The Vault #60: Judge Priest

There is no director that represents the oft-referenced idea of "America" as well as John Ford. That is not to say that the man was a zealot or xenophobe, marching pre-packaged messages before his audience.  As iconic as films like The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers are, their messages are hardly patriotic. Ford is far from the jingoism and moist-eyed sentimentality of Frank Capra. To interpret his work thusly would be a grave mistake. The homespun fable Judge Priest might seem cute and folksy, but its scenarios and characters are positioned for the sole purpose of exposing Southern hypocrisy and the contradictions of American myths.

Will Rogers plays Billy Priest, an unmarried, white-suit-wearing old man who presides over a court-room in post-Reconstruction Kentucky. The role is ripe for caricature, and the opening crawl heightens the sense of antique triviality: "The figures in this story are familiar ghosts of my own boyhood. The War between the States was over, but its tragedies and comedies haunted every grown man's mind, and the stories that were swapped took deep root in my memory." From this, and an opening scene which concerns Priest's ruling about his own servant (Stepin Fetchit) stealing a chicken, we are lead to believe Judge Priest cribbed from some unpublished Faulkner scribbling, a tale of a quixotic old man painted in glowing tones, focusing on rural dialect and the details of slow living.

Again, on the surface, Ford does not want to startle the audience. He allows Rogers to joke and ramble on to Fetchit and his uxorious sister, who does not want her son Jerome (Tom Brown) marrying a girl of "questionable origins" (Anita Louise). These origins concern her father, whose identity is unknown until Priest, having partake in a few julips, finds him weeping at his wife's grave. Priest may be old and befuddled, but he knows true love when he sees it, and tries his darnedest to bring the couple together. Unfortunately, the girl's father soon finds himself on trial for assaulting local cad Flem Talley, Jerome's chief competitor for the girl's hand in marriage. 


There's more than a little All's Well That Ends Well in the story, but the inescapable elements that make Judge Priest fascinating is its setting in 1890 Kentucky. When it was released in 1940, the time period of Judge Priest would have been very much alive in some viewer's memories. While the film has the nostalgic introduction and Will Rogers charm inviting us to recollect the good old days, certain unfortunate truths of history are laid bare as well. The only two African American speaking parts are relegated to Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel (in one of her unheralded Mammy parts pre-Gone with the Wind), who both serve Priest in the manner of slaves. Sure, Rogers playfully engages Fetchit's greedy and callow nature, and sings along with McDaniel's spirituals, but the subtext is clear; very little has changed from 1861 to 1890, and perhaps even less from 1890 to 1934. 

 The film climaxes with the consummation of the romance and the release of an innocent man, but both are predicated on the ultimate right and goodness of the Confederacy. A character witness reveals that Jerome's prospective father in law fought valiantly for the South in the war between the states, and thusly deserves his freedom. This also clears up those "questionable origins" - anyone who risked his life for Dixie is by definition an honorable man. The triumph of is celebrated with a minstrel show/parade led by Fetchit. The most recognizable Negro caricature of his generation, little more than Priest's lap dog, is overjoyed at the union of two white people setting out for a future he can never hope to experience. 


Though it may seem a light melodrama verging on comedy, Judge Priest is a metaphor for the ideals of the South. Five years later Ford would make Young Mr. Lincoln, another courtroom drama which assumed the victorious moral code of the Civil War was formed some years earlier in small-town Illinois. The earlier film reminds us that across the Ohio River, a different set of values was being cherished and upheld, equally charming, and at the time, equally right. Rogers' insouciant charm and avuncular wit gloss over the tremendous iniquities of southern racism and class warfare. Yet, along with the tremendous character and heroism of Abraham Lincoln, Judge Priest and those like him are also are parts of the American scene.

Lust, Caution

The specific details of another time and place are usually enough to fill a book, let alone a film. Throwing a melodrama on top usually renders the costumes a convenient layer of gauze draped over a contemporary issue. Consider the cries for freedom in Braveheart or the sanctity of a woman's right to choose in The Cider House Rules. The characters in a period piece tend to be closer to us than the people they depict, parroting back the values of our day, not theirs. On the other hand, get too lost in the details, and the plot disappears, as in Gangs of New York. The degree of difficulty incumbent in the costume drama, coupled with the Oscars' insatiable desire for "high-brow" filmmaking has made Ang Lee one of the most marketable prestige directors of our time.

