A Luso World Cinema Blogathon é um evento dedicado a filmes e cineastas em língua portuguesa de todo o mundo, organizado por Critica Retro e Spellbound by Movies. Para uma lista completa dos blogueiros participantes, visite os links nos sites de hospedagem.
One of the brightest lights in recent Brazilian cinema has been director Fernando Meirelles. The São Paulo native discovered film through his father, who made 8mm parodies with his family and friends. In college he studied architecture, but also sustained his interest in filmmaking. He entered indie TV and experimental film after graduation, which led to advertising. He co-founded the ad firm O2 Films.
In 2002, he co-directed, with Katia Lund, the movie City of God, a crime picture based in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, based on a novel inspired by actual events. O2 Films was one of the production companies. The film was an international sensation, and was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
In subsequent years, Meirelles made the Oscar-winner The Constant Gardener, as well as the films Blindness and 360 and the HBO series Joint Venture. When the Summer Olympics came to Rio in 2016, he directed the opening ceremonies. In 2019, Meirelles adapted the play The Two Popes for Netflix.
Popes loosely tells the story of the relationship between Pope Benedict XVI and the future Pope Francis, back when he was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in the wake of the 2012 scandal over corruption within the Vatican. Anthony Hopkins plays the former and Jonathan Pryce plays the latter.
Meirelles recreated the Sistine Chapel in the famous Cinecitta studio in Rome. This podcast explains how he did it. St. Peter’s Square was computer-generated. Additional filming was shot in and around Rome as well as Argentina.
Pryce and Hopkins were both Oscar-nominated, for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Pryce spoke some Spanish and Hopkins spoke some Italian and a little Latin. They both came across very convincingly.
I can’t say the story moved me that much, not being Catholic, but the contrast between the two holy men and their differing visions for the future of the faith was presented well. The reality behind the popes and their connection to each other is different, but this is, after all, a dramatization. The adapted screenplay by Anthony McCarten was also Oscar-nominated.
Popes is an ambitious production depicting a crucial turning point in religious history, told on a small, almost intimate scale.
The Vaccine is out in the world now, and it’ll take some time before its impact on the future of the film industry can be measured. One likes to believe 2021 couldn’t possibly be any worse than 2020, but getting past that nightmare of a year with not only a new president on deck but a legitimate defense against the Virus does give one reason to be hopeful. Zod knows we could all use that.
—Mank. The making of Citizen Kane through the eyes of co-writer Herman Mankiewicz. I was kinda drowsy when I watched this, plus it was really talky (what a surprise, a movie about a writer was packed with dialogue). It was cool to see historical figures like Orson Welles, Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and William Randolph Hearst depicted, but ultimately this didn’t thrill me as much as I had hoped it would. David Fincher directs from a screenplay by his late father Jack. Gary Oldman acts drunk most of the time as Mankiewicz and Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies was good, but overall I thought it was kinda meh.
—Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Early 20th-century blues pioneer Ma Rainey comes to Chicago with her band to record her songs, but her ambitious trumpet player has ideas of his own about how her music should be played. Co-produced by Denzel Washington, based on the play by August Wilson, Viola Davis is damn near unrecognizable in the title role but is also a force of nature, taking the contempt she holds for the white men controlling her career, the suspicion she has over Chadwick Boseman (in his final role) subverting her position as bandleader, and her general world-weariness and putting it into the blues. Boseman stands a strong chance at winning a posthumous Oscar with his performance; how very sad it is that he’s no longer with us.
It’s awful hard to look at this and not think the genie is out of the bottle. It’s not likely to return, either. The theatrical distribution model was struggling before the Virus and if it’s a matter of financial survival on the studios’ part, even with a Vaccine now available, I’m unconvinced they’ll go to bat for the theaters without a strong motivation. Maybe one will come.
The closure of movie theaters this year as a result of The Virus has led to a resurgence in drive-ins. Here’s a first-hand account from this past summer of a mother taking her family to a drive-in. In Queens, a drive-in has been born (with a Brooklyn extension), plus a local diner set up one in Astoria. Others have sprung throughout the tri-state area.
