From Miami to Rancho Mirage

Hour of the Gun (1967)
directed by John Sturges
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid can ruin a man for other westerns, and Jason Robards hasn't faired too well since I first saw him digging up gold as Governor Lew Wallace while Pat polishes off the brandy in Santa Fe. Hour of the Gun feels like... times have changed. Whatever historical record Sturges wanted to correct with regards to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the underlying moral question here - "Is a badge all that separates a killer and a just man?" - is simplistic even by the standards of 1967.

As a point of comparison, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was released in 1962. Five years! James Garner always seemed like a TV star to me, which he was (the Josh Holloway of horse operas), but he's lived long enough to be regarded as a great actor. He isn't. He spends too much time alone as Wyatt Earp, riding his horse out of town while Doc Holliday takes a drink in a bar. They get together every so often and worry about Ike Clanton's gang of criminal cattle-rustlers, but I like Ike's ranch the best, where Robert Ryan growls with charisma and passes out six-shooters.

Or maybe I'm being too hard on everyone. Maybe it doesn't matter what kind of movie you make, as long as you can get United Artists to pay for you and Lucien Ballard to go watch the desert together in the state of Durango. When Wyatt isn't speaking, or Doc walks outside, that band of hills in the distance looks just like the Sandia Mountains, and the sunlight out there is something else.

Call Retiro 2046

Night Flight (1933)
directed by Clarence Brown
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I love stories about the early days of commercial aviation: daredevils put out to pasture after the first World War, strategists with eyes for an empire in the clouds.  In 1933, John Barrymore wouldn't want the role of a pilot.  He'd want to wear a suit, to keep his hands free for declamation.  Stuff some working stiff into the cockpit to fiddle with the throttle.  Ground is where the action is!

Thus, the hand-wringing board of directors of Trans-Andean European Air Mail anchors the episodic structure of Night Flight, instead of someone like the less "cerebral" Clark Gable, too busy jumping from a Douglas M-4 to his doom.  In twenty-four hours, a serum used to treat infantile paralysis must make it from a clinic in Santiago to the hospital in Rio de Janeiro.  To travel so far so quickly, pilots have to fly over the Andes and up the coast of Argentina in the dark.

Despite the South American setting, "European" is the tell, as it provides a nice excuse for internationally-minded Americanos like the Barrymore boys (John and Mister Potter) to fulminate at one another on a well-appointed soundstage.  That eventually leads to this sound advice about pilots, regrettably not shared in a whisper while the brothers stay up late in bunk beds: "Admire them if you want to.  Love them, even.  But never let them know it."

Clarence Brown achieves a remarkable sense of scale in two shots, one of a parachute, filmed from above, disappearing into clouds, and the second, filmed at sea level in the midst of a storm, of a small navigational flare that loses its way.  There's no death more romantic than an angry ocean, and so pilots go to glory while Riviére... gets a raise?  Calls Errol Flynn?

By 1939, Geoff Carter was a pilot first, manager second.  The first aviator we meet in this movie shows up on the runway minutes before takeoff, behind the wheel of an heiress's roadster.  He leaps from the car in his tux and steps right into a flight suit.  And what does the heiress say as she kisses him goodbye, when he chides her and tells her she won't be faithful?  "I don't trust zippers, they work too fast."  But zippers and assignments are out of his hands; he serves at the pleasures of people far away.