There. Save all this.
Mr. Von Ellstein! Would you come here please.
- You call that directing? - That is what I've been calling it for 32 years.
Why, there are values and dimensions in that scene you haven't begun to hit.
Perhaps they are not the values and dimensions I wish to hit.
I could make this scene a climax.
I could make every scene in this picture a climax.
If I did, I would be a bad director, and I like to think of my self as one of the best.
A picture all climaxes is like a necklace without a string... it falls apart.
Look, when I want a lecture on the aesthetics of motion pictures, I'll ask for it.
And it won't be on my time...
and a cover-up for a shallow and inept interpretation of a great scene.
To be a director, you must have imagination.
Whose imagination, Mr. Shields? Yours or mine?
You know what you must do, Mr. Shields,
so that you will have it exactly as you want it?
You must direct this picture yourself.
To direct a picture,
a man needs humility.
Do you have humility, Mr. Shields?
"Film is a disease, " Frank Capra said.
When it infects your bloodstream,
it takes over as the number-one hormone.
It plays la go to your psyche---------------.
As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film.
Very nice!
I guess I have to say that when I was growing up in the '40s and '50s,
I spent a lot of time in movie theaters.
I became obsessed with movies.
At that time there was nothing really available that I could find written on film...
except one book...
sort of my first film book, although I couldn't afford to buy it...
and couldn't find a copy except the only one available from the New York Public Library.
I borrowed it from the library repeatedly.
It's called A Pictorial History of the Movies by Deems Taylor,
and it was a pictorial history of the movies in black-and-white stills,
year by year up to 1949.
The book cast as pell on me...
'cause back then I hadn't seen many of the films shown in the book,
so all I had at my disposal to experience these films were these black-and-white stills.
I'd fantasize about them and they would play into my dreams.
I was so tempted to steal some of these pictures from the book-- a terrible urge.
After all, it's a book from the public library.
Well, I confess-- once or twice I did give in to that urge.
I remember quite clearly-- it was 1946 and I was four years old.
My mother took me to see King Vidor's Duel In The Sun.
I was fanatical about westerns.
My father usually took me to see them, but this time my mother took me.
It had been condemned by the Church...
Lust in the Dust, they dubbed it.
So she used me as an excuse to see it herself, obviously.
From the opening titles alone, I was mesmerized.
Bright blasts of deliriously vibrant color, '
the gun shots, ' the savage intensity of themusic, '
the burning sun, '
the overt sexuality.
Jennifer Jones was a half-breed servant girl...
and Gregory Peck was the villain,
a ruthless rancher'son who seduced her.
For a child it was a puzzle.
I mean, how could the heroine fall for the villain?
It was all quite overpowering. Frightening, too.
The finalduelin thesun,
- whereJenniferJones shoots Gregory Peck,
was too intense for this four year old.
Icoveredmy eyes throughmostofit.
You double-crossin'bobcat!
A flawed film, but nevertheless...
the hallucinatory quality of the imagery has never weakened forme over the years.
It seemed that the two protagonists could only consummate their passion...
by killing each other.
I guess that does it.
Pearl.
Hey, Pearl!
I didn't know it, but in 1946 Hollywood had reached a zenith.
Two decades later, when I embraced filmmaking,
the studio system had collapsed and was taken over by giant corporations.
It was during the '50s that my passion for films grew and became a vocation.
The movies were entering a new era...
the era of The Searchers and The Girl Can't Help It;
of east of eden and Blackboard Jungle;
of Bigger Than Life and Vertigo.
My passion was fueled by all sorts of famous and infamous films,
not necessarily the culturally correct ones.
Films you may never have heard of.
The Naked Kiss;
Murder by Contract;
Don't you get restless?
If I get restless, I exercise.
My girl lives in Cleveland.
- Well, this is not Cleveland. - I don't like pigs.
I do.
Human nature.
The Red House.
This is the way it could always be, Jeannie.
We don't need anybody else.
Ain't you Zeke Ward's kid?
Aaaaah!
Aaah! Mommy! Mommy!
Out on the lawn, Mommy! There it is! There it is!
John!
Mommy!
Directors that are sadly forgotten now...
Allan Dwan, Samuel Fuller,
Phil Karlson, Ida Lupino,
Delmer Daves, Andre De Toth,
Joseph H. Lewis, Irving Lerner.
Over the years I've discovered many an obscured films,
and sometimes they were more inspirational...
than the prestigious films that were receiving all the attention at the time.
But I can only talk to you about what has moved me or intrigued me.
I can't really be objective here.
This is like an imaginary museum,
and we just can't enter every room, unfortunately, because we just don't have the time.
So I'm talking to you about some of the films that colored my dreams,
that changed my perceptions and even my life, in some cases, '
films that prompted me, for better or for worse, to become a filmmaker myself.
As early as I can remember,
the key issue for me was: What did it take to be a filmmaker in Hollywood?
Even today I still wonder: What does it take to be a professional,
or maybe even an artist, in Hollywood?
How do you survive the constant tug-of-war...
between personal expression and commercial imperatives?
What is the price you pay to work in Hollywood?
Do you end up with a split personality?
Do you make one for them, one for yourself?
How about making Ants In Your Pants in 1941?
- You can have Bob Hope, Mary Martin. - Maybe Bing Crosby.
- The Abbott Dancers. - Maybe Jack Benny and Rochester.
- A big-name band. - What? Oh, no.
I want to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?
From the beginning I saw film as ameans ofself-expression.
I was mostly interested in the directors,
especially the ones who circumvented the system to get their visions onto the screen.
This the sort of thing you had in mind?
