Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Legend of the Lost!

Theme: Subcutaneous Phat - Desert Sessions

In the meme years, Sophia Loren is now chiefly remembered for this historic mogging at the hands of Jayne Mansfield:

M*n will never understand the murderous rage of a Casey out-Stacied.

But if being in even a single good movie were a category (it sure isn't at the Oscars), Loren takes the W hands down. Batjac gem Legend of the Lost (one imagines the word "City" might have rounded out the title before some clever clogs realised the title could refer to the protagonists as much as what they seek) sees Loren play petty thief and men-resenting thot Dita, whose hard-knock life in the alleys of Timbuktu must be self-imposed, as anyone who looked much like Loren could easily marry the first rich tourist she meets, but never mind. For some reason, like every Tinder foid, she's never met a moid to satisfy her laundry list of high-falutin standards until clean-cut idealist Paul (Rossano Brazzi) enters her life and introduces her to the radical notion of not being a resentful thot.

The hero we need.

But who's that other - why, it's John Wayne himself, of course, playing himself once more as "Joe January", a Dionysian cynic whose rough edges contrast sharply with Paul's goody-two-shoes schtick and whose disdain for wahmen matches Dita's for men. This unlikely trio seem an all-too-likely cast for an odd-couple (or odd-triad) action-adventure to find a lost city in the Sahara filled with jewels, an impression bolstered by the early scenes of obligatory good-natured broad humour typical of Batjac's unpretentious populism.

One early scene has a comic sleazoid seek out Wayne in this club (he's not even there; the scene is otherwise pointless) just so we can see this chick do this swimming dance:

I have no idea whether they do this dance in Mali IRL but I hope so. Email the government of Mali at MaliGov@whatever.com and ask.

But Legend soon strikes out in a surprisingly profound psychological and theological direction. Foreshadowed action scenes between our heroes and the Tuareg are deferred in favour of the elemental antagonists of heat, thirst, temptation and madness. Paul's goodness and Joe & Dita's badness are all tested. Featureless desert yields strange, beguiling beauty, and elaborate sets moan emptily with wind, which is appropriate because Legend has less in common with the Duke's thousands of crowd-pleasing westerns and more to do with Sjöström's silent psych-western opus The Wind, with its flawed men, neurotic women, and strangely cathartic hints of hope for their reconciliation.

They might not all make it, but we can.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Alamo!

Article theme: The Yellow Rose of Texas/The Eyes of Texas  - Elvis Presley

Because by any other metric it's great, the risible angle John Wayne h8ers have to take toward his epic masterpiece is that it is historically inaccurate on several counts, which puts it in the company of every single movie ever based on an historical event.

Everyone knows the real Crockett waterskied everywhere on two alligators.

I mean, did the Iliad faithfully capture the factual details of every moment of the Trojan war? There is a case to be made that movies should have to disclose their deviations from true events, but if you think this is anywhere near the worst offender, or that its purview is actually history and not myth, you need to put down the crack pipe. The facts are simply that 200-odd men stood against 7000, knowing defeat was inevitable, to buy time for General Sam Houston's army to escape north and lick itself into shape to claim the territory from the grasp of Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Who would win? I mean, yeah, actually it's the second lot, but it's the thought that counts.

"MaKe TeXaS mExIcO aGaIn" squealers can cope and seethe; if anything, Wayne's romantic narrative is too kind to Santa Anna, who didn't even bother to dispute the charge of despotism laid at his foot, went around calling himself the Mexican Napoleon, and was so narcissistic-slash-bug-fuck-insane he once held a funeral with full military honours for his amputated leg. Despite being an absolute cartoon, Santa Anna was reinstated three times by various disgruntled factions in old Méjico in between periods of exile for fucking everything up, only to fuck everything up again. His legacy is losing Texas because he was as incompetent as he was megalomaniacal. Yet Wayne - himself a boogeyman for his pinko detractors - was uninterested in the farcical demonology that would inevitably result from a proper treatment of the not-so-great dictator, showing more warmth and empathy for the enemy troops than any lib has ever mustered for someone who so much as called him a fag on 4Chan:

Much of the drama at the film's core is derived from clashing personalities under the pressure of imminent death. Richard Widmark plays Jim Bowie rough and ornery, Laurence Harvey plays Will Travis with a huge stick up his ass, and the Duke himself plays Davy Crockett straight down the middle, a canny diplomat who speaks the language of the rough-and-ready volunteers and the distinguished men of state with equal fluency. Charges of caricature could be levied by fanboys of any colonel of the three, but as a dramatic dynamic it keeps what might be a dull wait sparking with uncertainty, internal conflict and odd-couple humour. There's even a subplot in which Wayne trolls some glory-supporting merchant trying to pressure a young Latina hottie (Linda Cristal) into marriage, before packing her off to safety in old-timey chivalric fashion.