Lee first broke onto the American film scene with an eminently classy adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, then followed with two more ambitious, but less recognized pictures. The Ice Storm treated 1970s Connecticut like an alien world. Fully encased in pre-Reagan sexual politics and social mores. the ensemble's performances were convincingly of their time, yet more affecting than suburban melodramas like American Beauty. Ride with the Devil was a was, first and foremost, a story about youth and violence, and only coincidentally set during the Civil War; that Film gave us a brief glimpse of Lee's incredible gift for action and suspense. It also, unfortunately, led us to the dull, techonological Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and flat-out awful Hulk.

After another humanist success with Brokeback Mountain, Lee returned to his native China in Lust, Caution. Set in Shanghai and Hong Kong during WWII, Lee keeps the audience close to the action, never losing himself in thousand-extra battle scenes. The action instead follows Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), a poor college student who finds herself involved with the resistance. First participating in nationalistic theatre productions, she soon is acting much more important, and dangerous role - that of society wife. Her mission is to lure a government official, Yee (Tony Leung Cheu Wai) to his death.

From the outset, the commitment of an entire resistance cell to kill one midlevel official seems a waste of resources. One failed attempt occupies almost a third of the film's 158-minute running time. The war is always far away, and Yee's actions even farther; is it really worth risking the poor woman's life? The importance of the mission is so secondary, Wong Chia Chi ends up distracted by the fancy dresses, the plush lifestyle and the fake (or real?) love affair. No matter that Yee is a selfish and abusive lover - he's all she knows.

Lust, Caution explodes in violence only once - most of the aggression of the war is dramatized in the NC-17 sex scenes. Here Leung Cheu Wai demonstrates his considerable dark side; the actor known best for his roles in Hero and In the Mood for Love is chilling, yet sympathetic. Again, his identity is perfectly circumscribed by Chia Chi's perception - whether he is deserving of assassination is never made clear. From his rough treatment of our hero, we can only presume. This is not the flashy, commercial sex of Paul Verhoeven, whose Black Book (released in the same year as Lust, Caution) took a similar female espionage premise and made it into an erotic thriller. Sex is not a release for either of these partners - it's a manifestation of psychological wounds.

Lust, Caution was criticized for its glacial pace - a supposedly simple mission takes places over four years. However, this is less a film about the moral politics and strategy of the Chinese resistance, and more a coming-of-age story. Wong Chia Chi is educated as a warrior, but more importantly as a woman, learning to love a man for what he is, rather than what he represents. Lee brings this all to screen with his trademark elegance and economy, evoking the great romance of Dr. Zhivago, but also the helpless predetermination of Barry Lyndon. The tragic conclusion would be inconceivable in a contemporary setting; it mirrors the minimal value put on human life during World War II. The people of an earlier time are recognizable as members of our species, with similar emotions and needs. However, their actions might as well be science fiction.

Half-Price Pulp

Before the censors let loose the grindhouse and blood washed away any sense of decency the B-movie ever held itself to, there were even smaller, grittier pieces of fiction, two-act works of armchair psychology. With Avatar running close to three hours and even lighter fare like The Other Guys taking 1 hour and 50 minutes, let's step back to earlier times. Two movies in under 2 hours 20 minutes:

There might be no opening more boring than that of Anthony Mann's Strange Impersonation. Nora Goodrich is a pharmaceutical researcher developing a new anesthetic (you probably want to stop reading right now). But an envious assistant and an unfortunate accident later, she's changing her name and running cross country to get identity-morphing plastic surgery. Mann molds an innocuous tale about a career woman and dark coincidence into a stylish thriller, one in which men are powerless and society's darkest impulses are laid bare. It's wonderful to see such a talented director working on such low material, and even more of a thrill when he brushes all he's exposed away with a simple "it was all a dream" coda. Impersonation is a wicked little trick, so briefly twisted and insidious it ends without us fully understanding its import. It comes and goes in a blink, healing like a shallow cut, but the psychic wound lingers long after.