- Course they need freshening up. They been hanging quite a while. - I can't get into this.
Sometimes it seemed everything conspired to prevent them from achieving personal expression.
This... This may be a problem, unless you get a thinner man.
For there are rules, many rules, in Hollywood's power game.
Shoulder pads. Straighten it right out.
This'll give you the effect. It'll be good.
A poetor a painter can be aloner,
but the American film director has to be, first and foremost, a team player.
Most important was the collaboration between the director and the producer.
In The Bad And The Beautiful, possibly the best drama about Hollywood's creative battles,
Kirk Douglas plays the producer...
- What if... - Suppose we...
and Barry Sullivan the director.
They both dream of making great films,
but for their first project they have been assigned alow-budget thriller called...
The Doom of the Catmen.
Put five men dressed like cats on the screen, what do they look like?
Like five men dressed like cats.
When an audience pays to see a picture like this, what do they pay for?
To get the pants scared off'em.
And what scares the human race more than any other single thing?
- The dark! - Of course. And why?
Because the dark has a life of its own.
In the dark, all sorts of things come alive.
Suppose we never do show the cat men. Is that what you're thinking?
- Exactly. - No cat men!
Movies are a medium based on consensus.
In the old days you dealt with moguls and major studios.
Today you have executives and giant corporations instead.
But one iron rule remains true.'
every decision is shaped by the money men's perception of what the audience wants.
I've told you a hundred times, I don't want to win awards.
Give me pictures that end with a kiss and black ink in the books.
I'll make this picture, Harry, or I'll quit.
It was a time...
when the producer was the key figure.
I found it and licked it. I wanna produce it so much, I can taste it.
He chose the director... He cast the director...
that he thought would be right for the material,
which he had directed... acquired a novel, a play, an original, whatever...
and then given the green light.
Then he would cast the director.
That was pretty much the system when I came into the business.
Duel In The Sun is a fascinating example.
Even an old master like King Vidor, who practically put Hollywood on the map,
was not necessarily calling the shots.
The major creative force on the film was the producer, David O. Selznick,
an obsessive perfectionist who wanted to top his greatest achievement,
Gone With The Wind.
The result was a kind of grandiose quality...
that was a bit over the top,
but to David it was great fun...
to exaggerate, to heighten.
Hisall-encompassing enthusiasm galvanized everybody.
That energy, '
that sense of play fulness,
of rascality...
that was Selznick.
About 1:00 or2:00 in the morning,
when the actors had to go to sleep,
David would settle down and rewrite the script...
and we'd get different pages the next morning.
That didn't always set too well with the directors, but it was David's picture.
It was his baby.
King Vidor was directing,
but David was overcome by his own enthusiasm at times...
and began more and more to direct over King's shoulder.
And that created considerable tension on the set,
finally leading to the moment when King stood up...
and told David he knew what he could do with the picture and walked off.
David's enthusiasm overwhelmed him...
and William Dieterle finished the picture.
This is King Vidor. Put him on.
- Have you made up your mind? - I've made up my mind, Arthur.
Get yourself another boy. I'm a director, not a butcher.
Somehow Vidor survived as an on-again/off-again team player.
He even worked again later with Selznick in television.
Vidor was probably the most resilient of the film pioneers,
one of the few who were able, time and again, to convince the moguls...
to let him experiment with the medium.
Throughout his career he succeeded in alternating studio assignments...
pictures like The Champ and Stella Dallas...
with personal projects like Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread...
or this most unusual film.'
MGM's Irving Thalberg agreed to finance it...
because Vidor had given the studio its greatest success of the silent era-- The Big Parade.
Sometimes Vidor was even willing to mortgage his house or gamble his own salary.
Somehow he found a way to do one fort he studios, one for himself.
Now, remember, the Hollywood of the classical era-- the '30sand '40s...
was based on a powerful, vertically integrated industry.
The studios, particularly the fiv emajors...
MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, RKO and Fox...
controlled everyphase of the process.'
production, distribution, even exhibition,
as they owned their own chains of theaters worldwide.
To produce 50 pictures a year,
each studio held its stars, writers, directors, producers...
and an army of skilled technicians...
underlong-term contracts.
They even cultivated a recognizable style, or a look, in their films.
MGM was more of a dream world...
where everything was idealized...
and somewhat sentimentalized.
That came, I think, from L.B. Mayer,
what he thought was classy.
And I think probably Fox leaned more towards,
uh, uh--
Well, I wouldn't exactly say gritty realism,
because they made Betty Grable musicals and ice skating pictures...
and all kinds of pictures.
But I think the things that Zanuck is remembered for...
are pictures with a social conscience...
and done with a degree of, of realism...
that probably would not be characteristic of MGM.
In those days I could look at the picture and ife verything was in white silk... MGM.
I could look at the picture...
if it's a Fred Astaire-- RKO.
Subsequently, MGM.
Paramount was a little bit all over the place.
They did not have to...
They did have their own handwriting,
with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope...
or with Martin and Lewis and...
We knew exactly...
We went to the same restaurants. We had our own circle.
Now, if you worked at MGM, you had to adjust to the MGM style.
And it was quite different from the WarnerBrothers or Paramounts tyle.
If they did not conform to the studio look, the mavericks were reigned in.
Some, like Erich von Stroheim, simply refused to be harnessed,
and he paid a heavy price.
Buster Keaton-- very free wheeling...
agonized when MGM put him under the yoke of their supervising producers.
His genius didn't survive the treatment.
On the other hand, those who could work comfortably within the system, they thrived.
They came to define their studios'style.
Clarence Brown at MGM, '
Henry KingatFox, '
Raoul Walsh at Warner Brothers, '
they were Hollywoodpros whorose from theranks.
