Tag Archives: Jason Robards

Big Hand for the Little Lady

Nicholas Chennault ~ December 18, 2013

Big Hand for the Little Lady—Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward, Paul Ford, Jason Robards, Kevin McCarthy, Robert Middleton, Charles Bickford, Burgess Meredith (1966; Dir: Fielder Cook)

A drama-comedy whose comedic overtones get stronger toward the end, with a large and excellent cast. It was the final film for both character actor Charles Bickford and Chester Conklin, a comedian from the silent era.

The annual big card game is taking place in the back room of a saloon-hotel in Black Rock, presumably in Texas. The players are wealthy local cattle barons and merchants—Jason Robards, Kevin McCarthy, Charles Bickford, Robert Middleton and John Qualen. Into town arrives a small family on their way to San Antonio: A father, Meredith (Henry Fonda), a mother, Mary (Joanne Woodward), and a small son. While they wait for a wagon wheel to be fixed, Meredith gravitates toward the poker game, which Mary insists he avoid. Gradually he is drawn in by the lawyer Otto (Kevin McCarthy), converting their savings into poker chips.

As the movie slowly builds, Meredith loses all of his savings until he gets what he excitedly claims is a big hand, but everybody else seems to feel the same about their own hands and he needs at least $500 more to stay in the game. He sweats as the tension builds, he keels over of an apparent heart attack, and he is taken to the house of the doctor (Burgess Meredith). Out of desperation, Mary takes over the hand, although she seems to have little idea of how to play it or even how to play poker, for that matter. Eventually she goes across the street to the bank, trying to persuade the banker P.L. Barrington (Paul Ford) to lend her the $500 to stay in the game. For collateral, she shows him the great hand. He tosses them all out, but eventually joins them at the game and bankrolls her.

[Spoilers follow.] Overcome by the tension, one by one the regulars fold, and Mary wins without ever having to show them her hand. They are dazzled by her rectitude as a “good woman.” Turns out it was all a con set up by Barrington, who was cheated by the same group 16 years previously. Fonda emerges after the con as lively as ever, and the movie ends with Fonda, Mary (whose real name is Rosie) and several others in a new cutthroat card game. The film builds slowly, but it works well as a character study with excellent actors.

The big card game is one of the long-time elements of western movies, featured most prominently in recent years in Maverick (1994). One of the reasons it works well here is that we’re used to seeing Fonda as a lead in westerns, and when he keels over in the middle of the movie, it becomes much less predictable. Joanne Woodward (Mrs. Paul Newman) was an excellent actress, winning an Oscar for Best Actress in 1957 for The Three Faces of Eve. Of the remaining group of character actors assembled for this film, Jason Robards and Paul Ford are the strongest.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Nicholas Chennault ~ October 24, 2013

Once Upon A Time In The West—Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Claudia Cardinale, Gabriele Ferzetti, Woody Strode, Jack Elam, Lionel Stander, Keenan Wynn (1968; Dir: Sergio Leone)

Leone takes his leisurely time getting into the movie. The lengthy introductory sequence and credits aren’t done until almost half an hour into the film. It’s interesting to watch as an exercise in filmmaking, and it’s very atmospheric, with little dialogue.

Some think that this spaghetti western may be Leone’s masterpiece and one of the ten greatest westerns ever. Leone had a bigger budget to work with than with any of his Clint Eastwood trilogy. Visually, it’s probably his best. There’s a shot where Harmonica (Charles Bronson as an Eastwood-esque mysterious stranger) looks out a doorway at people building the new town of Sweetwater, and the scene is beautifully composed. It has a very good cast, with the exception of Cardinale, whose voice is dubbed to get rid of her accent. Frank (Henry Fonda, in a rare bad-guy role) is a killer-for-hire, now working for a ruthless crippled railroad baron (Gabriele Ferzetti). He disposes of Brett McBain, owner of a ranch with water that could delay the railroad, not realizing that McBain’s new wife Jill (Cardinale), a New Orleans prostitute, is about to arrive and will have to be dealt with as well. Harmonica and Cheyenne (Jason Robards) are more or less good guys—Harmonica of mysterious origins and Cheyenne as a local bandit chieftain falsely blamed for the McBain killings. Obviously all this will get sorted out, but it will take its time.

Henry Fonda as Frank the killer, in dark makeup to emphasize blue eyes.

Even if it’s very well done, this movie still has many of the weaknesses of its subgenre: Less emphasis on storytelling, more on insistent reaching for emotional reactions through visual images and close-ups; over-the-top violence, although not nearly as bad as in The Wild Bunch, which was in production at the same time; lingering close-ups on faces (frequently from below) and eyes. It’s a self-conscious epic, slow-moving and seemingly in love with the process of conceiving and making the movie rather than with the story it’s telling. That deprives it of narrative thrust, but may make it more attractive to auteurs. The dialogue is extremely sparse, even though the movie is 164 minutes long. Henry Fonda’s eyes seem abnormally blue, because he’s wearing lots of dark facial makeup; so is Charles Bronson. The gorgeous cinematography makes some of the best use of Monument Valley since John Ford. Some of the movie was filmed in Spain. A buggy ride taken by Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa starts in Spain and ends up in Monument Valley in the U.S. The music is by Ennio Morricone, including some nice symphonic stretches but notable mostly for effective use of the harmonica, identified with Bronson’s character. Bernardo Bertolucci (director of Last Tango in Paris in the early 1970s) was one of the writers, along with Dario Argento, who became a one-man Italian horror film industry.

