Author: thehorsesheadblog

Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time quietly worrying about the future of the NFR under the Trump administration (among other concerns, the National Film Preservation Act is up for renewal next year). As I’ve struggled to remain optimistic that the NFR would just fly under the radar as it did during the first Trump term, I woke up this morning to some disheartening news. Last night Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was fired via email from the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office on behalf of Trump. No explanation was given.

As easy as it would be for me to turn this into a catastrophizing post about what this means for the future (or expounding on what a cowardly move it is to fire someone via email on a Thursday night), I am choosing instead to focus on Dr. Hayden’s positive contributions to the Library of Congress. After a 40-plus year run serving libraries in Chicago and Baltimore, Hayden was nominated by Barack Obama to become Librarian of Congress in February 2016. With her official confirmation that July (and subsequent swearing in that September), Carla Hayden became the first woman and first African-American to serve as the Librarian of Congress. During her nine years as Librarian, Dr. Hayden focused on making the Library of Congress’ content more accessible to the public, particularly to underrepresented groups. Part of this accessibility outreach was making more of the Library available online, as well as expanding the Library’s social media presence. It was through the latter that we got that time Lizzo played James Madison’s crystal flute. Remember that? That was awesome.

But of course, I am eternally grateful to Carla Hayden’s input selecting films for the National Film Registry. Her first group of inductees in December 2016 was filled with so many iconic films that it inspired me to start this blog (“The Breakfast Club“! “The Lion King“! “Paris Is Burning!“). Her subsequent selections have been a healthy balance of perennial crowd-pleasers, long-lost actualities, and underrated gems. In addition to all the films I’ve gotten to revisit thanks to Dr. Hayden’s selections, I’ve also had the pleasure of discovering such films as “Eve’s Bayou“, “Pariah“, “Wanda“, “She’s Gotta Have It“, “Time and Dreams“, “Boys Don’t Cry“, “¡Alambrista!“, “Love & Basketball“, and many many more. And thanks to her, we live in a world where “Pink Flamingos” is on a government-sanctioned movie list.

Whatever Carla Hayden plans on doing next, I know it will be in the service of promoting our national heritage, lifelong learning, diverse voices, and so many other things this administration seems determined to purge. I thank Dr. Hayden for giving the Library of Congress what I call “the campsite treatment”; she left it better than how she found it.

November 16^th, 1999: Before everything shuts down for Y2K, it’s time to add more movies to the NFR. Here’s the 1999 roster that brought the National Film Registry to a total of 275 films, plus a pull-quote or two from my write-ups:

• The Kiss (1896): “monumental to the evolution of film”
• In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914): “blurs the line [between narrative and documentary] and doesn’t quite succeed in either camp.”
• Civilization (1916): “an Important Movie of its time that has all but disappeared in the last century”
• The Docks of New York (1928): “the third and god-willing final installment of my ‘Maybe I Just Don’t Get von Sternberg’ trilogy.”
• Lambchops (1929): “[on the NFR] mainly as a representation of Burns & Allen”
• The Emperor Jones (1933): “stands out…with its progressive casting…but the increasingly uneasy racial discussions make for an uncomfortable modern viewing.”
• Master Hands (1936): “I’m a sucker for a good promotional short.”
• My Man Godfrey (1936): “a prime example of the [screwball comedy] genre”
• The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936): “an effective, dramatic look at nature’s destruction by humankind”
• Trance and Dance in Bali (1936-1939, 1952): “a pass for its introduction to [Margaret] Mead and [Gregory] Bateson (but mostly Mead)”
• Gunga Din (1939): “part of the collection of films that make up the greats of 1939.”
• The Shop Around the Corner (1940): “definitely a minor classic, but still a wonderfully enjoyable film”.
• Woman of the Year (1942): “If you’re going to have one Tracy-Hepburn comedy on the list, ‘Adam’s Rib’ is the correct choice, with ‘Woman of the Year’ a distant second.”
• Laura (1944): “still packs quite the punch”, “the perfect murder mystery”.
• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951): “one of the best stage to film adaptations.”
• Duck Amuck (1953): “a fine example…of Chuck Jones’ imaginative animation”
• Roman Holiday (1953): “two of the most enjoyable hours in film history”, “Rome’s unofficial tourist video.”
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955): “a joyride through L.A.’s seedy underbelly”
• The Ten Commandments (1956): “still a massively impressive feat of filmmaking.”
• Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960): “an awesome soundtrack”, “[the film] passes all three NFR criteria for me.”
• Night of the Living Dead (1968): “plenty of creativity…[w]ith an endless cycle of zombie movies still being made today”
• The Wild Bunch (1969): “the next evolutionary step for the western”, “should absolutely be considered among the greats”
• King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis (1970): “an era’s tribute to one of its finest”
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): “completely succeeds at what it wants to be”, “[i]ts impact on filmmaking can still be felt”
• Do the Right Thing (1989): “Yes! Dear God Yes!”, “[the film] is here to wake you up, shake you, and remind you that all is not right with the world.”