Most of their lengthy careers were spent under one roof.
Take Michael Curtiz, for example, here directing The Charge of the Light Brigade.
This guy made no less than 85 films for Warner Brothers,
and Casablanca was his 63rd.
That's an average of three features a year over a period of 28 years.
Three features a year. Think of the incredible opportunities they were given...
to learn their trade and become a true professional.
There were also talents who needed the discipline of thes ystem to blossom.
A perfect example was Vincente Minnelli.
He knew and often acknowledged that the producer/director dynamic...
was crucial to the quality and success of a picture.
An avant-garde Broadway choreographer,
he was lured to Hollywood by producer Arthur Freed...
and became MGM's resident artist for 30years,
thanks to sympathetic producers like Freedand, later, John Houseman.
Minnelli had all of the studio's resources at his disposal.
The cameras were his brushes and the sound stage shis canvas.
All that he hated and loved about Hollywood was distilled in the harsh story...
of The Bad and the Beautiful--
the ambition, the power, the opportunism and the betrayal.
No one was spared, not even the director.
Here Barry Sullivan hears from his ruthless partner...
what has become of their dream project.
What happened? Didn't he go for Gaucho?
Go for him? He had a hemorrhage. He... Shh.
The first time a star ever said he'd shine...
Kirk Douglas'character was loosely based on several actual producers,
among them David Selznick.
The Faraway Mountain's gonna be done just the way we want it.
A million-dollar budget; a location in Veracruz; Von ellstein to direct.
Uh, Gaucho, Wendy for the girl.
Ants Chapman formy cameraman.
Von ellstein to direct?
You're taken care of. It won't be a separate panel, but your name'll be on screen.
Assistant to the producer.
- Thanks. - You know this story better than anyone else.
It's your baby. I want you with me on the set all the time.
You don't have to talk to Von ellstein.
- Any ideas you have, I'll tell him. - Thanks again.
- Von ellstein to direct. - You always said he was the best in the business.
Sure he is.
Fred, I'd rather hurt you now than kill you off forever.
You'rejust not ready to direct a million-dollar picture.
But you're ready to produce a million-dollar picture.
With Von ellstein I am.
Now, to survive, to master the creative process,
each filmmaker had to develop his own strategy.
Some, like Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille or Alfred Hitchcock,
carved a niche for themselves...
by excelling in a certain type of story and being identified with it.
Their very name became a box office draw.
A few even achieved Capra's dream...
and secured their name above the title.
They had wonderful directors at MGM, but you never heard their name.
But you heard about me.
I was the enemy of the major studio.
I believed in one man, one film.
I believed one man should make the film,
and I believed the director should be that one man.
One man should do it-- I didn't give a damn who.
But I thought the director had the most to do with it.
I just couldn't--
I just couldn't accept art as a committee.
I could only accept art as an extension of an individual.
If you haven't got the story, you haven't got anything.
Raoul Walsh used to say this, and this is another cardinal rule.
The American filmmaker has always been more interested in creating fiction...
than revealing reality.
Early on the documentary form was discarded...
or relegated to a marginal status.
For better or worse, the Hollywood director is an entertainer.
He's in the business oftelling stories.
He's therefore saddled with conventions and stereotypes,
formulas and cliches,
and all these limitations were codified in specific genres.
This was the very foundation of the studio system.
Audiences loved genre pictures,
and the oldmasters never seemed reluctant to supply them.
When John Ford rose in the middle of a tempestuous meeting...
at the Directors Guildof America in 1950 and introduced himself, this is what he said.'
"My name is John Ford, and I make westerns."
He was not referring to his more honored pictures, such as The Informer...
or The Grapes of Wrath or How Green Was My Valley or The QuietMan.
The westerns were what he was most proud of.
Or so he may have wanted us to believe.
Eventually filmgenres would serve to organize assembly line production.
Each studio made so many westerns, so many musicals,
so many gangster films, and so forth.
Edwin S. Porter's THe Great Train Robbery.
This was one of the first attempts at scripting a story,
and fittingly it was also a western.
The first master story teller of theA mericanscreen was D. W. Griffith.
His sensibility was steeped inaliterary tradition,
that of Dickens and Tolstoy, Frank Norrisand Walt Whitman.
Yet, while borrowing from 19th-centuryliterature,
Griffith was forging the new art of the 20th century.
He explored the emotional impact of film,
and before the outbreak of World War One...
he had already delineated nearly every genre, even the gangsterfilm...
with his short The Musketeers of Pig Alley.
Any minute now it may be curtains for Roy earl.
Genres were never rigid.
Creative filmmakers kept stretching their boundaries.
This was a classical art, where personal expression was stimulated,
rather than inhibited, by discipline.
Take Raoul Walsh, the most gifted apprentice and disciple of Griffith.
What's the idea, you? Get back where you belong.
His strongest films were variations ona few themes and characters.
The figure of the sympathetic outlaw, for instance, '
arebel in the tradition of Jesse James----------- inspired him time and again.
In High Sierra you didn't root for the police and the ordinary citizens--
you rooted for the gangster.
You knew he was doomed when he became separated from the only person who cared about him--
his tarnished angel, Ida Lupino.
Aw, be smart. Justyell up to him and tell him to put his gun away and come down.
Otherwise we'll get him sure.
All right.
Go ahead and yell.
- No, I won't! - What's that?
- I won't, I tell ya! - We'll get him then.
He's gonna die anyway. He'd rather it was this way. Go on, kill him, all of you!
Earl!
Come down! It's your last chance!
Come and get me! There's plenty of ya down there!
