Best Part of the Day
Sundown (1941)
directed by Henry Hathaway
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
I can only imagine what it was like to see a 21-year old Gene Tierney at the head of a column of Kenyan soldiers marching towards Acoma Pueblo seventy years ago. I never really thought the movies added much to what one comes across in person in New Mexico, but obviously I hadn't seen the right movies. I hadn't seen Gene Tierney with an afternoon thundercloud behind her, for one.
They aren't really Kenyan soldiers, any more than Bruce Cabot - born down the road in Carlsbad - is a British officer. As best I can tell, Henry Hathaway had an "African village" - palm trees, thatched homesteads, zebra skin lounge chairs - constructed along one of the outcroppings that looks towards Sky City. On one level, the effort to repopulate the pueblo with a second marginalized culture is insulting, but from a moviemaking perspective - as a way of recasting the physical world - the result is breathtaking.
The cynical older officer calls it "miles and miles of nothing to do," but we know better than that. An Italian prisoner of war who says he reads and thinks about things, and looks beyond whatever is right in front of him, spins a frightful tale of a German agenda in Africa. He wants to warn the British about what the Third Reich could do if they controlled the continent (thereby foreshadowing the events of the film). The Italian is a gentle man who likes to cook and be left with his thoughts.
And that's the highlight, from a geopolitical standpoint. Events move underground at the end of the movie, and most of the magic falls away. But first it's a bare and beleaguered encampment in the middle of one of the most beautiful places on earth. At night, while the officers drink gin and talk in a melancholy way about "sundown," Tierney walks in out of the darkness.
She's the half-English (of course) daughter of an Arab trader, dressed like no trader dressed in the course of history. She wants to see her father's house, abandoned since his death, and there it is: a physical construction, no backlot set, no ruin. Cabot (twice Tierney's age) eventually marries her in London (of course), in a bombed-out cathedral, where they listen to someone preach about Africa's "salvation." It feels at least a movie away.
directed by Henry Hathaway
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
I can only imagine what it was like to see a 21-year old Gene Tierney at the head of a column of Kenyan soldiers marching towards Acoma Pueblo seventy years ago. I never really thought the movies added much to what one comes across in person in New Mexico, but obviously I hadn't seen the right movies. I hadn't seen Gene Tierney with an afternoon thundercloud behind her, for one.
They aren't really Kenyan soldiers, any more than Bruce Cabot - born down the road in Carlsbad - is a British officer. As best I can tell, Henry Hathaway had an "African village" - palm trees, thatched homesteads, zebra skin lounge chairs - constructed along one of the outcroppings that looks towards Sky City. On one level, the effort to repopulate the pueblo with a second marginalized culture is insulting, but from a moviemaking perspective - as a way of recasting the physical world - the result is breathtaking.
The cynical older officer calls it "miles and miles of nothing to do," but we know better than that. An Italian prisoner of war who says he reads and thinks about things, and looks beyond whatever is right in front of him, spins a frightful tale of a German agenda in Africa. He wants to warn the British about what the Third Reich could do if they controlled the continent (thereby foreshadowing the events of the film). The Italian is a gentle man who likes to cook and be left with his thoughts.
And that's the highlight, from a geopolitical standpoint. Events move underground at the end of the movie, and most of the magic falls away. But first it's a bare and beleaguered encampment in the middle of one of the most beautiful places on earth. At night, while the officers drink gin and talk in a melancholy way about "sundown," Tierney walks in out of the darkness.
She's the half-English (of course) daughter of an Arab trader, dressed like no trader dressed in the course of history. She wants to see her father's house, abandoned since his death, and there it is: a physical construction, no backlot set, no ruin. Cabot (twice Tierney's age) eventually marries her in London (of course), in a bombed-out cathedral, where they listen to someone preach about Africa's "salvation." It feels at least a movie away.
posted by NPK at 2:13 PM
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