Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week saw me finally breaking ground on the current anime season, as I screened the first two episodes of MyGO followup Ave Mujica in quick succession. While the show is certainly more broad and melodramatic than its predecessor, it’s also extraordinarily entertaining, showing that MyGO’s writer/director team are just as confident with this sort of operatic theater as they are with MyGO’s quieter pleasures. We’ve also been munching through the Ramayan, and have at this point reached the big action-adventure core of the series, when Ram’s wife Sita is stolen and he must square off with the demons who’ve claimed her. It’s a pleasure as always to see such a formative, archetype-defining text in motion, and it’s serving as a fine compliment to our Armored Trooper Votoms excursions. But let’s forget all that business, for today I bring you a selection of fresh films, plucked directly from my towering film review buffer. Let’s break ‘em down!
First up this week was Pale Rider, an ‘85 western directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. The film introduces us to a tiny California gold-panning settlement, which has attracted the ire of local mining baron Coy LaHood. Eager to strip-mine the entire region, LaHood has resorted to sending raiding parties through the settlement in order to encourage their flight. His plan seems on the verge of succeeding when a stranger arrives – our titular rider, known only as “Preacher,” who proceeds to put the fear of god into LaHood and his men.
Pale Rider is pure western comfort food, as straightforward a power fantasy as you’re likely to find in the genre. I had sorta figured its acclaim would imply some degree of moral complexity; the ambiguity that ripples through Ford’s later films, the judgmental nihilism of the spaghetti westerns, or the solemn reflection of the revisionist era. Nope, none of that here – Clint Eastwood is an absolute badass and moral paragon, his enemies quiver and tremble before him, and basically everybody of any moral standing falls in love with him by the end of the film.
That’s not to say it’s a bad film, not by any means. Eastwood is a skilled director who learned all the right lessons from his starring roles, and he wields his protagonist’s badassery judiciously, letting the forlorn gold-panning settlers carry the film’s emotional weight. What we have in Pale Rider is a crowd pleaser executed with a master’s precision; the texture of the old west and gravitas of Eastwood’s persona are all here, but they are adorned with such sugar-filled confections as Eastwood grappling with Richard Kiel (“Jaws” from Moonraker) or facing down six color-coded super-deputies. A most agreeable watch.
We then checked out the Fist of the North Star film adaptation, continuing our journey through the anime films of the ‘80s. The influential manga basically plays as a combination of Mad Max imagery and magical martial arts battles, all injected with a heavy dose of muscle-rippling machismo. Our hero Kenshiro must wield the secret martial art known as Hokuto Shinken in order to defeat all of his many enemies, fighting a succession of warlords and fellow martial artists in order to restore hope to the wasteland.
I knew the general beats of Kenshiro’s journey heading into this film, and to be honest didn’t really learn much more from the experience. Kenshiro walks through burned-out cities seeking his lady love, using pressure point attacks to explode the heads of charmingly costumed retro-futuristic bandits along the way – that’s pretty much the whole narrative cycle, which repeats several times across this film. Lacking the self-parodic or conceptually/strategically inventive adornments of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, I found myself kinda fatigued with Kenshiro’s adventures, yearning for something more textured than “hard boiled hero man explodes hard boiled bandit man.” Machismo in the abstract does very little for me, and Fist of the North Star offers very little beside it.
Our next viewing was New Year’s Evil, a 1980 slasher that, having already viewed the canonical Terror Train, seemed like the next-best horror feature with which to celebrate the new year. Roz Kelly stars as Diane “Blaze” Sullivan, a DJ hosting a Hollywood New Year’s celebration with live music and hourly countdowns, as each new time zone welcomes the new year in turn. However, when a caller phones in promising to kill someone at each new stroke of midnight, Sullivan ends up serving as the police’s point of contact for the perpetrator of a horrific murder spree.
Though it’s advertised as a slasher and came out right after the original Halloween, New Year’s Evil is in truth more indebted to older murder-mystery traditions, with a heavy crime procedural element and not much focus on the actual murders themselves. That’s fine by me; genre placement aside, the film nonetheless provides a fine stew of interesting variables, with the most prominent being the persistent extended jams of the party’s actual hired band, as an obviously hair metal/prog-oriented group attempts to emulate Duran Duran and Big Star. Kelly also offers a strong central performance, with her increasing frustration and anxiety single-handedly selling the contrivances of the film’s premise. Far from an essential viewing, but certainly an interesting and not unpleasant oddity of the emerging slasher era.
We then checked out His Girl Friday, a screwball comedy by my beloved Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant as a scruple-free newspaper editor and Rosalind Russell as his top writer and wife, though both with a big red “EX-” written in front of them. Russell opens the film by declaring her intent to marry a nice, normal man (Ralph Bellamy) and “live like a human being,” unlike the cynical, scoop-ravenous creatures of the newspaper business. With one day to win his wife back and the story of a lifetime hanging in the balance, Grant will have to pull out all the slimy stops to ensure the good people of his city get just the news they deserve.
I mean, what can I even say about a lineup like this? His Girl Friday is one of the unimpeachable titans of the screwball genre, overflowing with wit, and featuring two master comedians in absolute control of their craft. Hawks’ decision to change Russell’s scripted role from a trusted male employee to a former wife results in one of the greatest of all Hawksian women, as Russell crosses verbal rapiers with Grant time and again, their repartee so fast and furious it actually broke the record for fastest film dialogue. Like previous Grant-Hawks collaboration Bringing Up Baby, the quips are constant, chemistry electric, and improvisation frantic, making it impossible not to be carried along as Grant and Russell shift from racing like hounds after the news to inventing it wholesale to fit their convenience.
Every character in this film is either a mark or a conman, one of the guileless “real human beings” that Russell sees as noble in a demeaning, paternalistic sort of way, or else one of the shifty hucksters that actually make the world go round. Her would-be husband is accidentally arrested no less than four times due to the meddling of Grant, a procession she takes in stride as the romantic gesture it was intended. There’s technically a developing plot about an allegedly unlawful state execution, but none of the newsmen actually care about the specifics – they’re there for a story, not for the truth, and if the truth needs some polishing to become a proper story, well then that’s the cost of business. Delightfully irreverent, speedy in both wit and form, and laced with that sneering, self-assured intelligence marking many of the best comedies, His Girl Friday is a deserved icon of Hollywood’s golden age, and a must-see film for anyone too cynical for the quiet life.