At the end of his memoirs,
Walsh quotes Shakespeare, his constant inspiration.
"Each man in his time plays many parts."
This applies to Walsh himself, but also to his explosive characters.
These outcasts were bigger than life, ' they stood beyond good and evil.
Their lust forlife was insatiable,
even as their actions precipitated their tragic destiny.
Mary!
The world was too small for them,
and Walsh would often give them a cosmic battle ground...
Mary!
- Mt. Whitney and the High Sierras. - Mary!
Eight years later Walsh filmed the same story as a western...
Colorado Territory.
Again he provided his desperado with a wide landscape...
which dwarfed human figures.
This time the Cityof the Moon in the Canyon of Death.
Hey, McQueen!
You gotno chance!
- Come on down! - Come and getme!
- We'll starve ya out! - Go ahead!
So dear to the heart of Raoul Walsh was his heroine, now a half-breedout cast,
that he gave her as much strength and character as the hero.
You don't wanna leave him up there, buzzards pickin' his bones clean.
Call him out, and we'll split the 20,000 reward with ya.
You might even sense a mystical dimension...
at the end of the film...
that clearly transcended any genre limitation.
The lost city is like a primitive cathedral.
As he listens to the Navajos chanting in the night,
Joel McCre are flects on his fate...
and appears to accept it.
Wes!
- Wes! - Colorado.
Wes, they're comin' at ya! They found a backway.
Come down, Wes!
Hurry, Wes! I got horses!
Walsh used some of the same camera angles as in High Sierra,
but this time the messenger of death was a Navajo sharp shooter.
Don't!
Don't! They'll kill ya!
Andin Colorado Territory,
the tragedy was complete.
Both protagonists were doomed.
Now, to me the most interesting of these classic genres are the indigenous ones
the western, which was born on the frontier;
the gangster film, which was originated in the east Coast cities;
and the musical, which was spawned by Broadway.
They remind me of jazz... they allow for endless, increasingly complex,
sometimes perverse variations,
and when these variations were played by the masters,
they reflected the changing times.
They gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.
You can see how film genre evolved...
just by watching three westerns John Ford directed...
with the same actor, John Wayne.
The character of the hero becomes richer, more complex with each decade.
The Ringo Kid of Stagecoach...
Sorry. No silver cups.
Grew first into the benevolent father figure of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
They all put in the hat for it, sir.
There's a sentiment on the back of it.
"To Captain Brittles...
from C Troop."
"Lest we forget."
Now watch Ford transform John Wayne...
into them is fit of The Searchers.
Ethan Edwards returns from years of wandering...
to discover that his love dones have been massacred by the Indians.
- Another one, huh? - John Wayne's heroic persona...
has turned dark and obsessive.
The physical death of the Indian is not enough.
Ethan wants to ensure his spiritual death as well.
This 'un come a long way----------- before he died, Captain.
Well, ethan, there's another one you can score up for your brother.
Jorgensen!
Why don't ya finish the job?
What good did that do ya?
By what you preach, none.
By what that Comanche believes,
ain't got no eyes, he can't enter the spirit land.
He has to wander forever between the winds. You get it, Reverend.
Come on, blanket head.
Gone is the simple black-and-white morality of the early days.
Gone are the old-fashioned values of the seasoned cavalry officer.
- Now look at Ethan Edwards of The Searchers. - Hyah! Get in there!
The same star, John Wayne, '
the same location, around Monument Valley, '
the same director, John Ford, '
but a different character, different attitudes, different conflicts,
almost a different country.
Ethan Edward shunts down his niece,
No, no! ethan!
Abducted and raised by the Indians after the massacre of her parents,
because he believes she has been tarnished.
Living with Comanches, he insists, is not being alive.
Ethan Edwards is actually the most frightening characterin the film.
- Debbie! - After years of searching,
when he finally finds Natalie Wood,
you don'tknow whether he's gonna kill her or save her.
No, ethan! No!
Let's go home, Debbie.
This is no happy ending, though.
There is no home, no family waiting forEthan.
He is cursed, just as he cursed the dead Comanche.
He is a drifter, doomed to wander between the winds.
The western also allowed for elaborate psychological and even Freudian dramas.
- Well, patron? - Hang him.
In Anthony Mann's The Furies,
the patriarchal cattle baron wantshis rebellious daughter...
to beg him for her lover's life.
You will not humble your self.
This I ask.
While John Ford only alluded to the darkside, Anthony Mann dwelled in it.
The proud Mexican chooses to die...
ratherthan allow his woman to humiliate herself.
Amen.
The Furies could'vebeen a Greek tragedy.
The powerful story, written by Niven Busch, the author of Duel in the Sun,
was actually inspired by Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot.
Juan.
The kiss of a good friend.
'Til our eyes...
next meet.
'Til then.
Tears a body to see someoneyou love hurt, doesn't it?
Do you want me to beg? Do you want me on my knees to you for his life?
- I'd hang him anyway. - That's what he said.
He did, eh? He always was smart.
But you're not. You're old, getting foolish and you've made a mistake.
It's meyou should've hung,
because now I hate you in a way I didn't know a human could hate.
Take a good, long look at me, T.C.
You won't see me again until the day I take your world away from you!
Juanito.
Juanito!
The mythology of the frontier,
of a land in perpetual expansion,
has given way to greed, vengeance,
megalomania, sadistic violence.
- Roy! - Anthony Mann's brooding heroes were no saints.
Look out! Let go ofhim!
Seeking revenge was their obsession,
an obsession that would consume and nearly destroy them.
Even James Stewart, the all-American hero of Frank Capra's fables,
succumbed to outbursts of savage violence.
