Flashback: Woody Strode

   I walked through the living room one night in February while my colleague Ms. Applebaum was watching TCM. The movie she had on was "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", John Ford's last great western, released in 1962. The scene I happened to catch was the one where John Wayne, drunk and despondent, sets fire to his house, apparently planning to burn up with it. His hired hand, played by Woody Strode, sees the flames, races into the house, and runs out again, carrying Wayne over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes. 
    Think about that. Here's a guy who's running - not stepping or stumbling or staggering, but running - while toting John Wayne. I can't think of any other actor who ever did that. I'm not sure any other actor could. 
    Strode's athleticism was no fluke. He'd played professional football in the U.S. and Canada, and done some professional wrestling between early acting jobs. With a tall, lean, muscular frame and a shaved head that was distinctive at the time, he was physically imposing and a formidable presence on the screen. 
    Like most acting careers, Strode's was a product of luck and timing. Early on, there were escapist B pictures with titles like "Jungle Man-Eater" and "Bride of the Gorilla", along with more upscale productions like "Demetrius and the Gladiators", "The Ten Commandments" and "Pork Chop Hill". (If he'd come along a decade or two later, in the age of blaxploitation or commando-style action movies, he might've become a major star, but that wasn't the case.)
    The parts and the movies gradually got better - at least some of them did - and in 1960, he landed two of his most significant roles: the title character in Ford's "Sergeant Rutledge" and Draba, the gladiator who fights Kirk Douglas in the arena in "Spartacus". 
    A key scene in "Spartacus" shows what he could do when he got a real character to play and a decent script. Spartacus, who's new to the gladiator school, approaches Strode's character and asks him his name, just to get acquainted. Strode's response is matter-of-fact. "You don't want to know my name. I don't want to know your name. Gladiators don't make friends. If we're ever matched in the arena together, I have to kill you." Strode doesn't raise his voice when he says this. It's not a challenge or a threat, it's a simply stated matter of life and death, and Strode's unaffected delivery makes it convincing. 
    Strode rarely played leads, and his characters are realists who want to survive, which means they're deferential to the prejudice and stratification of the prevailing society. It's not always explicit, but it's always there, and, again, it's a matter of timing. What's interesting is to watch how he plays that. He was a black actor playing black characters not long removed from a time when blacks in the real world were being lynched and the standard role for a black supporting player in Hollywood was bug-eyed comic relief. Strode did not do bug-eyed comic relief. His characters, like the gladiator in "Spartacus", tend to be soft-spoken and self-contained. They concede as much as they have to, but no more. There's an inherent, defiant dignity about his work, even in roles and movies that don't amount to very much. 
    In "The Professionals", one of his best roles and one of his best films, Strode plays a bounty hunter who joins Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan on a dangerous mission in Mexico around the time of Pancho Villa. "Anybody object to working with a negro?" their employer (Ralph Bellamy) asks. Marvin dismisses the question with a withering look and says, "What's the job?" Strode doesn't even acknowledge the question. He doesn't say anything at all. 
    Sidney Poitier was the first black actor to make the A list, the first African-American star who could reliably carry a mainstream film at the box office. Strode's career and Poitier's coincided, but Strode was older and had a different set of skills. If Strode's range as an actor was more limited than Poitier's, so were his opportunities. Timing yet again. But try to imagine Sidney Poitier, or anybody else, running out of a burning building lugging a 200-pound John Wayne and making it look as easy as a trip to the corner store. Only one guy could do that. Woody Strode.

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN  (1944)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Delmer Daves
    Robert Hutton, Dane Clark, Joan Leslie,
    Bette Davis, John Garfield, Janis Paige
A G.I. wounded in the Pacific spends a few days in Hollywood before shipping out again and meets the girl of his dreams in actress Joan Leslie. The story's predictably thin, but it's enough to string together all kinds of musical numbers and movie-star cameos. Bette Davis and John Garfield, who set up and ran the real Hollywood Canteen, preside over the movie one, too, and most of the Warner Brothers contract players appear. Favorite bit: Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet slipping into character to intimidate a Marine sergeant who's been manhandling Patty Andrews on the dance floor. 

The Assignment (2016)

THE ASSIGNMENT  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Walter Hill
    Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Terry Chen,
    Tony Shalhoub, Caitlin Gerard, Anthony LaPaglia
This is like a Sam Fuller movie for the 21st century, a twisted pulp thriller starring Michelle Rodriguez as a tough guy/hit man named Frank Kitchen. Frank has to deal with some dangerous people in his line of work - he's used to that - but things really turn nasty when he bumps off the worthless brother of a prominent plastic surgeon played by Sigourney Weaver. It seems the doc was quite attached to her brother, and she hires her own team of thugs to jump Frank and whisk him away to an off-the-grid operating room, where some unplanned, unscheduled and emphatically unwanted gender-reassignment surgery takes place. That leaves Frank still plenty tough (and plenty pissed off), but no longer a guy, and somebody's going to pay for that. A lot of people. Rodriguez is perfectly cast as the surly, hard-boiled killer. There's even a trace of Brando in her delivery. Besides which, she's fearless: You'd have to be to even attempt something like this. Weaver's as cold as ice in the Arctic, calmly telling her story from behind the locked doors of a mental institution, where she spends her days reading Shakespeare and Poe while confined to a straightjacket. Hill's script and direction come at you like a slug from a .45, Frank Kitchen's weapon of choice, and a reminder that while Sam Fuller's no longer around to make deranged movies like this, we can still thank the cinema gods that Walter Hill is.

