Movies I Love: River Of No Return

RIVER OF NO RETURN is a western I can watch anytime - though it is hardly a Western at all, more of a Canadian ... filmed in Canada in 1954, that magic year for me - by Otto Preminger it moves along at a cracking pace, Monroe and Mitchum are great together - just like Mitch and Deborah Kerr in that 1957 John Huston classic HEAVEN KNOWS MR ALLISON - another great Fox Scope movie (and another Movie I Love - see Mitchum label). (Apparantly Mitchum had been in the army with MM's first husband, and had seen photos of the young starlet then ...) - actually MR ALLISON is about a marine and a nun in the wilderness (or a remote tropical island), so it shares similarities with this - there they catch that unfortunate turtle, here it is a moose; plus are holed up in a cave with marauders on the loose ..
1954 was that year I began going to the movies when about 8 - JOHNNY GUITAR, DRUM BEAT, SITTING BULL, THE COMMAND - RIVER OF NO RETURN was another western that year, while Raoul Walsh was also making SASKATCHEWAN with Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters in Canada that year. (Shelley and Marilyn had of course been room-mates at one stage...). Here Marilyn is Kay, a saloon singer who is entangled with no-good Rory Calhoun who has cheated his way to a gold mine and needs to get to Carson City to file the claim. Mitchum is the farmer who comes to the tent city after a stint in prison, looking for his son - Tommy Rettig, who is friends with Kay. Later back on the farm father and son rescue Calhoun and Kay who are going downriver on a raft - but Calhoun has his own plan and takes the farmer's horse and gun, leaving them at the mercy of marauding indians, so there is nothing for it but for father, son and Kay who has stayed behind to head down the river themselves on the raft. The Canadian wilderness (Alberta and Banff area) looks great here, and I love the music for whenever the redskins appear ... it is a great soundtrack too.



Exciting fare then, and the back projections with the raft and the stunt doubles are well done. I like the sequence where Mitch takes the frozen wet Kay to a cave, wraps her in blankets and massages her back to warmth as their warring characters begin to respond to each other as the scene melts into the shot of the warm flames. MM and Mitch spar well together and she copes well with the rough stuff. I love how Marilyn looks in 1954, here and in THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS, after that break-out year 1953 for her. Her Kay is pure peaches and cream, and she sings marvellously too. She had developed so much as an actress and performer since those early small parts in 1950 just a few years earlier ...


People tend to forget what a great vocal artist she was. When I was a teenager one of the first record albums I had was "Marilyn" the soundtrack to the 1963 compilation film Fox were quick to put out about her, and it included those songs from the film on it - the theme "River of No Return", "One Single Dollar", "Down in the Meadow" and the terrific "I'm Gonna File My Claim" which she sings in the saloon to the understandably dazed audience. This film has all those Fox Monroe touches: her costumes by Travilla, choreography by Jack Cole, and the songs with lyrics by Ken Darby and music by Lionel Newman. Preminger keeps it going well - he also did CARMEN JONES the same year in that busy decade for him before his Jean Seberg films (we also like BONJOUR TRISTESSE (see Deborah Kerr label) and he finished the decade with ANATOMY OF A MURDER, before his early 60s big hitters). So, its a fun western, an enjoyable movie I can happily re-watch any time its on - I love the bit where the redskin gets onto the raft to rip her blouse off (before being despatched) so she has to face the rapids in her camisole. It may be symbolic but why at the end does she throw her red shoes away - she is going back to the burnt out cabin in the wilderness with no proper clothes or shoes!
In the Monroe filmography RIVER though is regarded as a studio programmer she had to do in 1954, but it actually stands with the best of her Fox films and Kay is one of her best roles.

1954 - what a year for leading ladies: Marilyn's 2, Elizabeth Taylor's 4 including THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, Ava's THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA, Audrey as SABRINA, Grace in 5 films including REAR WINDOW, THE COUNTRY GIRL and GREEN FIRE, not to mention those other busy ladies like Shelley Winters, June Allyson, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Anne Baxter etc.... and Kay Kendall in England; and in Europe: Alida Valli in SENSO, Sophia Loren in WOMAN OF THE RIVER, Silvana Mangano in MAMBO; more at 1954 label. (By 1957 the new crop like Lee Remick, Shirley McLaine, Joanne Woodward, Eva Marie Saint and the grown-up Natalie Wood had arrived, along with those second tier names like Vera Miles, Martha Hyer, Dorothy Malone and the B-girls Rhonda Fleming, Virginia Mayo, Arlene Dahl, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget ... while Ingrid Bergman was back, and the '40s gals like Lana, Rita, Susan were pretty busy too, as indeed were the '30s lot!