More well-known, but equally bare-bones, is Ida Lupino's The Hitchhiker. Frequently cited as the only film noir ever directed by a woman, it concerns three men trapped in a car, orbiting a single, powerful object; a .22 revolver in the hand of a crazed killer. Remade recently as The Hitcher, replacing the victims with a young couple, Hollywood outsmarted itself by changing the dynamic. And critics who call this film a noir are off-base as well; there's no gray area of sympathy or moral ambiguity when it comes to William Talman's portrayal of the titular maniac. Indeed, The Hitchhiker less resembles those portraits of urban malaise and decay than it does the psychological westerns of Bud Boetticher, the three souls locked in a battle of wills not on horseback, but pummeling through the sands of Baja California in a battered Chevrolet. The film boils down all hard-boiled fiction, prose or film, into one simple rule: all that matters is who's holding the gun, and where they're pointing it.

Worn-Out Genre + Will Ferrell + Gags Beaten to Death = Funny? The Other Guys

Adam Sandler was one of Saturday Night Live's most original comic talents - as a result, he is barely memorable as a sketch performer. His most enduring material from that show comes from songs he wrote and performed himself on Weekend Update; he would not refine his comic talent to a discernible character until the twin hits of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Will Ferrell, on the other hand, was the king of SNL, most famous for his send-up of George W. Bush, and most accurate in his side-splitting impression of Robert Goulet. These were not original characters, but spoofs; it follows then that most of Ferrell's vehicles, from Anchorman to Talladega Nights have been riffs more than wholly original material. Though his most recent and best (read: strange) film was Step Brothers, his latest, The Other Guys, finds the star back in familiar territory.

This time cop movies are the victim of Ferrell's increasingly thin improvisations. He plays a pencil-pushing nerd who loves being chained to a desk, much to the chagrin of his partner played by Mark Wahlberg. Yet after New York's two Shaft/French Connection style supercops fall to their hilarious death, there's a power vacuum that needs to be filled by two new alpha dogs. So off the odd couple go, hot on the tail of financial ne'er do well Steve Coogan. Oh yeah, they're competing for police force supremacy with Rob Riggle (the guy who said "Catalina fucking wine mixer" about a dozen times in Step Brothers) and Damon Wayans, Jr., who as of press time, apparently exists. And their boss is Michael Keaton. Oh, and Anne Heche is in this movie (remember Six Days, Seven Nights? Neither does anyone else).

Outside of that muslin-thin plot, The Other Guys is the interaction of characters who can be summarized in one or two running jokes per person. Attractive women can resist the chubby, oafish Ferrell; Wahlberg at one point shot Derek Jeter; and Keaton can't stop inadvertently quoting TLC songs. Also an old lady describing graphic sexual acts, some jokes that make light of suicide and a whole heap of misogyny. Some of these bits are funny, the first time around. Keaton will receive good notice if only for the impeccable plastic surgery he clearly invested in sometime between his last movie and this one. However, by the time the third act rolls around, we're tired of Wahlberg kicking everyone's ass, and homophobic wisecracks about the fact that Ferrell drives a Prius.

There's been a movement in Hollywood lately to make "ironic", raunchy buddy comedies, ironic in that they are jabs at the original wave of these R-rated action-romps, like Midnight Run and 48 Hours. Pineapple Express was one such imbalanced failure; Robert Downey Jr.'s Due Date may be another. Maybe we have Wet Hot American Summer to blame for this idea that the creakiness of the 80s could somehow be funny anew, but these movie just do not work for these. Robert Deniro and Nick Nolte thought those were serious roles. Although Wahlberg is the best part of The Other Guys, he's clearly in on the joke, and that self-awareness makes it more difficult for us to laugh at him.

The more pressing problem with the action-buddy spoof is that, well, it inevitably has to have some action. These car chases and gunfights are the equivalent of the sappy moments in romcoms - they slow down the laughter and seem out of place. And what's more, the structure slows down the pace of Ferrell's comedy, which feels stuffed into a cop-movie costume that makes it sweaty and uncomfortable. While The Other Guys makes you laugh, it doesn't make you think or feel much of anything, other than to wonder what subgenre Ferrell and collaborator Adam McKay will choose to attack next.