Animal House (1978)

ANIMAL HOUSE  (1978)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Landis
    John Belushi, Tom Hulce, Stephen Furst, 
    Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert, Bruce McGill,
    John Vernon, Karen Allen, Donald Sutherland,
    Verna Bloom, James Widdoes, Mark Metcalf
    Kevin Bacon, Douglas Kenney, Cesare Danova,
    Mary Louise Weller, Sarah Holcomb, Martha Smith
"Christ. Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the fuckin' Peace Corps." National Lampoon's satire on early-'60s college life, in which the merrily debauched members of a lowlife fraternity declare total war on sobriety, social conventions, academic standards, anybody in authority and much of civilization as we know it. The original slob comedy, and as a celebration of all-out anarchy, a throwback to the Marx Brothers. Belushi at his most crazed.

Stephen Furst

(1954-2017)

Dillinger Is Dead (1969)

DILLINGER IS DEAD  (1969)  ¢ ¢
    D: Marco Ferreri
    Michel Piccoli, Annie Girardot, Anita Pallenberg 
A man who designs gas masks for a living comes home to the house he shares with two women. He cooks dinner, watches a little TV, listens to some awful music and finds a gun in a closet, wrapped in a newspaper from the time of John Dillinger's death. That's about as much of a plot as there is here. It's one of those late-'60s experiments that seems to operate on the principle that nothing has to make sense as long as it ends up on the screen. There's a nice scene where Michel Piccoli pours honey down Annie Girardot's bare back, but most of the film is just this guy cooking, watching home movies, playing with his gun and walking around the house in his boxer shorts. Dillinger, being dead, never saw any of it. You could argue he didn't miss much.

Anita Pallenberg

(1942-2017)

F For Fake (1974)

F FOR FAKE  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Orson Welles
Layers and layers of fakery in the art world, unraveled and spun into more fakery by Orson Welles. Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Oja Kodar (Welles' mistress) and Welles himself are among those involved, but the movie keeps circling back to a forger named Elmyr de Hory, who might be the most gifted and prodigious fake of them all. How much is true? Hell, I don't know. Welles was clearly amused, though. It's his last completed feature-length film, and a precursor in some ways to the Banksy documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop". Watch it on a double feature with Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns". That could be fun. 

The Witch (2015)

THE WITCH  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Eggers
    Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie,
    Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson
This movie takes place around 1630 in New England, where a righteously stubborn man named William is being expelled from his Puritan community, together with his wife and family. The dispute has something to do with religion, but whether they're being kicked out for being too fanatical, or not fanatical enough, is hard to say. What it means is that they're cut off and out on their own in the wilderness, where their assets are few and their liabilities include heavy doses of guilt, escalating bouts of hysteria, and the sad, inescapable fact that William has no skill at all when it comes to hunting and farming, which means that come winter, they're probably going to starve. Then it gets creepy. The movie's great on atmosphere. The Lord's punishing grace may be shining down on these people, but the sun is not. The language is archaic. Everything looks authentically 17th-century. It's moody and unsettling as long as the nature of the terror afflicting the family remains mysterious, suggesting that the real evil out to destroy them isn't looming in the dark or in the woods, but in themselves. It loses something at the end, when it becomes more literal. Horror movies can be more horrifying sometimes when they don't try too hard to explain themselves. 

Fandango (1985)

FANDANGO  (1985)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Kevin Reynolds
    Kevin Costner, Judd Nelson, Sam Robards,
    Chuck Bush, Suzy Amis, Glenne Headly
A wild-assed, bittersweet road movie about five college buddies who duck out of their graduation party to take a final revealing journey together before the adult world catches up to them. The year is 1971. Vietnam looms over everything. One of the characters is an ROTC cadet about to go on active duty. Two others have just gotten their draft notices. One's a divinity student, and one's about to get married. This is their last waltz and they know it, two days of reckless whims, desperate joy and marathon beer drinking before they move on, their time together probably more or less over. It's a rambunctious celebration of youth, with a wistful underlying sense of its transitory nature, and an impressive early collaboration between Costner and Reynolds, who would team up later (with bigger budgets but not always better results) on "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and "Waterworld". Glenne Headly does an amusing bit as a woman who has an unusual problem getting her laundry done. 