In The Naked Spur, you see him reel in his dead prey.
He has become a bounty hunter in order to buy back the ranch stolen from him...
- while he was away fighting in the Civil War. - Cut him loose, Howie!
I'm takin' him back!
This is what I came after, and now I got him! No partners, like I started!
He's gonna pay for my land!
It's no good if you take him back!
They're dead! Finished!
- He'll never be dead for you! - I don't care anything about that!
The money! That's all I've ever cared about!
Roy, he called the current. He said face up to it.
All right, that's what I'm doin'. That's what I'm doin'.
Maybe I don't fit your ideas of me, but that's the way I am.
- Jeff! - Hey, Hank!
You all drop your guns and come on down.
Budd Boetticher explored the bare essentials of the genre.
His style was as simple as his impassive heroes.
Let me see your hands, please.
- Deceptively simple. - Put 'em out there!
The archetypes of the genre were distilled to the point of abstraction.
Bull fighting had been Boetticher's first vocation.
The choreography of basic human passions was his forte.
What did you do with Hank?
- Who's he? - The station man here.
He's overyonder in the well.-----------
And the boy?
He's with 'im.
In the seven westerns he made with Randolph Scott,
Boetticher always gave precedence to character over action.
You let us go and we'll never breathe a word about this.
I know you won't. Do you go along with what he said?
If I said yes, you wouldn't believe me.
Yeah, it's dumb even talkin' about it, ain't it?
Each adventure was a poker game,
and the player's complex moves were more important than the avowed goal.
- You know what's gonna happen to you? - I think so.
- You scared? - Yeah.
You're honest about it. I'll say that for ya.
Ouch!
Pour yourself a cup of coffee.
In the power play, the hero and the villain were complimentary figures.
They shared the same loneliness, the same dreams...
and even the same ethical code.
Have a seat.
Over there.
Somehow, the gentleman and the desperado...
were fascinated by each other.
- You got a wife up on your place? - No.
- Should have. Ain't right for a man to be alone. - They say that.
Well, I oughta know.
- You cook good coffee. - Brennan.
Talk.
What about?
Your place. What's it like?
It's not much. Not yet, anyway.
- You got stock on it? - Some.
Work the ground?
I plan to, yeah.
I'm gonna have me a place someday.
I thought about it. I thought about it a lot.
You figure you'll get it this way?
Well, sometimes you don't have a choice.
Don't you?
- Now, look, Brennan... - Frank!
For decades the western genre embellished the reality of the west...
to make it more "interesting."
But in the mid-'50s several films started questioning the myth...
perpetuated by Hollywood.
Arthur Penn, forinstance, presented Billy the Kid as a juvenile delinquent...
in search of a father figure.
By having aj ournalist follow the young misfit throughhis career of crime,
Penn suggested how history was distorted even as it was unfolding.
- Statey our name. - Garrett.
- Huh? How's that? - Garrett. Pat Garrett.
My--
Little case of the quick jump.
Somebody gonna get his head clipped off.
Paul Newman portrayed Billy as a suicidal antihero...
who sought his own death.
You help me.
We don't want you.
Neither a vicious killer nora sympathetic outlaw,
Billy was arebel without a cause.
You help me.
His rage and confusion hadmore to do with them a laise of growing up in the 1950s...
than with there a lities of the Old West.
Please.
Billy, don'tgo for your gun.
Keep your hands away from your side.
- I don't wanna kill ya. - He's here.
Billy.
Come to me.
Just when you think the western has been exhausted,
that there's nowhere else to go with it,
something will come along with a new slant on things.
It's very exciting when that happens.
Unforgiven is a good example...
of what I mean when you can address a situation.
There's a lot of concern in society today...
about, about violence and gunplay,
and that film, even though it takes place in 1880,
it, uh, it addresses that now,
that in order... when you are a perpetrator of violence...
and you get involved in that sort ofthing,
you roby our soul...
as well as the person...
the person you're committing a violent act against.
In Unforgiven, Eastwood plays a professional killer...
who has tried to reform and become a farmer.
Physically and mentally scarred,
he'shaunted by his dark and violent past.
Judgment night comes after his best friend has been tortured to death...
by Sheriff Gene Hackman.
There's no glamour in killing anymore.
The lawman behaves as badly as the renegade.
They're both former gunslingers who have shot people in the back or when they were unarmed.
Who's the fella owns this shithole?
Uh, I-l own this establishment.
Bought it from Greeley for a thousand dollars.
You'd better clear outta there.
Yes, sir.
Just hold it right there. Hold it!
Well, sir, you are a cowardly son of a bitch.
You just shot an unarmed man.
Well, he should armed himself...
if he's gonna decorate his saloon with my friend.
You'd be William Munny out of Missouri.
Killer of women and children.
That's right.
I've killed women and children.
Killed just about everything that walks or crawled...
at one time or another.
And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill,
for what you did to Ned.
You boys had better move away.
I've always felt that the western movie...
is one of the fewart forms that Americans can lay claim to.
Americans are somewhat masochistic, I must say, about that.
Sometimes they can be very blase about their own art forms...
because it doesn't...
The grass is always greener, you know.
It's, um...
It's easy to look elsewhere...
when sometimes great art can be right in front of you.
Of course, most American directors never claimed to be artists.
They prided themselves on appearing blase.
Holding one's cards close to the vest was a survival strategy.
Even an old masterlike John Ford, it seems, had to wear a mask.
- Watch how he plays the tight-lipped pro... - Take one.
In front of Peter Bogdanovich's camera.
"Take one"? Won't want more than one take, will they? Shoot.
