemplates, as all new fathers must, a future for his children.–JR

April 21, 2010|The films of David Russo have a distinctly handmade feel, and often the hand becomes visible. A largely self-taught filmmaker and animator, he makes no pretense that he's not manipulating the action. When he sets his models into neon time-lapse against backdrops that strobe from sky to sea to blackness, he almost always winds up in the shot. In Russo's short creations and in his first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, bespoke art objects–or even just words–make long, looping journeys in search of some answer. But like most philosophical quests, the journey is more important than its endpoint.

While he developed his craft Russo carried on an eleven-year career as a janitor, a vocation that sharpened his sense of the things society values: what we keep, what we cast away, what we flush. His short art films Populi (2002) and Pan With Us (2003) (viewable here, along with most of the artist's other work) gave him his first wider exposure, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in consecutive years. More recently, his hand-wrought animation lent texture to the video for Thom Yorke's "Harrowdown Hill" (2006).

Dizzle's path from script to screen was fraught with financing issues and a slender production window. It wasn't bought for distribution after its Sundance debut in early 2009, and by the time it reached Russo's hometown Seattle International Film Festival the same year, its hopes for release were no better. Finally, Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film picked up Dizzle for a brief 2010 New York theatrical engagement and a video-on-demand run that starts today. Russo's renegade janitors, chemically enlightened and midwifing the birth of a new species, might manage to swim free of the sewers after all.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures – DVD

April 19, 20101950s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

THEM! (1954)
***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
screenplay by Ted Sherdeman
directed by Gordon Douglas

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey
screenplay by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, suggested by the story "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury
directed by Eugène Lourié

WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)
**½/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor
written and directed by Edwards Bernds

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956)
*/**** Image C Sound B
starring Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell, Donald Wolfit
screenplay by John Mather, J.T. McIntosh and Edith Dell
directed by Paul Dickson

by Jefferson Robbins We're all mutants now. Those of us who weren't literally irradiated by the Atomic Age still carry its glowing cultural DNA. As we've built better ways to destroy ourselves, we've also spurred the creators of our science-fiction to imagine life in newer Waste Lands. Their work assumes that no matter how we survive each new apocalypse, our circumstances will be quite changed. The upshot of our atom-splitting folly would be not sloughed skin or violent cancer, but marvels and wonders, which would then seek our destruction on their own terms.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) – DVD

February 23, 20101960s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins I’ve wondered for a long time why I love the Hammer Film takes on the Universal monsters. I discovered them in my youth, so there’s the nostalgia thing; and they typically involve stuff a young man loves: disfigurement, cleavage, viscera, cleavage, death. But the communion is somehow deeper than that. Guillermo del Toro describes his youthful exposure to creature features in the language of a Catholic embracing Jesus: “At a certain age, I accepted monsters in my heart.” Yeah.

The Cove (2009) + Home (2009)

January 5, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Crime, Documentary, DVD, France

THE COVE
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
directed by Louie Psihoyos

HOME
***/**** Image C+ Sound B-
directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

by Jefferson Robbins Critically assessing the environmental documentary is often a hard road, because it forces you to bear the competing tensions of shame, anger, and self-righteousness. You know you're part of the problem as you sit there spinning a petrol-derived video disc, typing on a laptop with tantalum capacitors strip-mined from Africa, but, damnit, you didn't personally spit-roast those lemurs. The best you can hope for, usually, is some beautiful photography, a compelling story, and a degree of responsibility on the filmmakers' part–a commitment to balancing science and passion in respectful measure.

The Gary Cooper Collection: Along Came Jones; Man of the West; The Pride of the Yankees; The Westerner – DVD

December 16, 2009****/****, 1940s, 1950s, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance, Sports, Western

ALONG CAME JONES (1945)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, William Demarest, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson
directed by Stuart Heisler

MAN OF THE WEST (1958)
****/**** Image A- Sound B-
starring Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O'Connell
screenplay by Reginald Rose
directed by Anthony Mann

THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942)
**/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Herman J. Mankiewicz
directed by Sam Wood

THE WESTERNER (1940)
**½/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Doris Davenport, Fred Stone
screenplay by Jo Swerling and Niven Busch
directed by William Wyler

by Jefferson Robbins I thought Gary Cooper was broader. The way he carried Hollywood on his shoulders from the silents through the talkies to the threshold of the New Wave, you'd expect him to be broader. Instead, he was the definition of lanky. Where his centre of gravity lay was in his Rushmore of a face: in close-up, he's an impossible granite monument, like that ever-unfinished Crazy Horse memorial in South Dakota; in full shot, in his prime years, he's a broomstick supporting a boulder.