Month: June 2024

When I started this blog in January 2017, the National Film Registry totaled 700 movies, and even as that number grew over the last seven years, my goal from the start was to hit that 700 milestone. It has been quite the journey getting to this moment, and it is with immense pride that I present…

The Plot: Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a young, naïve Texan who moves to New York City with a dream of becoming a sex worker (“hustler” in his parlance) catering to rich older women. After an unsuccessful start with a bored Park Avenue socialite (Sylvia Miles), Joe meets Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), an impaired Brooklynite con man who takes him in and agrees to manage his hustling. As the months wear on and the weather gets colder, Joe’s business continues to be hit or miss, while Rizzo’s health worsens. Despite their bleak existence, Joe perseveres in the hopes of helping Rizzo achieve his dream of moving to Miami. It’s a story of survival in the Big Apple’s rotten core, set to the same Harry Nilsson song playing on a seemingly endless loop.

Why It Matters: The NFR calls the film “gritty” and “frequently disturbing”, praising the “electric performances” of Voight and Hoffman.

But Does It Really?: Roger Ebert once said that no great movie can be truly depressing because a great film’s artistry can uplift even the most downer subjects, and that’s how I feel about “Midnight Cowboy”. While not the cultural touchstone it once was, “Midnight Cowboy” still has a compassionate quality that ultimately supersedes its gloomy subject matter to be a captivating experience. I attribute most of that compassion to Schlesinger’s realistic but never melancholy direction, as well as the compelling performances from Hoffman and especially Voight. “Midnight Cowboy” successfully tows the line of being timeless while simultaneously of its time, and the film is a no-brainer for NFR induction.

Shout Out: Among Joe’s possessions is a poster of Paul Newman from “Hud”.

Everybody Gets One: John Schlesinger was part of the British New Wave of filmmaking in the early 1960s, and one of the few openly gay film directors of the era. Following the international success of his 1965 film “Darling”, Schlesinger successfully pitched an adaptation of “Midnight Cowboy” to United Artists, who gave him total creative control and a budget of $1 million (which would ultimately balloon to $3 million). Screenwriter Waldo Salt got his start in the 1940s, but, like so many of his peers, was blacklisted in the 1950s after refusing to testify before HUAC. “Midnight Cowboy” was one of Salt’s first big projects following the dissolution of the blacklist. His daughter Jennifer appears in the movie as Joe’s hometown sweetheart Crazy Annie.

Wow, That’s Dated: Part of the sexual interplay between Joe and Shirley involves a game of Scribbage: the forgotten bastard child of Scrabble and Yahtzee.

Seriously, Oscars?: Although “Midnight Cowboy” didn’t enter the Oscar race with the most nominations of the year (“Anne of the Thousand Days” – 10) or win the most trophies that night (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” – 4), it received seven nominations and scored three very important wins: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, the only X rated film ever to win the top prize (more on that rating later). The film lost its Editing nod to “Z”, Sylvia Miles lost Supporting Actress to Goldie Hawn in “Cactus Flower”, and Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight lost Lead Actor to a very different cowboy: John Wayne in “True Grit”.

• Oh, and apparently one of the bus passengers on Joe’s trip is M. Emmet Walsh in his film debut? Definitely missed that.
• The film is a straightforward adaptation of the second half of the novel. The book’s first half is Joe’s life in Texas before he goes to New York, and while most of that is excised from the movie, the main points are featured throughout in flashbacks and dream sequences. The one thing I wish they had kept was Joe’s reasons for wanting to be a hustler. In the final film I get that his history with sex is complicated to say the least, but other than wanting to make money, they never clarify his choice. Still, I can’t begrudge a movie that doesn’t spell out everything.
• Shoutout to two of this movie’s behind-the-scenes talents. Editor Hugh A. Robertson’s Oscar nod for his work here was the first for an African American in that category. And as of this writing, the film’s costume designer Ann Roth is still with us, having recently won an Oscar for her work on “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and even more recently played the older woman on the bench in “Barbie”.
• This film’s depiction of New York City is the epitome of its seedy reputation from the late ’60s onwards. As seen in “Midnight Cowboy”, this is the dingy, cacophonous Manhattan where you will get pickpocketed immediately upon arrival; a city that turns everyone into a hustler of some kind. The film plays it all so realistically you accept that this is what New York must have really been like.
• A staple of Off-Broadway theater, Sylvia Miles makes quite the impression as Joe’s first “client”. As surprised as I am by her Oscar nomination (she’s in the film for about five minutes), I’m always in favor of anyone pulling a Beatrice Straight and getting a nod for a one scene performance. Unrelated, Sylvia Miles once dumped a plate of food on misogynist/critic John Simon’s head at a restaurant, which makes her my personal hero.

