Never Be Alone Again
by Nicolas RapoldPage 2 of 2
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Like Ryan in Born and the essential On Dangerous Ground (and like all Ray's best male leads, really), Robert Mitchum can move disarmingly in The Lusty Men between a magnetic-seductive savoir-faire and pools of uncertainty. After a bold and terrific scene of bereft homecoming (to his old family farm, repossessed), rodeo vet McCloud (Mitchum) is idolized by a married bull-rider aspirant (Arthur Kennedy). Ray pours on the subcultural detail of nervewracking bucking-bronco footage; the bandstand music is so relentless as to be macabre. Professional and personal, there's a love triangle with his protégé's hardscrabble wife (Mitchum: "Anytime your plumbing don't work, just call McCloud"), with Ray delicately shading in McCloud's unspoken (and self-denied?) long game of knowing his friend might not survive. There are no illusions about where the lives of Ray's heroes can lead: voices of experience come from ragged bachelors contentedly fooling themselves and jarringly hard-bitten old women.
Ray compared the use of primary color on screen to close-ups, and by that measure, the amazing Johnny Guitar is shot from a few inches away. Joan Crawford presides as proprietress of an empty casino that looks hewn into a cliff; old flame Sterling Hayden (Mr. Guitar himself) arrives, and the Dancin' Kid and his thieving gang (featuring Ernest Borgnine) hang around and model bolo scarves. Though sometimes treated as a cult oddity, JG is frankly arresting in its sense of drama. The masculine rivalry turns out to be between Crawford and rival Emma (Mercedes McCambridge, a green Fury), who goads the sheriff's posse that's dressed in funereal black-and-whites the entire film. Crawford's commanding, wounded voice, whether heard or unheard, pierces through every scene, is on everyone's mind, is still on my mind. The one time she wears a dress, it bursts into flames. So she puts on pants again. Gypsy (Roma?) romance Hot Blood, with Jane Russell, is worth it mainly for the bizarre spilt-paint-buckets palette rooted in orange. Its bigga-family donnybrooks and on-again-off-again courtship flirt with the formulas of a musical, which allows two highlights: a bang-on-a-can dance-off and a bullwhip-equipped wedding dance number that's a very public seduction.
The inspiration for Film Forum's gnomic Godard tagline, Bitter Victory is aptly titled, starring Richard Burton condemned to a desert mission with the contemptibly pencil-pusher-risen superior who married his old love. Shot in black-and-white 'Scope on Libyan dunes, it's akin to the same year's Paths of Glory in its remorselessness about institutional cowardice, but personalized through Burton's Captain Leith — beyond cynical, brave, yet on the edge of brittleness. (Unlike Paths, it's set in the more recent Allied North African campaign of World War II.) Anchoring an entire weekend in the series like one of its own Scope architectural monuments is Ray's brand-name movie, Rebel without a Cause, though Jimmy Dean's Method leanings and aphasia drive me into James Mason's cortisone-addled arms in Rebel-for-Dad must-see Bigger Than Life. (If you've already seen Rebel, Knock on Any Door is a jagged precursor curio in kid-gangster clothes, with Bogie conjuring drama out of line readings alone, as an ex-hood lawyer called to defend a frenzied-desperate pretty-boy hood who can't quite make good.)
Film Forum's series is just shy of go-any-day reliability (A Woman's Secret and even Party Girl each feel bogged down by era-specific woodenness of male leads and scenario). But if you've ever been looking for something you thought you'd lost, the searches in Ray's work are essential viewing.