Bad Boys: HUD and ALL FALL DOWN

Finally I have seen HUD all the way through, as previously I had only seen bits of it here and there. It certainly lives up to his reputation with that great Panavision black and white photography and that modern (1963) western setting, as directed by Martin Ritt who gets the best from his cast of 4, from a novel by Larry McMurtry (who also wrote THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and who scripted Ang Lee's film of that other modern western also set in 1963 BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN.) Here we have proud old Melvyn Douglas (that debonair leading man of Garbo's in films like NINOTCHKA and TWO FACED WOMAN) as the old rancher sharing his farm with son Hud (Paul Newman), grandson Lon (Brandon de Wilde) and housekeeper Alma (Patrica Neal). Lon of course hero worships Hud who is shown to be a heel, getting involved with married woman and generally not caring for anybody but himself. He and the weary and wary Alma have a flirtation which spills over almost into violence one drunken night. Problems at the ranch escalate too with the herd of sick cattle which have to be destroyed in a grim sequence, which proves too much for the proud older man. Alma leaves on a greyhound bus and Lon also sees the light leaving the unrependant Hud feeling distinctly sorry for himself. Its a searing climax. Neal's Alma is a brilliant creation well deserving of her best actress award that year.

[This May 1963 issue of "Films & Filming" was the one which had my personal ad in when I was 17, which led to all my pen-friends then... as per other posts here].

Here is a good synopsis from IMDB: "Hud Bannon is a ruthless young man who tarnishes everything and everyone he touches. Hud represents the perfect embodiment of alienated youth, out for kicks with no regard for the consequences. There is bitter conflict between the callous Hud and his stern and highly principled father, Homer. Hud's nephew Lon admires Hud's cheating ways, though he soon becomes too aware of Hud's reckless amorality to bear him anymore".
A confession though: while I admire Newman's charity works and his spaghetti sauces, as an actor he just never interested me much - whether he is HUD or THE HUSTLER or COOL HAND LUKE or Brick in CAT... or Ben Quick in THE LONG HOT SUMMER or Chance in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH he always seems the same basic bad-ass character to me, so as Hud he is more of the same really.


ALL FALL DOWN, as scripted by William Inge and filmed by John Frankenheimer, from the novel by James Leo Herlihy (who also wrote BLUE DENIM and MIDNIGHT COWBOY) which I loved then in 1962 aged 16 - the same age as Clint, who records events obsessively in his notebooks, observes his parents Ralph and Annabel (Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury, both perfect casting) and he falls for the visiting "old maid from Toledeo" Echo O'Brien (Eva Marie Saint - also perfect as ever) - the fly in the ointment though is older brother Berry-Berry (Warren Beatty at his most) a never-do-well who returns home with predictable results ... its one of those rites of passage movies where Client finally realises his idolised older brother is no good and is in fact a dangerous, pitiable jerk who leeches onto women and cannot function in a relationship.



Set in Cleveland Ohio it has some lyrical black and white photography and some nice scenes set in Florida as Clint travels looking for his straying brother ... this is one I like a lot and have done for decades.

Christmas treats ...

Starting with a box of macaroons from Paris - the box is a work of art in itself, I feel tempted to hang it on the wall, it has a lovely black cat on it - also a spice & marmalade cake, also from Pierre Herme, Paris. Then dipping in and out of all those old movies on television, catching up with some not seen since I was a kid, and a few old favourites.

NIGHT PASSAGE is a pleasant memory of a '50s Sunday afternoon matinee, this 1957 James Stewart western should have been another of his tough westerns with Anthony Mann, but Mann walked due to script problems, so it was directed by James Neilson. A look at frontier life along the railroad, with train robberies; I remember liking this scene with Stewart and young Brandon DeWilde on the train, also on board was Elaine Stewart (another of this year's departees, aged 80) married to big boss Jay C Flippen! Audie Murphy and Dan Duryea were among the baddies, and Ellen Corby another tough frontier woman.


TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE from 1959 - not seen this since then but its as effective and violent (effectively directed by John Gullermin) as I remembered - Gordon Scott the perfect Tarzan for '50s kids, Anthony Quayle a terrific villain with young Sean Connery and Niall McGuinness in his gang, along with bad girl Scilla Gabel - Sophia Loren's stand-in on BOY ON A DOLPHIN, and here starting out her own career as a sizzling eurobabe. Scilla was always good value in Steve Reeves epics and movies as diverse as SODOM AND GOMORRAH and my fave MODESTY BLAISE.





THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER - one of those lavish (it says here...) 1977 remakes, helmed by the usually reliable Richard Fleischer (THE VIKINGS, BARBABBAS) this is an idiotic remake of the Erroll Flynn original. Lurid colours and guest stars aplenty: Charlton Heston, the older Rex Harrison, Raquel Welch is mainly silent - the interest for me is the re-teaming of Oliver Reed (rather portly here) and David Hemmings as his evil brother - their hell-raising was taking its toll on them here, since they were young in 1964's THE SYSTEM, a key movie for me then [review at David Hemmings label], showing the 60s just starting to swing. Mark Lester as both the prince and the pauper shows that most perfect child actors (OLIVER) grow up to be very uninteresting indeed, he is lanky here with frizzy hair and there is no difference at all between his two roles ... an amusing time-waster then, not in the same league as the producers' delightful star-stuffed MUSKETEERS films by Richard Lester. Right: THE SYSTEM gang in '64 including Olly and David Hemmings - 2 years later he was the star of Antonioni's BLOW-UP and the icon of the age!



THE SEARCHERS. A classic one never tires of of course, like THE QUIET MAN and VERTIGO, also afternoon or late night delights. More on Ford's classic western at Jeffrey Hunter label - he has that bath scene here with Vera Miles (Mrs TARZAN in real life as she was then married to Gordon Scott!; her pregnancy cost her that leading role in VERTIGO). I shall get around to appreciating Vera in due course. What is jarring about THE SEARCHERS now is the treatment of the squaw Hunter accidentally marries; but to counterbalance that we have those essentially 50s yet timeless scenes with those characters Martin Pawley, Laurie Jurgenson and Natalie Wood's Debbie.

MANSFIELD PARK, the 1999 film of a Jane Austen novel seems to have divided opinions, as a lot of Austen purists hate it. I read the book some time ago, it is not my favourite Austen - that is PERSUASION by a mile, one I can re-read and like all 3 adaptations (costume drama label). The priggish Fanny Price is indeed Austen's least loveable heroine as she relishes her moral superiority over the other young people putting on the play, which she does not approve of. It is a good cast here though, with Harold Pinter (left) as Sir Thomas Bertram whose business interests in Antigua turn out to be slavery, James Purefoy and Johnny Lee Miller as his sons; the marvellous Sheila Gish (right) as Mrs Norris who tries to keep Fanny as the poor relation, and Lindsay Duncan as both Fanny's downtrodden mother and opium-addicted wife of Sir Thomas. Frances O'Connor is a spirited Fanny, but hardly fair to Austen's original.

Finally, a re-view of 1958's A TALE OF TWO CITIES as well, not seen since I was a kid. French actor Paul Guers who did actually look like Bogarde, plays Charles Darnay whom Dirk replaces on the guillotine - Guers has been in some other items I saw recently like Demy's BAY OF ANGELS and THE GIRL WITH GOLDEN EYES (both at French label). This is solid Rank Organisation fare by Ralph Thomas with all those familiar featured players: Rosalie Crutchley, Freda Jackson, Athene Seyler, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasance etc, all looking splendidly in period.

THIS HAPPY BREED. Another perennial favourite, as I have written about before (Kay Walsh label). Kay excels as Queenie the dissatisfied daughter of Robert Newton and Celia Johnson; and there is that endless bickering between Amy Vaness's mother-in-law and Alison Legatt's spinster sister, all part of the Higgins family in Clapham between the wars. The period detail is just perfect and the emotions are fully engaged, particuarly that scene when the parents in the garden are told of the deaths of their son and his wife, as the camera stays in the sitting room where afternoon tea is about to be served ...

And one discovery: THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION THE WITCH & THE WARDROBE from 2005: "When the Pevensie family are evacuated out to the country, they are unaware of the adventure they will encounter. During a game of hide and seek, the youngest daughter, Lucy discovers a wardrobe which transports her to the land of Narnia. Covered in snow, Narnia is full of weird and wonderful creatures, but is watched over by the evil White Witch. When all four Pevensie children end up through the wardrobe, they discover that it was meant to be, as two daughters of Eve and two sons of Adam must join with the mighty lion, Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) to defeat the evil White Witch". Tilda Swinton is perfect as the Ice Queen/White Witch and James McAvoy (whom I had not though much of) is an adorable faun and the children are just perfect. For a CGI movie I liked it a lot, and Andrew Adamson's direction is also perfect! I shall have to watch the others now ...