The voices are a bit of a problem, too, for a big-budget film. The Italian mode of filmmaking involved shooting film without recording any sound, leaving all sound and dialogue to be dubbed in later. That means there’s usually some form of disconnect with the film, especially when, as with Claudia Cardinale, the sound you hear when she speaks isn’t her own voice. In the lengthy opening sequence, with the creaking sound of the windmill and Jack Elam’s killer trying fitfully to get a fly off his face without using his hands, Elam has only a few words of dialogue, but it’s jarring that they’re not in his voice. (His mismatched eyes and rough features have never been so lovingly captured on film, though.) Bronson, Robards and Fonda, at least, are recognizable by their voices, but sometimes the modulation and ambient sound seem wrong. That’s true with the harmonica theme, too, when Bronson’s supposed to be playing it and the acoustics are wrong.

Harmonica (Charles Bronson) gets the drop on Frank (Henry Fonda).

Leone and his collaborators reportedly immersed themselves in watching the great westerns before making this, and there are lots of references from these films. Both Clint Eastwood and James Coburn are said to have turned down the role of Harmonica. Robert Ryan was to have played the sheriff (actually played by Keenan Wynn), but had to back out when his role in The Wild Bunch got larger. John Landis is a stunt double. This was Leone’s last western, unless you count Duck, You Sucker, a story set during the Mexican revolution for which Leone served as producer and perhaps director.

Debate as you may whether this is one of the ten best, or even one of the 55 greatest westerns. What cannot be debated is that to have any kind of informed opinion you have to see this and Leone’s Man with No Name Trilogy. They represent the very best of spaghetti westerns and a new approach that has influenced western movies ever since.

Hour of the Gun

Nicholas Chennault ~ August 30, 2013

Hour of the Gun—James Garner, Jason Robards, Robert Ryan, John Voight (1967; Dir: John Sturges)

This underrated retelling of the Wyatt Earp story features the grim James Garner (see also Duel at Diablo and A Man Called Sledge), not the comic one with the easygoing charm. Garner plays Wyatt, paired with Jason Robards as an excellent Doc Holliday—more believable as the tubercular gunfighter than the physically robust Kirk Douglas and Victor Mature in previous film versions of the story.

Garner as Wyatt Earp.

The Earp story has been more successfully retold in movies than any other from actual western history, with varying levels of accuracy. The best cinematic version of the Earp story may be Tombstone, although My Darling Clementine, one of the older and least historically accurate versions, has its proponents. Hour of the Gun belongs in this more than respectable company. In fact, gritty thriller writer George Pelecanos, who says that westerns are his favorite film genre, claims Hour of the Gun as his favorite western, as the upright lawman Earp becomes a colder and more implacable killer in hunting his brothers’ murderers (interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, October 9, 2009). Pelecanos points to the excellent Jerry Goldsmith score as one of the movie’s overlooked strengths. The cinematography by Lucien Ballard is also terrific. Edward Anhalt wrote the screenplay; he shows up briefly in the film as Doc Holliday’s doctor.

This was director Sturges’s second telling of the Earp story, a decade after his earlier Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. In the meantime, he’d made The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Hallelujah Trail, and he was at the peak of his game. He was one of the best directors of his time in dealing with large-scale stories and action, but this is a more modest effort in terms of scope and budget. While Gunfight goes with its title and builds up to the legendary battle, Hour of the Gun starts with the gunfight and focuses on Earp’s subsequent vendetta ride, as he hunts down those he holds responsible for gunning down his brothers. In telling this story, it keeps more to the historical facts than the older film did, but only to a point. Much of the dialogue in the courtroom scenes, for example, is taken from actual transcripts. Text on screen after the initial credits says, “This picture is based on fact. This is the way it happened.” Well, not quite, but it’s closer than previously filmed versions of the story.

The Earps and Holliday at the OK Corral.

In his 1967 review of the film, Roger Ebert called this one of Garner’s best performances. The casting is one of the film’s strong points, especially in the three primary roles: Garner as Earp, Robards as Holliday and Robert Ryan as an older and more cerebral Ike Clanton than we usually see. Robards is good as Doc, although he’s significantly older than the actual historical character. He mentions having killed during the Civil War, but the real Doc Holliday was much too young to have fought in the war. The Earp brothers (Virgil and Morgan) are not terribly memorable in this version of the story. Look for a young John Voight as Curly Bill Brocius in an early role. Interestingly, there’s no Johnny Ringo in this version of the story. And basically there are no women in this story, either.

Because of its focus on Earp’s search for revenge, the movie becomes more melancholy as Doc tries to keep Earp balanced. Doc: “I know you. You can’t live like me.” “Those aren’t warrants you have there. Those are hunting licenses.” Earp comes to realize the ultimate futility of revenge past a certain point. The vendetta itself is not celebrated as much as in Tombstone. The film’s climax shows Wyatt shooting it out with Ike Clanton in Mexico, which is not at all the way Clanton died. The end of the movie, with Doc dying in a Colorado sanitarium, is heart-wrenching. Wyatt says he’s going back to Tombstone as the U.S. marshal, so Doc will think he’s regained his idealism and respect for the law; in fact, he intends never to be a lawman again. The irascible dentist-gunman forces Wyatt to leave and sits playing cards with an orderly on an outdoor veranda as Wyatt drives off in a buggy.

The poster emphasizes the revisionist elements of the film.

Since the movie presented a revisionist view for its time of a famous western lawman, audiences weren’t sure what to make of it when it was released. But it stands up pretty well more than 40 years later. Garner would play Wyatt Earp again in Blake Edwards’ 1988 comedy-thriller Sunset. In Sunset, Garner is an aging Earp during the period of the late 1920s when the former lawman was in Hollywood advising on westerns, paired with Bruce Willis as Tom Mix.

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Tag Archives: Jason Robards

Big Hand for the Little Lady

Once Upon a Time in the West

Hour of the Gun