A column for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine‘s September 2022 issue. — J.R.
For me, the most horrible implication of the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and in Uvalde, Texas is the suggestion that guns functioned for two alienated and tongue-tied eighteen-year-old boys as vehicles for their alleged “self-expression”, even though what was actually being “expressed” by them were only mindless replications of other nihilistic slaughters. In a country that habitually disparages or dismisses art in favor of its “entertainment” -– which is clearly why entertainers with zero interest in art such as Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump wind up as treasured ideologues — the potential entertainment value of guns can function as a handy substitute for art as a self-assertive kind of performance. This already tends to be the dramaturgical and discursive function of guns in the various forms of cinema that these teenagers accessed, which makes it only logical that it should become their own dramaturgical and discursive form of “self-expression”.
In other words, what la caméra-stylo represents for France as a form of art, la caméra-fusil represents for the United States as a form of entertainment — a form that basically mandates that the entertainer “shoot first and ask questions later” (whether this is done with a camera or in terms of military combat), if, indeed, questions are ever asked at all. Read more
THE LAST FRONTIER, directed by Anthony Mann, with Victor Mature (1955, 97 min.)
Spurred by the enthusiasm of Jean-Pierre Coursodon, posting in the chat group “a film by,” I follow his lead and also see Anthony Mann’s THE LAST FRONTIER for the first time, and I wind up basically agreeing with him: the film is a lot better than its reputation warrants (for one thing, some of the CinemaScope landscapes are breathtaking), and Victor Mature is especially good in it. In fact, it seems pretty clear that the fact that this movie has such an unfashionable cast -– not just Mature, but also Guy Madison, Robert Preston, and James Whitmore, which the relatively fashionable Anne Bancroft can’t quite offset -– has something to do with its apparently low place in the Anthony Mann canon. (The fact that the film has an imposed and unsatisfying ending doesn’t help either, but this is so perfunctory that I find it easy to overlook; Mann almost seems to glide right past it.)
Mature plays a Noble Savage here (a trapper who joins the U.S. Cavalry as a scout), and many people either forget or don’t know that he virtually began his career as a D.W. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (December 1, 1989). — J.R.
Ron Kovic’s autobiography, which recounts his conversion from patriotic enlisted marine to crippled demonstrator against the Vietnam war, isn’t a very literary book, although it uses some very literary devices (frequent time leaps, switches between first and third person) to approach the intensity of the traumas it deals with. Oliver Stone’s well-intentioned but faltering 1989 adaptation, scripted by Stone in collaboration with Kovic and starring Tom Cruise, eschews this approach for an episodic linear plot that doesn’t allow us to see Kovic’s conversion develop with any complexity. (As he showed in Platoon, Stone knows a lot about fighting in Vietnam, but he knows much less about being an antiwar activist, which is equally important to Kovic’s story; the movie’s demonstrations tend to be as blurry and as cliched as its nostalgic evocations of the American dream.) Stone’s unfortunate penchant for psychologizing leads to a number of murky suggestions here, such as the notion that Kovic’s warmongering instincts were somehow tied to the refusal of his mother (Caroline Kava) to let him read Playboy. Worst of all, the movie’s conventional showbiz finale, brimming with false uplift, implies that the traumas of other mutilated and disillusioned Vietnam veterans can easily be overcome if they write books and turn themselves into celebrities. Read more