The new DOWNTON ABBEY special is indeed a treat, and ticks all the right boxes, and the new GREAT EXPECTATIONS is an odd re-telling, rather different from Lean's version, with Ray Winstone a perfect Magwitch, and Gillian Anderson as a wraith-like younger Miss Havisham. Unusual though to see a plain-jane Estella (who is meant to be a glacial beauty out of the rather ordindary Pip's league), but here Pip with his sculptured cheekbones and pouting lips, is much prettier than her! Pip is Douglas Booth who was one of Isherwood's boys in CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND (gay interest label). Now for that BEN HUR re-boot, with Winstone again (as Jack Hawkins). It cannot be a patch on Wyler's classic but may have some cheap laughs!
BEN HUR (2010) actually turned out to be quite interesting, shot in Morocco it looks more like THE LIFE OF BRIAN than a Hollywood blockbuster, and wisely does not try to be - the chariot race for instance is much smaller scale (no circus maximus here) and the ships at war are courtesy of CGI effects and there are interesting script variations from the Wyler film. Winstone is a mumbling Arrius, Hugh Bonneville good as a nasty Pilate, Alex Kingston right as Mrs Hur (the leprosy is also played down), but in all a radical re-working of the original material. Joseph Morgan is a totally underwhelming uncharismatic Ben, but Stephen Campbell Moore (from THE HISTORY BOYS) a rather good Messala.
We will though be still watching the Lean and Wyler originals when these lightweight remakes are soon forgotten - I tuned in to Lean's EXPECTATIONS again yesterday and was bowled over again by how perfect it all was, with that great double act of Martita Hunt and Jean Simmons as the perfect Havisham and Estella, and that marvellous black and white photography, so right for Dickens.

My week with Marilyn ?

This is going to be one fascinating movie - but will it work? Michelle Williams who was so great in MEEK'S CUTOFF (review at Westerns label) is hardly one's first choice as Marilyn, but judging by the clips she somehow seems to convey the essence of MM without impersonating her. All the other girls who played Marilyn (ususally in cheesy telemovies) were of course hilariously awful, this though could be interesting. Some unusual casting too - Kenneth Branagh should be able to suggest Olivier, and Judi Dench Dame Sybil Thorndike - but Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller?

It is of couse based on the book by Colin Clark and captures Monroe at an interesting juncture. She has been tired of being the 20th Century Fox sex symbol and had moved to New York where her friend Milton Greene and others had taken some wonderful studies of her and then they set up this filmTHE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL to be made in England and directed by Laurence Olivier who also stars, and photographed by ace cameraman Jack Cardiff, who liked her a lot, as per his book MAGIC HOUR. It was of course a legendary troubled shoot, as detailed in all those Monroe books, but did she ever look lovelier even crammed into that tight dress? We will always have the film, I saw it again a while back, not entirely successful but it has some lovely moments [review at MM, Cardiff labels]. It should be fascinating then to see how it is presented here ....

Blowing Wild: homage to Gary Cooper

BLOWING WILD - nice to re-acquaint myself with this nifty 1953 tough little meller, which I saw at a Sunday matinee back in the 50s. Directed by Hugo Fregonese and scripted by Philip Yordan it assembles 5 tough cookies somewhere in South America for a tale of oil riggers versus bandits. When your cast is Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Anthony Quinn, Ruth Roman and Ward Bond then wait for the fireworks!

Coop and partner Bond have their oil digging operation ruined by bandits and have to seek work. Enter wealthy Quinn and his predatory Medusa-like wife Stanwyck who once had the hots for laconic Coop and wants him back - he though falls for new girl in town Roman, playing a nice girl here .... then the bandits come back for the final explosive shoot-out - after Stanwyck has disposed of Quinn, so like all bad girls she has to pay the price. Stanwyck and Cooper (their third teaming?) are great together.



