I Shot Jesse James (Samuel Fuller, 1949)

Samuel Fuller's directorial debut, made in 1949, 67 years after the actual events. Fuller saw Jesse James as a psychopathic killer who committed war crimes during the Civil War. It was about time someone killed him.

John Ireland and Tommy Noonan played brothers Bob and Charles Ford in the movie and were half-brothers in real life. A predecessor to The Long Riders (1980) in which Stacey and James Keach played Jesse and Frank James, David, Kieth and Robert Carradine played the Younger brothers and Randy and Dennis Quaid played the Miller brothers, whoever they were.

I saw I Shot Jesse James at the university when I was in high school, about 45 years ago. The scene that always stood out to me was the one where Jesse James is taking a bath in the barn. Bob Ford is standing behind him with a gun thinking about shooting him. Jesse James says, "Well, go ahead, Bob. What are you waiting for? There's m' back." Almost as if he has a sixth sense. Then he reaches back with a brush and says, "Here. Scrub it."

Available on the Criterion Channel. 

Rimfire (1949)

I was expecting something more like Scooby Doo. A Secret Service agent in 1869 travels to a small town looking for stolen government gold. The thieves would have some trouble disposing of it because the gold bars are marked as U.S. government property which means they'd have to be melted down. An itinerant gambler comes to town, is falsely accused of cheating, tried and executed. Then his ghost apparently starts killing people, shooting them somehow. And, at the scene of one such murder, a .45 caliber rimfire shell casing is left behind, which doesn't really make sense since he shot him with a revolver and there was no reason to reload right there on the spot, but what do I know.

With Jason Robards, Sr, long before his son's career took off and Victor Kilian who looked old even in 1949. He played Mary Hartman's grandfather on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and was the old guy who lost his wallet full of money on The Brady Bunch.

A disappointment even for an old western. Maybe it had an important lesson about capital punishment but they didn't dwell on it. No one was really concerned that they executed an innocent man even when they thought his ghost was killing people.

Free on Tubi.

Mame (1974)

I knew it was bad. I saw it once long ago. I don't go for musicals anyway. Lucille Ball was miscast.

Orphaned preteen Patrick (Kirby Furlong) goes to live with his colorful wealthy bohemian Auntie Mame (Lucille Ball), in 1920s New York. 

I  remember Furlong from old episodes of Adam-12, Canon, and  Emergency. I sat up last night and watched him in his last role in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, Off the Minnesota Strip, available on YouTube, about a girl who returns home after time as a runaway teenage prostitute. They left in the old commercials and local news updates. Peter Sellers had been admitted to the hospital.  

Kirby Furlong went on to become a professional musician and has worked on movie soundtracks. The poor actress who played Agnes Gooch (Jane Connell) later rented the movie at a video store. A helpful employee warned her it was terrible and suggested she get Auntie Mame (1958) instead. 

The critical reaction to the film made Lucille Ball swear off movies. She looked great in soft focus and years of heavy smoking gave her singing voice the quality Auntie Mame's might have had. 

I don't know about Mame, but if you want to watch Off the Minnesota Strip, a good second feature might be Strangers with Candy, either the TV show or the movie, a spoof of Afterschool Specials starring Amy Sedaris as a teen runaway who returns home in her 40's after years of crime, depravity and prison, to take up where she left off, going back to high school and coping with teen problems. With Steven Colbert, and the movie has Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Now that I think about it, if you want to make Mame a double feature, you might watch it with Harold and Maude.

J.D. Vance: The power of film criticism

Cinema, or at least movie criticism, has played a role in the presidential election. From Counterpunch.com:

+ According to one of Vance’s friends from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the tipping point that flipped Vance from a relatively sedate Never Trumper into one of the most fanatical MAGA-trons on the Hill was the hostile reaction to Ron Howard’s treacly film of Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. Jivani described the mocking reviews as “the last straw.” Blame it on Will Menaker: “Hillbilly Elegy: Mawmaw and Peepaw use hill people wisdom to help huge, fat pussy get an internship at The Heritage Foundation.”

+ Before JD Vance’s conversion to MAGA, this is what he had to say about Trump…

“Might be America’s Hitler”

“I’m a never Trump guy”

“Never liked him”

“Terrible candidate”

“Idiot if you voted for him”

“Might be a cynical asshole”

“Cultural heroin”

“Noxious and reprehensible”

+ Of course, none of these aspersions bother Trump. Vance has surrendered, bent the knee and kissed Trump’s feet. And Trump will parade him around like a captured warlord, until he tires of him and begins subjecting him to ridicule and humiliation.

Richard Simmons, R.I.P.

Richard Simmons has died, one day after his 76th birthday. Long ago, he wrote a memoir which included a chapter on his becoming an Italian movie star. He was terribly overweight at the time, living in Italy. He was hired to play a meatball in a series of Italian TV commercials, then, I don't think he mentioned the name of the movie, but he appeared in Felini Satyricon (1969). I've seen it a couple of times. I knew he was in it but didn't spot him. That's him in the movie in the photo above. I just looked for it on streaming video but it's unavailable.