Years ago, I wrote about ways drive-ins could improve, and while my suggestions would be less feasible in the face of a pandemic, I still believe they could work in normal times. As things stand right now, drive-ins are a nice way to retain the traditional theater-going experience.
In the 60s and 70s, drive-ins were repositories for, shall we say, more adventurous cinematic material, the kind that appealed to younger audiences. Horror films were among the more popular genres.
The Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn Blogathon is an event celebrating the lives and careers of the famed Hollywood couple, presented by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood and Love Letters to Old Hollywood. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the links at the host sites.
Katharine Hepburn made more TV movies than you might suspect for an actress whose film career began in 1932 and was almost as active in the theater throughout her life.
Her migration to the small screen began after the death of Spencer Tracy in 1967, probably not a coincidence. All told, she made nine films for television, beginning with a remake of The Glass Menagerie in 1973 and ending with One Christmas in 1994, her final film role.
In 1972, Hepburn appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and was asked if she would ever make a film with Laurence Olivier, the legendary British actor who was so big they named an acting award after him. Hepburn smiled and said, “Well, neither of us is dead yet. Even though you may think so.”
The Rule Britannia Blogathon is an event celebrating British cinema, hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site. Black Narcissus
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Back in May we talked about the writer-director team of Powell and Pressburger, and I’m glad for the opportunity to discuss their movies again. They were beautifully made, with stunning cinematography and lush, vivid color.
If I ever saw Black Narcissus before, I don’t recall. All I knew about it was it had creepy-looking nuns doing nun stuff, but to be more specific: Deborah Kerr establishes a hospital and school with a group of her fellow nuns in the Himalayan mountains of India, but the atmosphere drives them all a little cuckoo. It’s based on a book.
Okay, first of all, I thought for sure that they shot this film on location somewhere in the Himalayas, but it was (mostly) done indoors! Specifically, it was shot in a studio with matte painting backgrounds, so perhaps we should talk about that.
The 2020 Wonderful Ingrid Bergman Blogathon is an event in tribute to the classic Hollywood actress, hosted by The Wonderful World of Cinema. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site. Europa ‘51(AKA The Greatest Love)
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Ingrid Bergman first met Roberto Rossellini in 1949. The Hollywood actress from Sweden was so impressed with the Italian director’s work she wrote to him, wanting to collaborate with him.
At this stage of her career, Bergman was a superstar, known for such films as Casablanca and Gaslight, plus her projects with Alfred Hitchcock, Notorious, Spellbound and Under Capricorn. Making a movie outside of the Hollywood bubble, with an unfamiliar foreign filmmaker, was a risk, but one she thought worth taking.
The result was the movie Stromboli, released a year later. In the process, the married Bergman had an affair with Rossellini, who was separated from his wife at the time. The actress and director had a son, who was born two weeks before the American release of the film... and that was around the time Bergman’s troubles really began.
Ten years of this blog and I have yet to talk about Monty Python. For now, I’ll say what practically everyone else says about the British comedy troupe: they’re hilarious, I thoroughly enjoy their material, both on TV and in the movies (I own Holy Grail on DVD), and I could watch them all day. But this is not about Python as a group, just one of them: Eric Idle.
In the sixties, Idle appeared on the ITV children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set with Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones and met John Cleese and Graham Chapman as a guest on At Last the 1948 Show.
Idle and the others from Adjust were offered an adult, late-night show at around the same time Cleese and Chapman were offered a series by the BBC. In 1969, after a taping of Adjust, Cleese arranged a dinner meeting between the six of them to discuss a collaboration, and a legend was born.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC from 1969-1974, and afterwards, Idle and the others pursued solo projects. In 1975 Idle created the sketch show Rutland Weekend Television, with music by Neil Innes. It was during this period that the two came up with characters that spawned a life of their own.
Joan Rivers might have been the first female stand-up comic I had ever seen. I had seen comedic actresses on TV—Carol Burnett, Isabel Sanford, Nell Carter—but I associated Rivers with stand-up. I would see quite a bit of her on TV, and she was part of the zeitgeist at the time.
I thought she was funny, not so much for the things she said as for the way she acted: gossipy, manic, catty. It’s a safe bet I knew no one in real life remotely like her.