Mr. Ford, I've noticed that the, uh...
that your view of the West has become increasingly sad...
and melancholy over the years.
I'm comparing, for instance, Wagon Master...
to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
- Have you been aware of tha tchange in mood? - No. No.
Now that I've pointed it out,
is there anything you'd like to say about it?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Can I ask you what particularelement about the western...
appealed to you from the beginning?
I wouldn't know.
Would you agree that the point of Fort Apache...
was that the tradition of the army...
was more important than one individual?
Cut.
The gangster film.
Another rich genre which allowed filmmakers...
to dwell on America's fascination with violence and lawlessness.
It's only a coal truck.
Hey, Tom. Wait a minute.
- What happened? - Aw, nothin'. I just got burned up, that's all.
"There'saction only if there is danger."
This was said by Howard Hawks, an authority on both the western and the gangster film.
"To stay alive or die; this is our greatest drama."
The gangster film predates World War One,
as with Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley...
or Raoul Walsh's picture of 1915 called Regeneration,
which was shot on location on New York's Lower EastSide.
Gangsters then were viewed as the victims of a depressed environment.
Neighborhood kids growing up on the mean streets.
But ten years later, Prohibition brought about a tide of movies...
that signaled a tremendous escalation in urban violence.
What struck me in Scarface was Howard Hawks'cool and distant objectivity.
Hey! That's O'Hara's mob.
Heshowed Tony Camonte, also known as AICapone,
asa vicious, immature, irresponsible character.
Hey, lookit! They got machine guns you can carry!
- If I had some of them, I could run the whole works in a month! - I'll get you one!
Yet, that world was almost attractive...
because of its irresponsibility.
And that was disturbing.
At times, of course, the film is very funny.
Not surprising, as Hawks was as much a master of comedy as of action.
Swell! Look, it's little. You can carry it. Let's get outta here.
But at the endof the '30s came a really pivotal film... Raoul Walsh's Roaring Twenties.
Don't you ever say that to me again. Do you hear? Never.
This chronicle of the Prohibition era...
was the last great gangster film before the advent of film noir.
It readl ikea twisted Horatio Alger story.
The gangster caricatured the American dream.
Of all the dog-and-pony joints I've ever worked in, this tops 'em all.
Don't worry, honey. I likeya.
Well, happy New Year.
This was the gripping saga of a war hero turned bootlegger...
and his downfall after the stockmarket crash.
Eddie! eddie!
It was actually the inspiration behind one of my student films, It's Not Just You, Murray.
And I'd like to think, uh, GoodFellas comes out of the tradition...
of something as extraordinary as The Roaring Twenties and Scarface.
Drop it! Drop it!
Eddie!
The gangster had now become a tragic figure.
Eddie!
Walsh even dared to end the film...
on a semi-religious image...
that evokes a pieta.
He's dead.
Well, who is this guy?
This is eddie Bartlett.
What was his business?
He used to be a big shot.
After World War Two, the gangster turned into a business man.
The gang was taken over by anonymous corporations.
What a layout.
There's only one way to handle you. Kill me?
If I have to, yeah. A guy's gotta fight for what's his.
The first film to show the major changes in the underworld...
was Byron Haskins' underrated I Walk Alone.
Burt Lancaster, just out of prison, discovers the new world he's in.
Get him outta here.
He knows all my business. He stays.
You and your boys.
This isn't the Four Kings, 'no hiding out behind a steeldoor and a peephole.
This is big business.
We deal with banks, lawyers and a Dunn and Bradstreet rating.
The world's spun right past you, Frankie.
In the '20s you were great.
In the '30s you might've made the switch, but today you're finished,
as dead as the headlines the day you went into prison.
- Regional associate... - Stop tryin' to dizzy me up!
Here. Now, I want simple answers, Dave. No diagrams.
Dink's got the full say around here, right?
- Yes. - Okay, then.
Except that it's revocable by a vote of the board of directors of Regent Associates.
- Stop the double-talk. - I'm sorry, Frankie.
- Just what does Dink own? - In which corporation?
Some films,
notably Abraham Polonsky's Force of evil,
went even further and painted the whole society as corrupt.
The face of John Garfield, a lawyer for the mob,
was a landscape of moral conflicts.
People can be made to talk.
Was my phone talking too?
The social body itself was sick.
The system's violence became the issue, rather than individual violence.
You saw a corrupt world implode before your eyes.
Leo, I arranged with Tucker for you to quit tonight.
- I'll pay off your investments. - I don't want it, Joe.
The money I made in this rotten business is no good for me.
- I don't want it back. - The money has no moral opinions.
I find I have, Joe. I find I have.
Abraham Polonsky's dialogue was unusually poetic.
I'm glad you called me, Freddy.
I'm glad you thought it over to calm down and listen to me, so I can help you.
Coffee.
Please, Mr. Morse. All I want is to quit. That's all. Nothing else.
They won't let me quit, and I want to quit. I'll die if I don't quit.
I'm a man with heart trouble.
I die almost every day myself.
That's the way I live.
It's a silly habit.
You know, sometimes you feel as though you're dying...
here...
and here.
Here.
You're dying while you're breathing.
Freddy, what have you done?
Freddy, what have you done to me?
- Take it easy, Pop, and you won't get hurt. - You're safe with us.
Come on! It can't take all night!
- Stand up and walk! - Stop him! Stop him! He knows me!
Kill him! Kill him! He knows me!
Where's my brother, Ben?
You couldn't buck the system. You were indebted to the syndicate for life.
Where's my brother? Where's my brother?
Where did Ficco take my brother?
They were forever using you.
They even wanted you to sacrifice your own family.
I wanted to find Leo, to see him once more.