The character is listed in the credits as "Sausage Fest Disruptor", which I personally felt was just a little on-the-nose.

The fact you know from the jump everyone dies at the end (spoilars!!1) makes it all the more vital to pack the early scenes with endearing nonsense of this genre. You'll feel cheated of a whole series of Wayne-as-Crockett adventures, to the point of forgetting Wayne played Wayne in everything he ever made, which is quite the achievement for his 5,475th film. Moreover, he surrounds himself with such a strong cast of oddball minor characters that no scene passes without robust populist humour and pathos. Wayne sank $1,500,000 of his own money into the project, and his palpable love of the heroes outshines any question of intended disrespect. The Alamo is the siege classic to which misguided Zulu fans might best be gently redirected.

Roll call at an average Texas school (2025, colourised).

Contrary to what decades of character assassination might have you believe, the ideals for which the Duke actually stood were downright naïve in their let's-all-get-along would-be moderate-centrism.

In real life republics as a system are best characterised as utterly immunocompromised against destabilisation by l*ft-wing psychopaths, at which point the best-case scenario is that a Franco steps in to salvage the nation at the cost of many lives, and in the very worst cases you get a Mao. I have no faith in Wayne's dream, but perhaps, like Plato's own Republic, it's something that can only be truly realised beyond the confines of this world. For Wayne, that dream was one worth sharing. In his utter, naked earnestness, he gave a fitting tribute to the men who died for that impossible dream.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tall in the Saddle!

TitS, for short.

Like noirs, slashers, rom-coms and found footage flicks, the western proliferated mainly because it was cheap to produce en masse, leading to an endless succession of mediocre entries with generic titles that could easily be mistaken one for another. The best entries often combined the setting with an unusual genre angle: the original 3:10 to Yuma largely foregoes action for suspense, and silent classic The Wind is an eerie psychological character study. Tall in the Saddle likewise takes a detour through murder mystery territory, though I barely noticed on the first viewing, because the plot is easily and cheerfully forgotten amid a rapid-fire procession of great scenes and oddball characters.

A little-acknowledged cliché is rendering exposition scenes more dramatic/hilarious by having characters eavesdrop from bushes.

John Wayne is Rocklin, an easygoing Chad who breezes into town courtesy of one of the great western geezers played by George "Gabby" Hayes. This cross-generational buddyship sets the affable tone for the picture, with Hayes' ham-and-cheese gurning counterpointing Wayne's laconic deadpan to consistently endearing effect.

A whole road trip movie with these two would have been perfectly acceptable.

Rocklin's pursuit of a property claim is complicated by murder and intrigue, and a classic male fantasy conceit in which a blonde Betty (Audrey Long) and brunette Veronica (Ella Raines) appear to vie for his affections.

Which way western man/porque no los dos?

The ubiquity of this dynamic must speak to some deeply Jungian archetype in the male psyche. Long embodies the demure tradwife, while Raines chews scenery as the gun-toting bad girl. Perhaps the key to the fantasy is that either way, you win.

>ywn be fatally shot by ella raines because she overheard a third-hand rumour that you caught her brother cheating at cards
Why even live?

In this series I aim to bring attention to forgotten gems as much as praise the classics, so I'm tending not to say too much to keep what may be your first viewing fresh. With Tall, however, there's not much I want to say other than to recommend it at the end of a long day's work. Each genre is a list of variations on a theme, and sometimes the variables of plot, setting, characters, cast, dialogue and so on just align the right way, like a pleasing passage of improvised jazz. Tall isn't the most ambitious or ""important"" western, but if time spent smiling like a fool while watching it is any sort of worthy metric, it's in a class of its own.

Sometimes you just want to see John Wayne ride horses, drawl folksily, and punch people.

It's often remarked upon how seldom movies scale the heights of Great Art, but it's less often recognised how seldom they're great entertainment. So many movies start out strong but lose their way and become maudlin as they drag out that late-act-two low-point, possibly out of misplaced fear that they'll be dismissed as frivolous without some po-faced moping making up the "drama" quota for srs art. Others make the even worse gaffe of trying to make some point or other about society, religion, politics or some other heady subject matter on which they're utterly unqualified to speak. Tall makes no point, makes no attempt to make a point, and even makes its melodramatic low-points somehow cheerful, more a well-judged ebb than an indulgent wallow.

We're even treated to some scenery porn at just the right moments, giving the mostly town-bound action physical space to breathe.

"But why single this assembly-line western out among all others?" you sound out, as though phonetically, brows knitted in simianesque concentration. Let me put it to you this way: if I can eat anywhere, I might gamble on some froo-froo haute cuisine, but if I want a burger, no amount of esoteric shit is going to satisfy me like a burger, and in that context, Tall is like a Five Guys in a world of Big Macs.

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