In 2010 there was a documentary on her, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. It provided insight on where she came from and how her distinctive brand of humor originated. I remember she said in the doc, and I’m paraphrasing, something about how “ugly” women made better comediennes. I suspect she was making a distinction from comedic actresses, because we can all think of beautiful examples of those: Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Madeline Kahn.
If this were true, was it a form of compensation? Tina Fey is good looking, no doubt. Would I call her sexy? The word can mean different things to different people. I wouldn’t kick her out of my bed; I think she’d be a lot of fun to be with and would have lots of interesting things to say, and that’s sexy, in its own way. But I think we all know what Rivers was referring to: objective physical beauty.
The Alfred Hitchcock Blogathon is an event dedicated to the life and career of the legendary filmmaker, hosted by Maddy Loves Her Classic Films. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.
Good evening.
Perhaps more than any other director of the Golden Age, Alfred Hitchcock was a personality, someone known by movie audiences as well as any movie star, and never was that more apparent than when he made the leap to television in 1955 with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, AKA The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
A weekly anthology of suspense and horror stories, it’s notable not just for the quality of the stories but for how it shaped the Hitchcock persona. His droll sense of deadpan humor was often on display in his movies, sometimes as part of the cameo appearances he’d make in them. For TV, it was like he became an eccentric uncle with whom you were never sure if he was pulling your leg or not.
His introductions to each episode painted him as macabre yet self-depreciating, with a dry wit and a strong sense of the absurd, much like The Addams Family years later. The creepy theme song and the stylized cartoon silhouette of him also helped sell him as an iconic persona that one looked forward to seeing as much as the stories themselves. Here’s a collection of some of his more memorable intros and outros and here are some fun facts about the show.
So nothing fancy here; just my take on a few episodes picked at random. I didn’t realize when I began planning for this post AHP (a half hour) was a little different from AHH (an hour), though it’s all basically the same show.
With 21 Emmys and three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, James L. Brooks is an undisputed legend of the big and small screens. Let’s count the hits he was involved in creating, shall we: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Rhoda. Lou Grant. The Tracey Ullmann Show. And of course, The Simpsons—and that’s just TV.
Switch to the movies and you can add Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, all Best Picture nominees he directed and wrote. As a producer, you can even add Jerry Maguire, Say Anything and Big.
Before all of that, though, he was just a TV writer from Brooklyn working his way through the 60s. He had been a copywriter for CBS News, writing for broadcasts and documentaries as well as some work as an associate producer before switching to sitcoms, like That Girl, The Andy Griffith Show and My Three Sons. He created the show Room 222, the second one with a black lead character.
In 1971, Brooks tried his luck with a feature film. Thursday’s Game was an ABC movie that didn’t air until April 1974. Gene Wilder and Bob Newhart are two guys who enjoy a poker game with friends every Thursday night. When the game breaks up because of a fight and they need something new to do, Wilder and Newhart are forced to confront their inadequacies in life, especially when Wilder loses his job producing a crappy game show.
This all-star cast looks like a powerhouse now, but in 1971 many of them were not yet household names: Ellen Burstyn (two years before The Exorcist), MTM cast members Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman, Rob Reiner (the same year All in the Family debuted), Norman Fell (five years before Three’s Company) Chris Sarandon (four years before Dog Day Afternoon) and Nancy Walker (same year as McMillan and Wife and three years before Rhoda, not to mention those Bounty commercials). By the time Game aired in 1974, some of these people were better known, including Brooks.
Game feels like the sort of thing the future creator of Terms of Endearment would write. It has its funny moments—Walker plays an unemployment agency counselor, and her scenes with Wilder are cute—mixed with a little drama: Wilder and Burstyn’s marriage is in jeopardy due in large part to his inability to admit he lost his job; he pretends his Thursday night poker game is still going on, but he actually stays out all night with Newhart, which naturally stresses her out. Game is less funny-ha-ha and more funny-ain’t-life-peculiar.