It was morning by then, dawn,
and naturally I was feeling very bad there as I went down there.
I just kept going downand down there.
It was like going down to the bottom of the world...
to find my brother.
This madness culminated...
in Francis Coppola's The Godfather.
As Al Pacino discovered when he came back from World War Two,
the son had to follow his father's criminal path.
When you were a Corleone, there was no leaving the outfit.
It was an evil family bound by fear and torn by treachery,
but you served it without ever questioning its legitimacy,
as though it was your country.
American values... family, free enterprise, patriotism... became totally twisted.
Even individualism was dead.
The organization was a state within the state;
the gangster, a chairman of the board; and crime was a way of life.
By the late '60s the gangster genre had proven so versatile...
it could even embrace an avant-garde style.
Watch the innovative editing here of John Boorman's Point Blank.
The images are literally flashing through CarrollO' Connor's mind...
as he realizes who Lee Marvin is...
a killer who slugged and smashed his way to the top of the organization...
in a desperate quest to find the man in charge, the man who can simply pay him.
- Aaaah! - Walker.
Walker.
You're a very bad, destructive man, Walker.
- Why do you do things like this? What doyou want? - I want my money.
I want my 93 grand.
Ninety-three thousand dollars?
You'd threaten a financial structure like this for $93,000?
- I don't believe you. What do you really want? - I-l really want my money.
I want my money!
Well, I'm not gonna give ya any money, and nobody else is!
Don't you understand that?
Carter!
- Well, wh-who runs things? - Carter and I run things... I run things.
What about Fairfax? Will he pay me?
Fairfax is a man who signs checks.
No. Cash.
Cash, checks... Fairfax isn't gonna give you anything. He's finished.
- Fairfax is dead. He just doesn't know it yet. - Somebody's gotta pay.
Parallel to the gangster film was the rise of a very different genre... the musical.
An interesting coincidence.
The harshness of the times... the Depression...
colored this most escapist of all film genres.
With Busby Berkeley, the genre came into its own.
A former dance instructor,
Berkeley was the first to realize that a movie musical...
was totally different from a stage dmusical.
On film, everything was seen through one eye... the camera.
In designing his production numbers,
he would therefore rely on unusual camera movements and angles.
The camera itself would partake in the choreography.
Berkeley's ballets could not have existed outside of the movies.
They were pure cinematic creations.
Berkeley's films were viewed as pure entertainment,
but some time sheap plied his wizar dry to the grim realities of American life...
caught in the grip of the Depression.
Remember my forgotten man?
You put a rifle in hishand.
You sent him faraway.
You shouted "Hip-Hooray."
But look at him today.
Remember my forgotten man.
You had him cultivate thel and.
He walked behind a plow.
The sweat fell from his brow.
Butlook at him right now.
'Cause ever since the world began,
a woman's got to have aman.
For getting him, you see,
means you're forgetting me.
Aaaah!
Always stretching the limits of the musical genre,
Berkeley even dared choreograph human tragedies.
Aaaah!
The big parade goes on for years
I can't do it, I tell ya. I can't!
Berkeley's early musicals at Warner Brothers...
offered back stage stories whose pacing was not unlike that of the gangster film.
I'm too nervous! I can't do it!
They were dominated by the figure...
of the crazed, manic, often embittered Broad way producer.
- What do ya wanna do, boss? - Bring up that curtain!
In Footlight Parade, you hadJ ames Cagney.
- All right, that's you! - No!
In 42nd Street, Warner Baxter.
Watch that tempo! Watch it, will you?
Get your feet off of the floor!
In these times, if you showed any ambition...
-you either became a gangster or as how biz performer, - Faster! Faster!
Come on! Faster! Faster!
At least in the fantasy world of Warner Brothers.
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! It's brutal!
Ohh!
May I remind you that Pretty Lady's out-of-town opening is not far away?
It's been advertised as a musical-comedy with dancing!
If it isn't asking too much,
will you please show me a little?
Come on. Ready, Jerry? Get into it now!
Broadway offered a metaphor for a desperate, shattered country.
Director or chorus girl, your life depended on the show's success.
Against all odds, Warner Baxter achieved his dream.
These directors make me sick. Take Marsh.
Puts his name all over the program, gets all the credit.
If it wasn't for kids like Sawyer, he wouldn't have a show.
Marsh would probably say he discovered her. Some guys get all the breaks.
Buton opening night he was too drained...
to enjoy the production's triumph.
The show had taken on a life ofits own.
The task master's lot, in the end, was solitude.
They're sending me to New York for good,
to be head of the office of Fenton, Ray burn and Company.
- New York? - What?
New York?
Ten years later, Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me In St. Louis was a milestone.
- I simply don't believe it. - We'll leave right after Christmas.
I thought we'd all like to have Christmas in St. Louis.
Firstofall, the story didn't have a Broadway setting.
New York is a big city.
It was a memory album set in the Midwestat the turn of the century.
Its protagonists were the members of amiddle-class household.
They did not need to be professional performers.
Anyone could sing and dance, if they felt like it.
Singing and dancing became as natural as breathing or talking.
- La-da-dah, dah-dah-dah. - Also, the tunes were designed to furt her the plot...
and reveal the characters.
They expressed the ebband flow----------- of personal emotions.
If Santa Claus brings me any toys, I'm taking them with me.
I'm taking all my dolls; the dead ones, too.
I'm taking everything.
Of course you are.
I'll help you pack them myself.
You don't have to leave anything behind,
except your snow people, of course.
Sometimes they were tinged with bitter sweet irony...
as the family faced an uncertain future in the big city.
Have yourself.
A merry little Christmas.