• As Rizzo, Dustin Hoffman is clearly trying to distance himself from Benjamin Braddock and establish himself as an actor with range rather than a clean-cut leading man. To keep Rizzo’s limp consistent, Hoffman allegedly kept stones in one of his shoes. To paraphrase Laurence Olivier, “Have you tried acting, dear boy?”
• Side note: Rizzo is in that co-lead/supporting gray area that confuses the Oscars, and I suspect putting Hoffman in the lead category hurt both his and Voight’s chances of winning.
• If you know two things about this movie, the second thing is Rizzo shouting “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!” as he and Joe are almost hit by a cab while crossing a busy street. Both Hoffman and Voight attest that the cab was not supposed to be there and the whole thing was improvised, while producer Jerome Hellman insisted that the cab was always part of the scene, with Hoffman only improvising that specific line (there is a similar scene without the line in the original screenplay). Whatever the truth is, the actors’ version makes the better story, and as they say in another NFR movie “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

• That’s Bob Balaban as the student who picks up Joe at a movie theater. Not so much a “Before They Were Famous” role as it is “Before They Were That One Guy”.

• The one element that seems to be absent in the novel is the film’s homosexual aura. There’s a lot of talk about Joe’s male clientele (always shown as desperation on Joe’s part), and unfortunately plenty of homophobic slurs. One interesting coincidence is that when Joe and Rizzo start arguing about masculinity they mention John Wayne!

• Also very dated: The Warhol-inspired “happening” that Joe and Rizzo attend. It’s a bit excessive (even Schlesinger admitted later he should have trimmed it down), but you don’t mind it as you get lost in this unfamiliar territory alongside Joe and Rizzo. Speaking of Andy Warhol, party host Gretel is played by Viva, who in real life was one of Warhol’s superstars. According to Schlesinger, when he offered Viva the role, she immediately called Warhol with the news and while they were talking, Warhol was shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanis.

• Although I haven’t seen a lot of her filmography, I always enjoy when Brenda Vaccaro pops up in things, and her performance here as Shirley, the playful partygoer who hires Joe, is a lot of fun. This is also your reminder that Johnny Bravo’s mom is on the NFR.

• Joe’s rate is $20, which in today’s money is about $170. I know nothing about sex worker rates, but I feel like Joe’s lowballing himself. Also, Rizzo’s cut is $1 for cab fare, which is only about $9 today. Wow, that’s dated.
• The ending was spoiled for me years ago, but I still found it devastating after seeing it in the right context. And yet, in keeping with this film’s MO, I also found it surprisingly beautiful, ending my viewing experience on a positive note. And for those of you keeping score, that’s two NFR movies that end with Dustin Hoffman and another actor sitting in the back of a bus contemplating everything that’s happened.

• Both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight spent the next few decades being movie stars, and coincidentally won consecutive Best Actor Oscars: Voight in 1978 for “Coming Home” (with the same producer and screenwriter as “Midnight Cowboy”), and Hoffman in 1979 for “Kramer vs. Kramer”. Oh, and they’re both in that new Coppola “Megalopolis” movie, the first time they’ve been in a narrative film together since 1969 (though I don’t know if they have any scenes together).

• Both “Everybody’s Talking” and “I’m walkin’ here!” have entered the pop culture lexicon thanks to this movie, to the point where I imagine most people don’t know what they’re referencing.

• The film has had a few parodies over the years, and I’m partial to this tribute from a “Seinfeld” episode with an appearance by Jon Voight!

• And finally, the Muppet character Rizzo the Rat gets its name from this movie’s “Ratso” Rizzo. So thanks to an X rated drama, you have a rat puppet co-narrating your favorite Christmas movie.

The Plot: Near the end of the Civil War, both sides discover that they can win if they obtain a load of gold from a Union mine in Nevada. While the Union entrust Captain Edward Logan (Montague Love) to retrieve it, the Confederate send their own spy Jack (Raymond Griffith) to infiltrate the Union base and get the gold first. A sly, sophisticated criminal, Jack manages to evade capture and stumble onto a stagecoach carrying the mine’s owner Silas Woodstock (Mack Swain) and his two adult daughters Alice and Mae (Virginia Lee Corbin and Marian Nixon). Jack’s covert operation faces many setbacks along the way, but he still finds time to simultaneously woo both Woodstock sisters! And the hilarity just keeps ensuing in this comic output from one of the silent era’s many forgotten stars.