Steve at Movie Movie Blog Blog wrote about Game last year. I agree with him in that the poker scene in the beginning was a highlight and that nothing afterwards is quite as funny as that. The manic explosions Wilder was so great at are reined in and I admit, I kinda longed for more of them, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Indeed, at times Wilder looked like he was exploring his sexy side(?): he has a couple of shirtless scenes with Burstyn and Harper tries to seduce him in another scene. Young Frankenstein this is not.
I’d say Game is worth checking out overall, especially if you’re nostalgic for 70s television.
When I remember TV movies, I remember the epic mini-series of the 80s. They were trumpeted as a Big Deal in TV Guide and they usually had all-star casts, not that I would’ve heard of most of the names, but the point was they got my attention and I watched them, even if I was too young to completely understand what was going on.
As for the shorter, considerably less-than-epic ones, I think I understood even then that they were inferior to theatrical movies. I definitely remember The Day After and how that film stoked our nuclear apocalypse fears. When the Amy Fisher trial became popular, all three networks made TV movies about her! (I forget which one I watched.)
As kids, we also had the ABC Afterschool Specials: young adult melodramas about the issue of the week, usually starring some popular teen actor from television. Here’s a MeTV top ten list. I don’t remember any of these; I think I only watched them sporadically—why would I, when GI Joe and He-Man were on instead?
TV movies get a bad rep, it’s true, but back in the 70s, they aimed a little higher, had greater aspirations, and were more memorable overall. I’ve already discussed some of them, like The House That Would Not Die with Barbara Stanwyck, and Duel, the first feature film directed by Steven Spielberg. This month I’m gonna look at some more, and today we’ll begin with one that developed a huge cult following to become a pretty big hit thanks to a certain terrifying-looking doll.
I really feel you should know that before anything else.
Does it matter? Eh, not really. A movie with a title like Nude on the Moon is made for one reason and one reason only—to see lots and lots of hot chicks—and in that sense, this delivers big time. The girls in this movie may not actually be nude, but they are all gorgeous and they’re filmed perfectly, with a steady camera and in plenty of sunlight.
Lots of dudes made nudist camp and “nudie cutie” films back in the late 50s and early 60s, such as Russ Meyer, whom we talked about earlier this month, and while those films served a market Hollywood wouldn’t touch, the vast majority of them faded into obscurity in time. So why has this one not only survived, but is remembered today, if only by a few die-hard cultists?
I’ve tried to understand what the big deal was about Andy Warhol. When I lived in Columbus, I went to a major Warhol exhibit and looked at his silkscreens, sat through a few of his films, read his history, but I can’t say I ever made a personal connection to any of it.
It’s easy to say, “You had to be there,” but in his case, I really feel that’s true. For all of the articles that testify to his importance to art history and pop culture history, I don’t grok any of it, and certainly not his films—I mean, who would want to sit through a static shot of the Empire State Building for eight damn hours? More to the point, who would feel such a film had value?
I get that Warhol was mostly pulling everyone’s collective leg with his work, but audiences of the 60s strike me as willing accomplices to the joke. I dunno. Still, his films have a relevancy because of who he was, if not for their content, so I will examine a few and try to appreciate the importance they may have. No promises.
It took fifty years or so, but the world has caught up with John Waters. Just turn on your TV and you’ll realize there can no longer be any doubt. Whether or not that’s a good thing, well, that’s up to you to decide... but I will say this:
As an artist, no matter who you are or where you come from, no matter what your intentions are—whether you wanna provoke or shock with your art or whether you wanna create beauty, however you perceive it, or whether you just wanna make a million dollars and retire to the south of France—you’re never, ever gonna please everybody, and attempting to try is an exercise in futility.
It’s something I wish I could remember more often. I struggle with the conservative mores I was brought up in, and at times I’ve wanted to push my art further, whether it’s my visual art or my writing, as I alluded to recently. To embrace “trash,” to find virtue in modes of expression that run far left of center and to be open about it, takes guts, because even in 2020, there’s gonna be somebody ready to hang you for it.
You have to hand it to Russ Meyer. He knew exactly what he wanted to see in his movies, and he got it, time and time again: sexy chicks with big tits—yet his films weren’t pornos, and sometimes, they weren’t even erotic. His women weren’t put on pedestals; they were active and did things; sometimes bad things, true, but they were rarely boring.