The Vault #59: The Hit

The mythologized gangsters are never racketeers, bookmakers or tax evaders - such crimes, though worthy of extended prison sentences, are not fodder for melodrama. These must be doomed men, murderers and turncoats whose ticket to the gallows is punched whether found guilty in a court of law or not. They are marked for death from the beginning, and usually fight like a desperate animal against the fate pre-ordained both my common decency and the rigidity of the screenplay. At first, we had the brutish action of classics like Scarface. These disappeared in the noir era, where the protagonist was always ostensibly good, just a victim of circumstance. The cold-blooded gunman emerged in the late 60s not as James Cagney's hothead, but rather a stylish lizard, slithering taciturn from sexing to killing to sexy killing, more pop art than realistic public menace. Nihilism painted over, having become impossibly cool, now became strictly the territory of black comedy, audiences giggling when Tony Sirico jammed the mailman's head into the pizza oven in Goodfellas, or this classic moment from Pulp Fiction:

Tarantino forever made the button-man a subject of sport, not a samurai killer with a code, but an uneducated simpleton with a short fuse. The Sopranos and The Wire aside (both of which found the higher-ups more worthy of pathos than the foot-soldiers), this sophomoric view of organized crime is the one that pervades the culture today, from Guy Ritchie to the Coen Brothers. Though they are sophisticated filmmakers capable of tremendous insight, Miller's Crossing was more than a little cartoonish. 

The last film to give the hit-man his due deference was The Hit, which leans more towards philosophical treatise than bullet-riddled potboiler. Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) is a turncoat, a man who sold out his friends for witness protection in the south of Spain. He spends a decade reading books, enjoying wine, transforming from a man of violence to a man of letters, all before the opening credits finish. Wiser, greyer and softer-spoken, Willie is kidnapped by two hitmen, Braddock and Myron (the black eyes of a soulless John Hurt and blonde hair of a teenage Tim Roth) and taken for a trip to Paris, where he will meet his end. Willie does not run, he does not struggle - he is smarter, more contained, more normal than the gangsters we've seen before. His entire life has been in preparation for this fact, and he intends to show grace under pressure.

Coming out of hiding to do one last job is a well-worn cliche that dates back to Out of the Past. In Spain, and with cockney accents, one cannot help but think of Sexy Beast, but The Hit does not ply us with any traditional images of The Good Life, all poolside cocktails and string bikinis. The man in control, Braddock, has none of the wit or libido of Don Logan - he's not there for small talk or to settle a personal score. He's an errand boy sent by grocery clerks, to make Willie do one last thing: die.  There are no scores to settle because there are no personal relationships; passing a ruined castle Willie waxes nostalgic on the bygone days of knights and honor. Another cliche is made of Myron, the brash kid who's never hurt a fly in his life, talking big around adults. It's through Myron that we see both Willie and Braddock, the same side of the same coin, resolute and joyless, both using him for their own ends, Willie theoretically trying to escape. Myron finds himself having more in common with the group's hostage (Laura Del Sol), than either of his criminal compatriots. The life of a killer lacks the romance he once imagined - one hasn't the time to enjoy anything. Again, this is nothing new.

Shop-worn ruminations on life and death aside, it is the film Frears constructs around these themes that bursts with originality. Usually, when hitmen meet their prey, things are over in a matter of seconds, minutes at most, a few meaningful glances and bullets exchanged. Here, Willie is forced to stare into the abyss for the entire film. His choice is not to run, but rather to soak up his last hours living on earth. A shady grove next to a waterfall might be his preview of heaven, the fiery plains his entrance to hell. The living can get agitated; Willie is just along for the ride. He won't put up falso bravado or make airs he does not intend to back up - the same is true of Frears' unforgivingly objective camera angles, bereft of the British gangster style previously established by Mike Hodges and  Neil Jordan.

Of course, he's not the only one in danger. A small trail of bodies is following Braddock and Myron, and hot on their tail a nameless Spanish policeman, played with limitless gravitas by Fernando Rey (used as a wax statue of a caricature of himself, much like in The French Connection). Like Willie, he takes in the gory scenes with a horrified and numbed aspect. The voice of right and order is silent however; Rey has one intelligible line in the entire film. As in No Country for Old Men, another movie set in the desert that focuses on the banality of evil, there's nothing to be said, or even understood. Violence feeds violence, and it is insatiable.

"It's just a moment. We're here. Then we're not here. We're somewhere else... maybe. And it's as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?" Willie imparts these words to Braddock just before the bloody climax, trying to comfort him about his own, and ultimately everyone's, demise. Whether the stately sage believes his own words is up for debate, but those sentiments are certainly true. The Hit dramatizes not only the gangster's inevitable fate, but our own. It acknowledges bad men to still be human beings, a fact which genre films are often all too quick to forget.