Why It Matters: The NFR write-up is mostly a tribute to Raymond Griffith, whose on-screen comic persona was “worlds away from the frantic, rubber-faced funnymen who stereotypically appeared in silent films.” An essay by silent film comedy expert Steve Massa is comprised of mini biographies for the major players of “Hands Up!”

But Does It Really?: When we think of silent film comedy, we think of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, as if these were the only three comedians at the time. While these three are the ones whose films have endured (both in a cultural and more literal sense), they are the tip of the iceberg for a plethora of comic filmmakers whose work is mostly lost to time. “Hands Up!” is on this list to represent Raymond Griffith, another popular comedian of the era. While “Hands Up!” is not without its faults, it made me laugh out loud a few times, and it was fun to discover Griffith’s work and talents. A pass for “Hands Up!”; an enjoyable, if not integral, silent comedy from an unsung artist.

Everybody Gets One: Raymond Griffith started out as a child actor in touring melodramas. Griffith would later claim that all the yelling he did in performances caused his unique raspy voice, though others have suggested his malady was caused by a case of diphtheria. Either way, he was a natural for silent film. His early film work with the likes of Mack Sennett was mostly behind-the-scenes as a writer, but by the 1920s he had developed his on-screen character: the unflappable, urbane dandy. “Hands Up!” was one of 10 starring vehicles Griffith made for Paramount from 1925 to 1927, and one of only a handful of his movies to survive.

Wow, That’s Dated: Well obviously the less-than-stellar depiction of a nameless Indigenous tribe in the middle of this movie. It’s a brief episode, but these are the stereotypical “savages” that all but defined Indigenous people in the early days of film (and by “early days”, I mean the first century or so).

• By the time Raymond Griffith died in 1957, his career as a silent comedian was all but forgotten. According to the Massa essay, interest in Griffith’s films was revived by theater critic Walter Kerr and his 1975 book “The Silent Clowns”, which devotes a chapter to Griffith among write-ups of his more impactful contemporaries. Although Griffith’s film legacy hasn’t measurably improved in the last 50 years, his surviving films are readily available online, and there are historians like Steve Massa willing to sing his praises.

The Plot: Lou Diamond Phillips plays Ritchie Valens, the Mexican American teenager who achieved rock and roll fame with such songs as “La Bamba” before his tragic death in 1959 in a plane crash at age 17. When we meet Ritchie in 1957, he is still Richard Valenzuela, a part time farmhand in Northern California who moves to Pacoima, Los Angeles with his mother Connie (Rosanna DeSoto) and half-brother Bob Morales (Esai Morales, no relation). Richard’s rock and roll aspirations are juxtaposed with Bob’s dream of being an artist that are deterred by his alcoholism and volatile temper, often aimed at his wife Rosie (Elizabeth Peña). One of Richard’s first local performances is witnessed by Bob Keane (Joe Pantoliano), the owner of Del-Fi Records who quickly signs Richard and shortens his stage name to Ritchie Valens. Ritchie immediately has several hit songs, including “Donna”, which Valens wrote about his high-school sweetheart (Danielle von Zerneck). But the pressures of fame and the increasing instability of his brother start to weigh on Ritchie, culminating in that fateful performance in Clear Lake, Iowa with Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson, aka the Big Bopper (Marshall Crenshaw and Stephen Lee) and a fatal flight that would later be dubbed “The Day the Music Died”.

Why It Matters: The NFR gives a rundown of the film and the real Valens, stating that the movie “reinvigorated interest in Valens’ brief but notable musical legacy”. There’s also an interview with Luis Valdez that chronicles all three of his NFR entries.

But Does It Really?: Despite knowing virtually nothing about Ritchie Valens going into this viewing, I enjoyed “La Bamba” a lot. Yes, it’s the kind of musical biopic that has oversaturated our movie landscape in the last two decades, but “La Bamba” is a fresh precursor to all that. Led by director Luis Valdez and an affable Lou Diamond Phillips, the film does an excellent job treating these characters as realistic people rather than historical figures, and none of the important moments are overplayed, but rather spring organically from the story. While I found the ending a bit awkward (more on that later) the rest of the movie is an enjoyable biopic and a fine tribute to a talent gone too soon. “La Bamba” is first-rate representation of Hispanic artists both in front of and behind the camera and is an iconic enough movie that its NFR induction can go undisputed.

Shout Outs: “Vertigo” is playing at a drive-in movie theater while Ritchie and Donna make out. I wonder why Columbia didn’t save money and use their own Stewart/Novak 1958 vehicle “Bell, Book and Candle” instead.