As a cartoonist, I’ve drawn sexy girls in the past for my own amusement, and occasionally for publication, sometimes clothed, other times not. I’ve wanted to make an erotic comic book; I even wrote a script for a story about a stripper, but I never had the cojones to actually draw it and publish it.
Putting one’s sexual fantasies on display is not an easy thing, not even these days, where public exhibitionism is more common than ever thanks to the internet. I know the things that turn me on are not as unusual as I once might’ve thought (and none of your beeswax), but in my prose at least, I’ve loosened up somewhat in that category thanks to a writer friend whose stories have lots of steamy sex scenes. She and I have had long conversations on the subject. Still, I’m no E.L. James by any stretch.
Being attracted to sexual imagery and afraid of it at the same time has been the American way for generations, and it’s certainly been a long-running subplot in the history of film. The underground cinema of the 50s and 60s chafed at the restrictions against nudity and depictions of sexuality in general, and Meyer was one of the filmmakers at the vanguard.
I don’t blog about short films very often, outside of what I see at the Queens World Film Festival, anyway. This seems like a good opportunity to change that, especially since so many underground filmmakers are known for their short film material as much as their features.
There are lots of filmmakers I could talk about; for this post I’ve chosen five, all based in America. I may do a post like this again with other underground filmmakers; don’t know, but I’ll try to talk about shorts more often.
Meshes of the Afternoon. This was Vija’s suggestion: Maya Deren was a dancer and all-around creative person in addition to being an experimental filmmaker. In 1943, she and her husband Alexander Hammid got together to make this wordless, dream-like narrative—and it does resemble a narrative more than I had expected; I had thought it would be more impenetrable.
She stars in it, and given her thick, dark hair and the abstract nature of the film, it kinda resembles a Kate Bush video. The cinematography is good, and she and Hammid pull off a few clever camera tricks. For what it is, it’s not bad.
Deren is considered a major figure in the field of experimental film. She’s quoted at length in this piece about her.
Bridges-Go-Round. Shirley Clarke was also a dancer. She studied film at the City College of New York and was down with not only Deren, but other experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.
1959 was a very good year for her; in addition to her contributions to the Oscar-nominated short Skyscrapers, a collaboration with four other directors, including DA Pennebaker, she made this ode to New York’s bridges. The angles she shoots from, the double exposures, the color filters, make the bridges look like Spirograph designs (I can’t be the only one out there who remembers Spirograph, can I? Can I?). Here’s a more complete profile.
Pull My Daisy. This was Virginia‘a suggestion. Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac wrote and narrated this 1959 short directed by Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, featuring Allen Ginsberg and a bunch of other Beats (I presume) at a small party at some couple’s apartment. The people are definitely talking to each other, but you can’t hear what they say because Kerouac talks in a voice-over the whole time, making up some narrative about their conversation—I think.
I can’t say I’ve ever had much interest in the Beats, so while the contrast of Kerouac’s running commentary and the relatively mundane imagery feels like an overly literary MST3K episode, I zoned out after the first ten minutes once I realized this was going nowhere.
Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans was adapted into a Hollywood movie the next year, with Leslie Caron and George Peppard. Kerouac has been the subject of a number of docs, and movies have been made of On the Road and Big Sur. This Atlantic article wonders why Hollywood can’t make a decent film about the Beats.
Mothlight. Stan Brakhage was known for his abstract short films that really played around with the medium. He was also friends with Mekas and Deren, as well as the composer John Cage. For this 1963 short, he worked without a camera: moth wings, flower petals and blades of grass were pressed between strips of 16mm splicing tape and the finished product was contact printed. I like the strobe- like effect the film produces; it’s not the kind of effect you could easily reproduce with computers.
Scorpio Rising. Kenneth Anger is one of the first openly gay filmmakers in America; his films came under scrutiny in the past on suspicion of obscenity. You may have heard of the duology of books he wrote, Hollywood Babylon, about scandal within the Golden Age of the film industry. Here’s a piece on him from 2016.
In this short, images of biker gang members preparing to go out for the evening lead to a really wild party and a cross-country motorcycle race, all set to oldies music—though they probably weren’t old in 1964, when this was made.