And with that, I have watched every film inducted into the NFR in the 20^th century. Well…technically the 20^th century ended on January 1^st, 2001, so I guess I have a few more movies to go. Whatever, I’m celebrating now. Thanks for reading; see you next week!

Happy Viewing,
Tony

The Plot: On the Tex-Mex border in 1913, a group of aging outlaws led by Pike Bishop (William Holden) pull one last job robbing a railroad payroll office. After a violent showdown, Pike and his surviving men (Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sánchez) return to their hideout, only to learn the robbery was a set-up and that the “silver” they stole are worthless washers. Needing one more job to retire, the bunch, along with the crotchety Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) head to Mexico and strike a deal with General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) to rob a train transporting U.S. Army ammunition so the General can continue his fight against Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. All the while, Pike and his men are being pursued by bounty hunters led by Pike’s former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). Released just as Old Hollywood was dying out, “The Wild Bunch” showcases a Wild West in its final days, mixed with some of the bloodiest action sequences ever filmed.

Why It Matters: The NFR write up for “The Wild Bunch” is brief but flattering, calling it no less than “a true American classic”, praising Peckinpah, the cast, the cinematography, and the editing. An essay by film critic Michael Wilmington is equally effusive.

But Does It Really?: “The Wild Bunch” is one of the last “established classics” on the Registry that I had never seen before, and I enjoyed it. The film succeeds as the next evolutionary step for the western, with a realism and grittiness that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. Yes, the violence is intense, but it’s reserved for a handful of sequences, and the rest of the film is filled out with great performances by the entire ensemble and a script with much to say about loyalty and morality at the end of a lawless era. “The Wild Bunch” isn’t the greatest movie ever made, but it should absolutely be considered among the greats, and its NFR inclusion is a no-brainer.

Everybody Gets One: The original story of “The Wild Bunch” came from Roy N. Sickner, a stuntman who had doubled for the likes of Marlon Brando and Richard Harris. Sickner conceived the role of Pike for his friend Lee Marvin, who agreed to play the part, but bowed out for a bigger paycheck in “Paint Your Wagon”. The initial screenplay was written by documentarian Walon Green before being fleshed out by Sam Peckinpah. “The Wild Bunch” was Green’s first produced screenplay and Sickner’s sole writing credit.

Seriously, Oscars?: Despite its controversy, “The Wild Bunch” received two Oscar nominations: Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score, losing both to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. Sam Peckinpah’s screenplay nod was the only Oscar nomination of his entire career.

• This opening shootout has a lot going for it, and I’m sure in 1969 it was an intense sensory overload. Even amid the bedlam, Peckinpah establishes some key character dynamics and story elements, an incredible feat in and of itself. Also, even though Peckinpah avoided using Warner Bros.’ stock sound effects for this movie, listen closely for a Wilhelm.

• If you were a classic Hollywood star in the late 1960s as New Hollywood started taking over, your options were A) embrace the change, B) resist and decry the change, or C) retire. The likes of Holden and Borgnine were about 15 years past their movie star prime by 1969, but they clearly went with option A, relishing the chance to play more nuanced characters and mutter things like “son of a bitch” and “you lazy bastard”. As leader of the bunch, Holden is the glue keeping everything together, and can convey all you need to know about Pike with a simple look or a raise of his eyebrow. Holden’s understated work is nicely balanced by Borgnine’s bigger performance as Dutch. He’s not at a “Poseidon Adventure” level of hamminess, but he’s very explosive and emotive by comparison, crucially never crossing the line into overacting.
• The rest of the bunch is…also there. As the Gorch brothers, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates are fine, but thankfully they have more noteworthy performances in their near future. Jaime Sánchez does okay as the hotheaded young buck Angel, and Edmond O’Brien is having fun as the kind of Walter Brennan-type comic relief these movies are required to have.
• My viewing of “The Wild Bunch” was of the “Director’s Cut”, which features 10 minutes of sequences cut after the film’s premiere without Peckinpah’s input or approval. Amazingly, it wasn’t the carnage that was initially excised, but rather quieter scenes that served as supplemental character development. Among those cuts: a flashback explaining Pike’s falling out with Deke Thornton. Why would you cut that? We need that!
• Robert Ryan is playing a much more internal character than his other NFR work, but he’s always a welcomed sight, speaking volumes with his permanent hangdog look. Among the members of Deke’s posse are Peckinpah go-to L. Q. Jones, and Strother Martin in one of his more grating performances.
• “The Wild Bunch” was filmed entirely in Mexico, which means that at long last we have an NFR movie where the Mexican characters are played by actual Mexicans! The one exception is Puerto Rican Jaime Sánchez, who Peckinpah cast after seeing his performance in “The Pawnbroker”.
• General Mapache is played by Emilio Fernandez, who longtime readers may remember as the director of “La Perla”. Is it me or does he kinda look like Adolphe Menjou?
• Yeah, Peckinpah had issues with women. Every woman in this movie is either a literal whore or is treated as such, and several of them have violent on-screen deaths. Men would rather create a watershed revisionist western than go to therapy.
• The next big action sequence – the bunch’s train robbery – isn’t until the movie’s halfway point, and is another compelling sequence, played out with almost no dialogue. The subsequent chase scene is another reminder of how much easier crossing the US/Mexico border used to be.