This had made me realise how much I love Gary Cooper, particularly his later films - perhaps the most beautiful man of the 1930s (check out his two with Dietrich MOROCCO and DESIRE, and the delirious THE FOUNTAINHEAD with Patricia Neal in 1949 and he and Ingrid Bergman are perfect together in SARATOGA TRUNK in '43), he was ageing rapidly in the '50s - like Gable, Tracy, Bogart, Flynn, Power and those other early '30s hellraisers who partied hard with all that smoking and heavy drinking - most of them did not see much of their 60s or the 1960s.

He turned out lots of routine movies but I particularly like him in Wyler's still charming FRIENDLY PERSUASION, that fondly remembered hit of 1956 (Samantha the goose and Pat Boone's theme song) and then Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON in 1957, one I did not see until lately but this one does not work for me at all, Audrey Hepburn being far too young for his ageing roue - Wilder may have intended a light souffle in the spirit of Lubitsch but not for me. Much better is TEN NORTH FREDERICK in '58 from John O'Hara, and that brace of tough westerns: Anthony Mann's MAN OF THE WEST with Julie London and Lee J Cobb, and Delmer Daves' THE HANGING TREE in '59 with Maria Schell and Karl Malden, a particular childhood memory. Rossen's THEY CAME TO CORDURA is also a tough drama with the ageing Coop and Rita Hayworth very touching here. He then made his final two in Britain for Michael Anderson - the Hammond Innes adventure THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE with Charlton Heston and a great supporting cast (Michael Redgrave, Virgina McKenna, Richard Harris etc) and the thriller THE NAKED EDGE in '61, again the cast is the thing, with Deborah Kerr, Diane Cilento, Hermoine Gingold etc but it is impossible to think Coop could be the murderer. He was clearly ill by then and died on May 13 1961, aged 60, shortly after Gable's passing a few months earlier.



Seeing Coop now always reminds me of my father as my dad was a very Gary Cooper kind of man, both in looks and manner. We will always keep watching Coop and Cary Grant and James Stewart and Bogart and John Wayne, perhaps the greatest of the great male stars - there are others like Gable, Tracy and others whom we do not see so much now, perhaps their later films were not that special and are not revived much now.

Meek's Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt's gaunt, mysterious and superbly crafted film about pioneers and the old American west appears to have come from another age – from the early days of Malick or Antonioni. Some sequences are almost entirely wordless, and long stretches will go by in which you can hear only the repeated whine of the wagon wheels as the pioneers grimly trudge along, alongside the cattle pulling the wagons across the endless flat prairie. Sometimes, this sound is only just audible above the roar of the wind across the plains.



The three families have been persuaded to break away from the main column on the promise of a short cut, by the guide Stephen Meek - a wild man of the plains. Now they are hopelessly lost. They travel mostly on foot, leading their horses to save energy and water, their wagons, containing precious barrels of water, pulled by oxen. It nightmarishly portrays an old West of no roads, no signs of water, and no signs of civilization. But they follow Meek across the plains, hoping that the hill over the next horizon will bring hope. They they capture the Indian, a solitary man. The braggart Meek and the men discuss whether to kill him before he leads them into an ambush, the women want to keep him as maybe he can show them the way or lead them to water. The women in their long calico dresses and bonnets are stoic and resourceful.



The ending is very enigmatic - is the tree a symbol of water? The Indian feels he has fulfilled his part of the deal, and he leaves. He is secure in his position, the settlers have been saved but in truth they do not belong in this environment, they are invaders in a landscape as alien to them as the moon. Imagine what they must have felt: having crossed the long prairies, the rivers, worried about Natives and disease, crossed the Rockies - all that, and then they're being led into the wilderness by what they must have thought a lunatic. It is one of the most fascinating, powerful, hypnotic westerns I have seen.







Michelle Williams - soon to be Marilyn Monroe in the film about the making of THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL, she will surely be as amazing as usual - excels here as the main woman who feels she can trust the Native. Other scenes like the destruction of one of the wagons are marvellously paced. These settlers, like all the others, had to have True Grit indeed. It makes other westerns about pioneers and covered wagons, such as 1959's THUNDER IN THE SUN with those French Basques taking their vines to California (led by Susan Hayward and Jeff Chandler) seem very bland fare indeed, with the Indians as "the enemy" to be defeated; perhaps only Jan Troell's THE EMIGRANTS (1971) and THE NEW LAND ('72) caught the hardships of the new immigrants? as Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann travel from Sweden to the new land - and of course Lelouch's ANOTHER MAN ANOTHER WOMAN with its immigrants from France ...