The homoeroticism in this is evident almost from the beginning, and the party scene brings that subtext to the surface in a big way, but what struck me the most was the editing. He mixes in images of the Brando movie The Wild One with a Christ narrative and Naziism, and the Eisenstein-like cuts are sometimes no more than a split second, other times they’re longer. The effect is exhilarating and more than a little disturbing.
Many of these filmmakers were part of the film distribution collective co-founded by Jonas Mekas called the Film-Makers Cooperative, also known as the New American Cinema Group. Their archive of over 5000 titles are in a variety of formats, from 35mm to video and DVD.
Sure, a movie about a black guy who kills cops and gets away with it looks really good right now... and I can’t help but feel churlish for wanting to criticize a movie like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which even in its day hit like a bolt of lightning and set the stage for the blaxploitation films of the 70s. Still, it’s worth discussing as a film, independent of its wider cultural impact. I’ll do my best.
Chicago native Melvin van Peebles was working as a cable car grip man in San Francisco in the 50s when, in conversation with a passenger, he got the idea to make movies. A few fledgling attempts at some short films led to an unsuccessful attempt at breaking into Hollywood which led to an extended stay in Europe for awhile, meeting avant-garde filmmakers, making some connections, gaining experience.
In 1968 he made his first feature, The Story of a Three-Day Pass, in English and French, which led to a gig at Columbia Pictures, where he made the comedy Watermelon Man in 1970. MVP, however, craved greater creative control over his work.
Roger Corman is still alive and making movies! This Variety piece from last December discusses his latest projects and how he’s adapted to the technological changes to the industry—and even during the quarantine, he’s encouraged others to keep making movies.
To go into his career as an independent producer-writer-director, including discussing the many film superstars who started out with him when they were nobodies, would take way too long, so let’s focus on one aspect of it: his association with indie production company American International Pictures.
Founded by Samuel Arkoff & James Nicholson in 1954, their mandate was finding low-budget films that could be released as double features for the burgeoning teen market. Their first release was a Corman production, The Fast and the Furious. (Fun fact: Corman licensed that title to Universal in 2001, and when the long-running sports car franchise became a hit, Corman got a tiny piece of the profits.)
Corman had spent the 60s making adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories with Vincent Price and even spent a little time at Columbia Pictures. Then one day he became aware of motorcycles.
“Independent film” has become a loaded phrase these days, and it may mean one thing to you but something else to me. Is it simply a matter of working outside the Hollywood studio system? Maybe, but then why are so many smaller boutique studios owned by the majors still considered indies? Is it measured in budgets? If so, what’s the upper limit for a budget before a film no longer becomes “independent”? Is it an aesthetic, an attitude, a frame of mind? If so, who determines it? Is it a matter of distribution? Maybe, but these days it’s possible to see an indie at the local multiplex, at least in big cities.
I remember wrestling with similar issues during my years in the comics industry and I never found the answers there. With the movies, it’s probably even more knotty and tangled.
Ultimately, I can’t say I care one way or another beyond a certain point, but I think some filmmakers and some films are and will forever be associated with alternative cinema in America because of either their approach to filmmaking or their themes or their budget or any combination of the three—and it’s these films I’m gonna look at this month and possibly next month too.
For the sake of simplicity, I’m gonna focus on the 50s to the 70s; maybe the 80s if I feel like it. We have to begin somewhere, and for me, if we’re talking independent film, we have to begin with John Cassavetes.
In the old west, disputes were settled from the barrel of a gun, and wrongs done a man were never forgotten. Sure, it may take years, time that could be better spent thinking about it and realizing it’s probably not worth nursing a vendetta for quite so long and moving on with life instead—settling in a town with a peculiar yet ironically fitting name somewhere, getting a steady job punching cows, marrying an ordinary-looking girl but keeping the town whore’s address in your little black book, having a couple of kids and developing a drinking habit that’ll ensure you die before the age of forty, which was just about the average life expectancy of most people in the old west anyway—but you don’t care! Because a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, or at least what the screenplay tells him to do. Would you devote your life to seeing justice done, even if you may not have all the facts or may not be sure it even is justice?