• Thanks to my viewing of “La Venganza de Pancho Villa” for this blog, I had a general idea of where the Mexican Revolution fit into all of this. While Pancho Villa doesn’t make an appearance here, he gets name-dropped a few times, and his troop attacks Aqua Verde in yet another scene cut from the theatrical release.
• In addition to all the action this movie has, it contains a healthy dose of juicy dialogue, most of it mumbled in a way that, while appropriate for these characters, doesn’t give you the time to fully appreciate it. My favorite exchange (and one of the film’s main theses) is between Dutch and Pike about Deke: “He gave his word to a railroad.” “It’s his word.” “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to!”
• The film’s most iconic non-violent scene is a shot of Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers, weapons in hand, walking down a street en route to rescue Angel from Mapache. It’s a simple moment that does an excellent job of ramping up the tension in anticipation of the inevitable showdown. Most remarkably, the sequence wasn’t in the script, with Peckinpah creating it on the day.

• The final shootout is what I assume the ending of “Butch Cassidy” could have been. Most remarkably, it doesn’t last that long. Maybe five minutes? In any other movie it would have been 20 minutes minimum. And no spoilers, but the last line of this movie is Edmond O’Brien’s cackling. Always leave ‘em laughing, I guess.

• Walon Green has a handful of post-“Wild Bunch” screenplays to his name, including “Sorcerer” and “Eraser”, but his primary writing has been for such TV shows as “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order”. Green also directed the documentary “The Hellstrom Chronicle”, for which he won an Academy Award. And because I have nowhere else to put this: Walon Green is the man with a millipede crawling over his face during the weird tunnel scene in “Willy Wonka”.

• “The Wild Bunch” continues to get referenced, or at least alluded to, in practically any movie with a violent standoff. More overt references popped up on “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”, which featured characters named Angel and Lyle & Tector Gorch. As for direct parodies, it begins and ends with Jim Reardon’s “Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown”.

• Hollywood has been threatening us with a remake on-and-off for the last 20 years, at times attaching such names as Tony Scott, Will Smith, and Mel Gibson (!), but thankfully it has stayed in development hell where it belongs.
• And finally, Peckinpah’s goal with the excessive violence of “The Wild Bunch” was to so overwhelm the audience that they never wanted to see on-screen violence again. Unfortunately, moviegoers loved the violence, and the movies have spent the last 50-plus years out-goring themselves. Not every great movie’s legacy is what the filmmakers intended.

Further Viewing: Even this film’s making-of documentary is good! Consisting of 16 mm footage of the film’s production in Mexico, Paul Seydor’s “The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage” was released in 1996 and nominated for the Best Documentary Short Oscar.

Wow, 750 movies. How the time flies. Thanks as always to you for reading this. Onward!

November 16^th, 1998: The National Film Registry celebrates 10 years of adding movies to a list by adding 25 movies to their list, making it an even 250 for the Registry. Here’s the Class of 1998, along with snippets from my write-ups on these films:

• Westinghouse Works 1904 (1904): “another figure in the carpet of early filmmaking”
• From the Manger to the Cross (1912): “preservation-worthy, but not on the top of anyone’s list”, “I assume the book is better.”
• The Immigrant (1917): “an important stepping stone, if not essential Chaplin.”
• Sky High (1922): “It represents Tom Mix, and it features impressive footage of the Grand Canyon. That’s about it.”
• The Lost World (1925): “by no means a revered classic…but the effects by Willis H. O’Brien are worth the trip out.”
• The Phantom of the Opera (1925): “There are other Phantoms out there, but there’s only one Lon Chaney.”
• Pass the Gravy (1928): “[Max Davidson] has just as much a right to be in the NFR as any other lesser-known silent star”.
• Steamboat Willie (1928): “a pivotal moment in film history. Plus the songs are really catchy.”
• The Public Enemy (1931): “holds its own alongside the other gangster movies of the time”
• 42^nd Street (1933): “So much talking. More musical numbers, please!”
• Little Miss Marker (1934): “compared to the other films that could represent [Shirley] Temple on the list, it is found wanting.”
• The Bride of Frankenstein (1935): “stands next to the first [“Frankenstein”] as the horror film all others strive to be.”
• The City (1939): “a bit heavy-handed”, “an emotional tone poem for change.”
• Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse (1940): “a good lesson to all you aspiring architects out there.”
• The Ox-Bow Incident (1943): “never goes to that next level you want from a classic film.”
• Twelve O’Clock High (1949): “man do you have to slog through a long movie to get to all of the good stuff.”
• Gun Crazy (1950): “proof that some B-movies are better than the main feature.”
• The Hitch-Hiker (1953): “a wonderful example of how you can create a very suspenseful film on a shoe-string budget.”
• Modesta (1956): “achieves a unique status on the NFR thanks to its Puerto Rican production”
• Dead Birds (1963): “never take a documentary at face value.”
• Dont Look Back (1967): “If you’re a [Bob] Dylan fan, you’ll get a lot more out of this than I did.”
• Easy Rider (1969): “very much of its time, but still accessible”, “the road trip movie on LSD, perhaps literally.”
• The Last Picture Show (1971): “great performances…mixed with two hours of bleak existence for everyone.”
• Powers of Ten (1977): “in a word, trippy.”
• Tootsie (1982): “one of the finest comedies ever made.”

The Plot: Modesta (Antonia Hidalgo) is a housewife in a Puerto Rican barrio looking after her husband (Juan Ortiz Jiménez) and their three children with a fourth along the way. One day Modesta’s husband orders her to kill one of their chickens and cook it for dinner while he’s at work. Modesta fails to capture the chicken, and when her husband comes home and berates her for it, Modesta picks up a nearby large stick and hits him over the head with it. News of this spreads quickly in the barrio, and Modesta is soon joined by the neighboring housewives to form the League of Liberated Women, demanding equal status in their marriages, and equal responsibilities from their husbands regarding housekeeping and childcare. Brought to you by Puerto Rico’s División de Educación de la Comunidad, aka the Division of Community Education.

Why It Matters: The NFR write-up is primarily historical background on Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education and the films they produced throughout the 1950s and 1960s. “Modesta” is singled out for being “[f]eminist at its heart”, and director Doniger gets a shout out. An essay by NFR aficionado Daniel Egan is pretty much all the information we have about “Modesta” and its production.

But Does It Really?: There aren’t a lot of NFR movies filmed in U.S. territories (the only one I can think of is “The Chechahcos” in the then-territory of Alaska), so “Modesta” automatically achieves a unique status on the NFR thanks to its Puerto Rican production. The film itself is a simple fable handled decently if not remarkably, but it goes by quickly enough that it’s hardly worth griping about the film’s shortcomings. Of the dozens of films produced by the Division of Community Education, I don’t know why “Modesta” was the one chosen to represent them on the NFR, but I’m glad it was.

Everybody Gets One: Not a lot of information about Benjamin Doniger or why and how this native New Yorker ended up making movies in Puerto Rico. Prior to his work in Puerto Rico, Doniger served as cinematographer and/or camera operator on a few shorts including “The Cummington Story” and “Journey Into Medicine”. Some sources (including the NFR write-up) state that Doniger was the cinematographer on fellow NFR film “Louisiana Story”, though his only on-screen credit on that film is for sound (the credited cinematographer for “Louisiana” is Richard Leacock). Doniger’s entire directorial filmography consists of films made in Puerto Rico from 1953 to 1959, with “Modesta” being his second film as director.

Title Track: Modesta roughly translates to “humble woman”, which as we see is a very ironic title. “Modesta” should not be confused with Modesto, the California city near my hometown of Stockton. Modesto is the city Stocktonians make fun of to feel better about ourselves.

Seriously, Oscars?: No Oscar nod for “Modesta”. For the record, the 1956 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject, Two-Reel went to “The Bespoke Overcoat”, which is one of the most British titles I’ve ever come across. Some sources claim that “Modesta” won a prize at the 1956 Venice Film Festival, but I can’t find anything official to back that up.