Glenne Headly

(1955-2017)

A Man Called Ove (2015)

A MAN CALLED OVE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Hannes Holm
    Rolf Lassgård, Bahar Pars, Ida Engvall, Filip Berg
    Tobias Almborg, Fredrik Evers, Simon Edenroth
This is like a Swedish variation on the Bill Murray movie "St. Vincent", about a crotchety old man, the self-appointed enforcer of all the rules and regulations in his apartment complex. Despondent after the death of his wife, he tries repeatedly to commit suicide, and he's such a grumpy bastard, you kind of wish he'd succeed. He doesn't, or as one of his neighbors puts it, he's crap when it comes to dying. Something always gets in the way. He's also more complicated than he first appears, and the movie very gradually lets you in on that. Done wrong, this could be way too sweet. It's a crowd pleaser, complete with a couple of cute kids and a stray cat and eventually a baby, but neither the film nor Rolf Lassgård's grudging performance gives anything away. There's a deadpan stoicism to the humor that's distinctly Scandinavian, and where else but in a Swedish movie would two neighbors engage in a bitter dispute that prevents them from speaking for years, over the relative merits of a Volvo and a SAAB?

Habeas Corpus (1928)

HABEAS CORPUS  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: James Parrott, Leo McCarey
    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Richard Carle, Charlie Rogers
Laurel and Hardy play grave robbers. Bwa-ha-ha.

Double Whoopee (1929)

DOUBLE WHOOPEE  (1929)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lewis R. Foster
    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jean Harlow,
    Hans Joby, Charley Rogers, Charlie Hall
Stan and Ollie hire on as doormen at a posh hotel. The guests include a prince modeled on Erich von Stroheim and a hot blonde played by 18-year-old Jean Harlow. See if you can guess what happens when some ink gets into a woman's makeup kit, or Jean's skirt gets caught in a car door, or the prince gets too close to an elevator shaft. 

Do Detectives Think? (1927)

DO DETECTIVES THINK?  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fred Guiol
    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson,
    Viola Richard, Noah Young, Frank Brownlee
Not when they're played by Laurel and Hardy.

Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune (2010)

PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE  (2010)
    D: Kenneth Bowser                                              ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
A documentary about '60s protest singer Phil Ochs, whose catchy, satirical tunes were more pointedly political than Bob Dylan's, and just about as good. Ochs idolized Dylan, who (according to the movie) treated him badly. Ochs himself was funny, ambitious, egotistical, and as time went on, subject to escalating bouts of manic depression. He wrote and recorded some of the best topical music of his time, songs that became anthems in the struggle to end the Vietnam War, but the mass acclaim that Dylan achieved, and Ochs desperately craved, eluded him. In 1976, at age 35, he hanged himself. What Ochs might've done with another 35 years is hard to say. He was an adventurous and uncompromising artist, and musically his potential was unlimited. At the same time, there's a sense that by the time he checked out, his work was done. Toward the end, he was increasingly lost and out of control. The songs had stopped coming. Booze and the demons had won. And anyway, by then the war was over.

A Wedding (1978)

A WEDDING  (1978)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Altman
    Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Geraldine Chaplin,
    Mia Farrow, Amy Stryker, Desi Arnaz Jr., 
    Dina Merrill, Vittorio Gassman, Lauren Hutton,
    John Considine, Lillian Gish, John Cromwell, 
    Pat McCormick, Howard Duff, Pam Dawber,
    Nina Van Pallandt, Dennis Christopher, Viveca Lindfors,
    Peggy Ann Garner, Bert Remsen, Dennis Franz
This isn't Robert Altman's best movie, but it might be his most stereotypical: a comic ensemble piece in which 48 characters mill about and bump into each other at an upscale wedding reception. That's a few more characters than even an Altman movie can reasonably accommodate, so what you get is mostly a collection of cameos. Some of these are eccentric, and sometimes there's not much there. Carol Burnett and Paul Dooley are the bride's parents. Nina Van Pallandt and Vittorio Gassman are the parents of the groom. Mia Farrow's the bride's weird sister (and, boy, is she weird). Geraldine Chaplin's the compulsively organized wedding planner. John Cromwell plays a doddering bishop. Lillian Gish is the family matriarch, who expires just as the party's getting started and spends the rest of the film as a corpse. Nobody's entirely likeable, and the whole enterprise plays out on the principle that weddings, as the most emotionally charged and rigorously stage-managed social events on earth, are disasters waiting to happen. The effect, watching it, is like being a bystander at a big formal family bash, where you don't really know anybody and don't really want to, but the booze is free and the food is good and maybe somebody's sharing a joint somewhere, so you hang around just to see what funny little humiliating incident you'll be spying on next. Did I mention that this is Altman at his most cynical? That, too.

Dina Merrill

(1923-2017)