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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 9/03/2022 [TheJamesMadison]

A Hero Bursts Forth From the Sun

J.J. McQuade is the hero the lawless West needs in its most desperate of hours.

He is the selfless, tireless, and skilled Texas Ranger who operates only based on once code: that which is right. He protects the innocent, putting his life on the line to bring violent criminals to justice, cutting through the murky morality brought on by corruption and arms trafficking in the border town of El Paso. He sacrifices all that is his in pursuit of peace and freedom.

He is the greatest lawman of his generation, one who runs red lights because he's slightly late to a ceremony for an old friend after having single-handedly taken out an entire band of horse thieves after they took half a dozen state troopers hostage. He is the hero we need.

The Strength of Images

The director of Lone Wolf McQuade, Steve Carver, is one of the great visual artists of our time. His command of images and meaning is unparalleled. He uses his camera like a neo-classical artist composing images, but his subject is the epitome of manhood: Chuck Norris. Take the scene where Norris's McQuade, the lone wolf who is so dedicated to peace and goodness that he has no time to even clean his own house, finds the widow of the criminal partner of David Carradine's Rawley Wilkes. Lola (Barbara Carrera) is cleaning McQuade's house without his permission. She even throws away his beer! (The Freudian implications are obvious here.)

The two get into a physical confrontation that leads them to wrestling outside in the mud, made by a water hose. Knowing that we are in a piece of art, we can easily see what's going on here. It's not a random event just to make things look interesting, it's a penetrative look at the heart of the budding relationship. He is like the dirt. She is like the water. Combined, they make mud. It's enough to make one cry.

Finding Meaning in the Smallest of Details


There is a character in the film, an ATF agent named Burnside. The thing about Burnside is that he does not actually have sideburns.

What to make of this?

There's obvious deep meaning to it, and we just have to approach it from an ironic context. The ATF agent is never seen as anything other than a boob, someone more in place in an office than in the rugged terrain of South Texas that McQuade navigates with such ease and poise. Burnside is a detriment in the effort to track down Rawley Wilkes, his base of operations being deep in the wilds of the Texas countryside. Even the FBI Agent Marcus Jackson is willing to help McQuade by flying him around to look for any potential signs, but Burnside just complains.

The first sight of him without his side burns should have been the clue that he would not be a worthy contributor to the efforts. He could not live up to his name, named after Ambrose Burnside who was defeated at both Fredericksburg and Petersburg, he doesn't even have the necessary sideburns to fulfil the name in the basest of senses. This is the level of cinematic intelligence on display in Lone Wolf McQuade.

Lesser Films


There's a scene where Steve Carver looks back in film history and decides that he can do it all better. In Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone is attacked in his bedroom by machine gun fire from outside. Carver repeats this scene with the hero McQuade to much more powerful effect.

Essentially it's the same, but it's targeting the great hero Lone Wolf McQuade. It makes Coppola look like an amateur.

In addition, McQuade is given motivation in the film's final moments to really hate the bad guy when his pet wolf dies. How bad ass is that? He has a pet wolf! That's so much more badass than John Wick's puppy. J.J. McQuade > John Wick.

Coming Back to Reality


Okay, that was a bit over the top, no? Got a bit out of control?

Yes, I've overplayed the artistic success and import of this Chuck Norris movie, but I do enjoy it. It's a fun neo-western obviously inspired in equal parts by the Dollars Trilogy directed by Sergio Leone (the music by Francesco de Masi is the deadest giveaway) and the other Clint Eastwood star-vehicle Dirty Harry. In fact, the script for Lone Wolf McQuade was written for Eastwood, but he passed on the project which led to the director, Steve Carver, reaching out to the star of his previous film, An Eye for an Eye, Chuck Norris who did take the role despite his concerns that drinking beer on screen would ruin his image as a family-friendly action star.

Why did I go to these lengths? Well, the first was the joke itself. Inspired by our dear commenter Duke Lowell who has kept it up as a meme without any feedback for months, I decided to just do it without any fanfare. I thought it would amuse him. I hope it has.

The second reason was Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge by Joseph McBride. McBride has been writing about movies for decades, including having a day on set of The FrontPage. Wilder's writing partner I.A.L. Diamond said (I left the book somewhere I can't get to, so I have to paraphrase): "You people read things into these movies that are simply not there."

McBride has not only the gal to print this in his book, he even goes on to say that Diamond is wrong and that his own over-indulgent readings of Wilder's work is actually valid. He even quotes D.H. Lawrence's "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it." The problem that McBride has is that he not only doesn't trust the artist, he doesn't trust the tale either. (He also doesn't quote the first two lines of the Lawrence quote.) He goes so far overboard to overexplain his own thematic obsessions, transplanting them into Wilder's work so completely when there might have been a germ of an idea to begin with, that it becomes about McBride's own ideas rather than Wilder's. What starts as an interesting look at the life of a nomad journalist and screenwriter who goes from Vienna to Berlin to France and finally to Hollywood becomes an obsessive bit of nostalgia for Weimar Germany of all things.

He even says that Freud's assertion that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar is wrong. He says that the cigar is always something else. If you are there saying that Freud wasn't obsessed enough with symbolism, you've fallen down a rabbit hole you will never climb out of.

A while back, I wrote about reading too much into movies, and Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge is a book form of that.

What Lawrence said was, "let the art speak for itself." What McBride wants us to do is read him to figure out what the art says. I don't need a translator. You shouldn't either. I've read good, illuminating books about filmmakers and their work such as Steven Prince's A Dream of Resistance: The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki. McBride is not at that level, despite the fact that this was something like his tenth published book on film.

In Conclusion

Alright, I hope I combined something amusing with a small diatribe about something no one cared about.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Fall

Emily The Criminal

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Woman in the Moon (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Great to look at, solidly built narratively, and an extension of Lang's own thematic ideas, Woman in the Moon is a very entertaining adventure tale that may not quite hit the heights of something like Die Nibelungen: Kriemheld's Revenge, but is very much of the same school of filmmaking as Metropolis." [Personal Collection]

M (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This movie is awesome." [Personal Collection]

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Rating 3/4) Full Review "The film is a portrait of a nation on the verge of being consumed by chaos and terrorism, obvious fears of a half-Jewish man who was seeing everything he knew either flee or disintegrate." [Library]

Fury (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Lang came to Hollywood and made the most of his new location, language, and production environment. He made a film that fits really well in with his German work while declaring his presence in Hollywood with style, intelligence, and strong control over his actors." [Personal Collection]

Western Union (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Well produced, well directed, and surprisingly affecting in its final moments, Western Union may be Fritz Lang reacting to his financial disappointments and John Ford's financial successes, but he does it quite well. He doesn't make it his own, twisting and turning the script to fit his own thematic obsessions, but he does make the best of what he has." [Library]

Ministry of Fear (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, the film works. It's conventional and operates in a fairly tight box, but Milland helps to elevate it and Lang's expert handle of the physical production keeps things interesting visually. I'm going to have to read the book to see why both Greene and Lang felt like it failed, though." [Criterion Channel]

The Woman in the Window (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It doesn't quite fit the rest of his work thematically, a similar distance created in Ministry of Fear, but he entertains well because he was a professional who understood the medium really well." [Personal Collection]

Scarlet Street (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This is the complete package of a Lang film that we haven't seen since he left Germany. He has made very good work pretty consistently (Fury is still great, even if there is a compromise that makes it less Lang's work), but this is purely Lang." [Personal Collection]

Contact

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