Title Track: Potentially dating back as far as the late 1500s, “La Bamba” originated as a Mexican folk song in Veracruz. Many different versions of the song have been performed and recorded over the years, with Andrés Huesca making it a hit in America in 1947. As seen in the film, Ritchie Valens recorded “La Bamba” as a tribute to his Mexican heritage and released it as the B-side to “Donna”. Both songs were a hit for Valens, with “La Bamba” peaking at #22 on the Billboard Hot 100. Funnily enough, the Los Lobos cover recorded for this movie did even better than Valens’ original, going all the way to #1.

Seriously, Oscars?: Despite being a critical and financial hit, “La Bamba” was not a major player during the 1987/1988 awards season. The film’s only major nomination was the Golden Globe for Best Drama, losing to “The Last Emperor” (though kudos to “La Bamba” for not going for the easier nomination and potential win in the Musical/Comedy categories). Columbia Pictures was the US distributor for “The Last Emperor”, as well as fellow Best Picture nominee “Hope and Glory”, which may explain why “La Bamba” was left in the dust.

• Right out the gate, this movie is as much about Bob Morales as it is about Ritchie. I sense in his research that Luis Valdez recognized an optimistic teenager wasn’t the most exciting lead for a movie, so the wise decision was made to have it be about both of them: Two brothers with artistic aspirations, one with a positive outlook and good luck, the other with a self-inflicting string of bad luck. It makes for a good dichotomy, though Morales’ intense performance occasionally sidelines Phillips in his own movie.
• As Connie, Rosanna DeSoto puts a fun spin on the aggressively supportive mom. This isn’t a Mama Rose-type stage mom pushing her child into showbusiness; this a woman who will support her son’s dream in any way possible. It’s a shame DeSoto didn’t gain any awards traction for this performance. In fact, it’s a shame no one in this movie got nominated for anything.
• You cannot have someone performing rock and roll in a ’50s gymnasium without me thinking of “Back to the Future“. I kept expecting Ritchie’s cousin Marvin Valens to make a phone call.

• Shoutout to Joe Pantoliano as Ritchie’s manager Bob Keane. In 2017, Pantoliano achieved the rare distinction of having three of his movies inducted into the NFR in the same year: this, “The Goonies”, and “Memento“. And shoutout to Pantoliano’s work advocating for mental health, including his nonprofit No Kidding, Me Too!
• I was ready to call BS on Ritchie having a girlfriend named Donna that inspired him to write the song, but it turns out that is true. The real Donna Ludwig was interviewed by Valdez for the film and even came to the premiere! Side note: The real Bob Keane felt that among the final film’s inaccuracies was the relationship between Ritchie and Donna, which he considered more akin to “a casual acquaintance”.

• Kudos to whoever made the footage of Phillips as Valens on “American Bandstand” look like a ’50s black-and-white TV show. Very authentic looking. And yes, this is one of those movies where everyone is watching the same show at the same time, but to be fair there were only three channels back then. The odds of that happening were much better.
• Alright, another movie for my Die Hard Not X-mas List!
• I knew enough about Ritchie Valens beforehand that I started to squirm once Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper showed up. This infamous night is also dramatized in 1978’s “The Buddy Holly Story” with Gary Busy as Holly and Gilbert Melgar as Valens. I’ve never seen “Holly”, but I’m told the version of these events in “La Bamba” is more historically accurate. This all begs the question: Will the Big Bopper ever get his own biopic? 

• I don’t know if this movie’s ending completely works. Of course, the death of Valens is as sudden and heartbreaking here as it was in real life (DeSoto’s performance made me tear up), but then the movie just ends, followed by a maybe-too-upbeat reprise of Valens performing La Bamba over the end credits. It all feels very abrupt. Allegedly, another ending was shot with the real Bob Morales paying tribute to his brother in the present day, but it was scrapped.

• “La Bamba” producer Taylor Hackford would go on to direct his own biopic about a legendary musician: 2004’s “Ray” starring Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles.

• Upon the 2017 induction of “La Bamba” into the National Film Registry, Lou Diamond Phillips stated his pride in its place on the list and that the film “still speaks to the American Dream and to inclusion and representation”. In Luis Valdez’s interview with the Library of Congress, he stated how “very pleased and honored” he is to have three of his films on the NFR, noting that it is an acknowledgment of “the presence of Chicanos in the American scheme. I mean we’re all Americans.”

Listen to This: “La Bamba” was added to the National Recording Registry in 2019, with a write-up mentioning that Valens’ music “brought a new sound to the mainstream, and inspired generations of Chicano musicians”. An essay by Valens expert Larry Lehmer is a succinct history of the song’s origins and Valens’ cover.