Yellowstone

They're now showing Yellowstone, Kevin Costner's modern day western soap opera, free on Pluto. I watched some of it and it was awful, most of it either boring or absurdly violent. Maybe that sounds good to some people. It had a nude sex scene. 

According to the internet, and I found examples of this on YouTube, the family brands their ranch employees like cattle and they have a spot where they dump the bodies of people they murder. In an episode I watched, a female family member is being tortured for some reason. A male relative bursts in with a gun, shoots the men and rescues her. In the next scene, the men's naked corpses are hanging outside the ranch house. And the show is aimed at aging men who think this is quality television.

It's making me question my admiration for Breaking Bad.

According to Wikipedia, it was pitched as The Godfather in Montana, so they aren't supposed to be normal people. I should have looked into it before I tried watching.

A Fistful of Dollars remake in the works

I see they're doing a remake of A Fistful of Dollars, which was already remade as Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis. A Fistful of Dollars was itself an unauthorized remake of Yojimbo. Fans are demanding that Scott Eastwood be cast in his father's role.

I didn't like A Fistful of Dollars. There were too many things that didn't translate at all from the samurai film to a western. Maybe they'll correct that stuff in this remake.

A Fistful of Dollars never stated the year it took place. There was a grave marker that had the year 1873 etched into it and the revolvers they used were first manufactured in the 1870's, but the rifles all came from the 1890s. It's common in westerns to use 1890's model Winchester rifles as stand-ins for 1873 Winchesters, but the Mexican Army soldiers were using Mauser rifles from the 1890s, plus they wore uniforms that came from around 1910. I got most of this information from a website where gun nuts identify movie firearms.

If the original movie was set in 1910 and was made 60 years ago, they could make a sequel with the original cast set in 1970. A few of the actors are still alive. There's Clint Eastwood, of course, at 94. Marianne Koch is apparently still alive although she gave up acting, went to medical school and became a doctor. The little kid in it is still kicking. There are others who are still living, but the characters they played were killed in the first movie.  

Of course, there were also smugglers in A Fistful of Dollars buying guns in Mexico to sell to Indians in the United States which I don't think was an issue in the 20th century. So after sixty years, a sequel would likely be set in the 1930's.

Kevin Costner's Horizon which I haven't seen

I'm repeating myself, but it was three years ago that I mentioned this so I guess it's okay.

I may have misunderstood it, but I once read that Pudovkin made Storm Over Asia because he happened to be in Mongolia or someplace that looked like Mongolia. There were some reasonably good films of the late Roger Corman made only because he had a few days before he had to tear down a set. 

And yet there are independent low budget film people who insist that you shouldn't make a movie just to make a movie. You should only make movies about which you are deeply passionate. Well, tell that to poor Kevin Costner. Tell it to John Travolta who fought for years to make Battlefield Earth. 

After Waterworld and The Postman, Costner knew things like this could end in disaster. 

Psychologists used to think compulsive gamblers were unconsciously trying to punish themselves by losing all their money, but research has shown that they usually started out winning. The poor wretches keep trying to recreate their early success. It's a shame Cosner didn't make Waterworld first and then followed it up with Dances with Wolves. He'd be about $38 million richer.

I am reminded of what someone said about Russ Meyer. You'd watch his movies and think that if he just had some money to work with he'd have been a great filmmaker.

If Costner had made an obviously cheap but overlong western, didn't work too hard at it and pleaded poverty---that it would have been better but he had to pay for it all himself---people would have...well, I don't know what people would have done, but he would have saved money.

He should have made thirty-eight $1 million movies instead of blowing the whole thing on one film.

Many years ago, the pioneering zero-budget filmmaker Jon Jost spoke at the University of Oregon. They had shown his movies over a number of weeks and he was there for the final film. The student group that arranged it quickly pulled together some more money and Jost did a filmmaking seminar and a filmmaking workshop, but no one was sure which was which. I was working so I went to the shorter one. We were crowded into a small room. One of the older students ran to 7 Eleven to get beer.

This was the mid-'80s and Jost said that if he were just starting out in film, he'd film on Video 8. This was long before digital video or even Hi8. He said to shoot everything in sequence, do all the editing in camera and when you're done, push eject and there's your finished movie, a $10 video cassette. One film student muttered something about a tape-to-film transfer. Jost said, no just show it on video. The film students were aghast at the idea of making a movie that couldn't be shown in a theater.

If it's your first movie, it won't be any good anyway, Jost assured them.

"It won't be any good anyway." I've lived by those words ever since.

The Perfect Hand (2023)

I read a review of this on Once Upon a Time in a Western website. It sounded promising and it was. A low budget western. I don't think there was ever more than one horse on screen at a time, so it may have been the same one. I wasn't paying attention to the animal. Writer/director/star Michael Fredianelli has 51 other writing credits on IMDb which is probably why this came out so well. A complex, coherent plot.

In no particular order, it has a treasure map, a magician/preacher/conman, serial killers hiding their victims in barns, incest, a man having his hand broken leaving him disabled, unable to shoot or write poetry, a duel where two guys try to outdraw each other, murderous henchmen, a suicide, corporal punishment, a gunfight with an adolescent.

An hour and 53 minutes.

Free on Tubi.