Make they uletide gay-----------------
Next year all our troubles.
Will be miles away.
Oh, have yourself.
A merry little
Christmas.
Now.
Tootie.
Tootie!
Sweet ness and innocence will prevail,
but with the explosion of a child's pain and rage...
unexpected shadows were suddenly caston this nostalgic period piece.
Nobody's gonna have them! Not if we're going to New York!
I've got to kill them if we can't take them with us!
Tootie, darling, don't cry. You can build others now people in New York.
You can't do anything like you do in St. Louis!
Oh, no, darling. You're wrong.
"The rabbit hunters have his private carrot patch surrounded,"
and they're closing in.
"And what's that sticking up over that bush?"
- Are you my daddy? - It's, um-- Hmm?
- No, I'm just your Uncle Doug. - Oh.
In themid-'40s something interesting happened.
Hey, fellas. Can Icomein?
Darker currents seeped into the musical,
as they had in the western and the gangster film.
Even the more conventional musicals hinted at the post war malaise.
Root-too-toot-ooh Toot-ooh.
Listen to that fiddle player slap, slap, slap.
On the surface My Dream ls Yours had all the trappings...
of a Doris Day vehicle produced on the Warner Bros assembly line.
It seemed to be pure escapist fare.
Oh, it's so spacious and peaceful.
No sponsors or agents pushing me around.
Just hitch your wagon to me and you'll be a star.
No. Thank you, Gary, but I have too much to do on my own.
- My dream is yours. - But the comedy had a bitter edge.
It isn't much to give.
You saw the performer's personal relationships...
turnings our and being sacrificed to their careers.
So, darling, may I say.
Look, honey, let's have an understanding.
Two careers in one family is one too many.
We'll concentrate on mine, huh?
Come on. Hereheis!
The film made you aware of how difficult,
or even impossible, relationships are between creative people.
It was a major influence...
on my film New York, New York.
I'm through with spending time
Doris Day'sbigbreak comes when she has to replace Lee Bowman, the popular crooner she loves,
who's too drunk toper form on his own national radios how.
Gary, you can't go on. You're drunk.
Lee Bowman's character was an egotist who felt threatened by Doris Day'ssuccess.
My dream is yours.
- It isn't much to give. - In New York, New York, I took that tormented romance...
and made it the very subject of the film.
But while I live My dream is yours.
Lovely girl.
Lovely singer.
Handy with a knife, too.
Begins to shine.
The pinnacle of the musical was reached in the early '50s.
Again we meet the incomparable Vincente Minnelli.
Look at The Band Wagon's finalproduction number, "The Girl Hunt Ballet."
In this satire of Mickey Spillane's pulp novels,
you see the musical borrowing and absorbing the icons of film noi...
private eyes and dangerous sirens.
Minnelli's musicals celebrated the triumph of the imaginary over the real.
Any aspect of reality, however trivial,
could be transformed, stylized and incorporated into a ballet.
The world was a stage,
and it belonged to those who could sing and dance.
MGM was then the magic factory,
where producerArthur Freed nurtured such classics as On The Town,
An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain,
It's Always Fair Weather and, of course, The Band Wagon.
He's drunk.
- How bad? - Very.
- What do you want me to do? - Keep him off.
A horse!
My kingdom for a horse!
George Cukor's A Star ls Born...
took the genre one step further.
Get a load of Norman Maine, will ya?
It gave us Judy Garland as a bandsinger who becomes a moviestar...
while James Mason, her mentor, sabotages his career.
Sure, but just a few. I promised the boys.
Take your hands of fme.
Actually, the story had been brought to the screen twice before...
in a non-musical form.
"The show must go on." That is the performer's first commandment.
But Mason's Norman Maine couldn't take it anymore.
- That does it. - Just a few more.
- I said, that does it. - But you got plenty of time!
He was trapped in the cruel worldof make-believe.
L-I'm sorry, gentlemen. No time.
He couldn't even bear to look at himself.
Are you trying to stop me from going on? Is that it?
These broken mirrors were the first step toward self-destruction.
For the love that's truly true you gotta have me go with you.
- You gotta have me - Why the holdout.
And me.
Have you sold out.
Time you woke up Time you spoke up.
This line I'm handin'you.
It's not a hand out
Asa team we'd beast and out Fallout.
- You wanna live high on a dime. - This was not a musical-comedy.
This was a musical drama about the sad ironies of show business.
- Boodely-ooh-boo - Why the holdout.
Have you sold out.
Time you woke up Time you spoke up.
Ooh, you gotta have me go with you.
Why the holdout Have you soldout.
Time you woke up Timey ou spoke up.
This line I'm handin' you.
It's not a handout.
As a team we'd be a standout.
You wanna live high on a dime.
You wanna have too harsh a climb.
You gotta have me.
Go with you.
All the time.
In spite of bold attempts by such choreographer-directors...
as Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen and Bob Fosse to open up new territories,
the musical ceased to exist as a film genre.
But the showbiz performer still remains a key figure in musical biographies.
Recently the most exciting effort was probably Bob Fosse's self-portrait, All ThatJazz.
It's show time, folks.
The figure of the exhausted entertainer needing open heart surgery...
would fitright into Busby Berkeley's gallery of hard-driving, hard-drinking,
chain-smoking directors.
We're glad that you're sorry.
Now.
Cut!
You blew it. You forgot your line.
At the end of this number you're supposed to say, uh... What's he supposed to say?
He's supposed to say, "I don't want to die. I want to live."
Well, if you can't say it, you can't say it. We'll just have to cut it.
Cut it. Take me up. Next setup.
Of course it's not enough for American directors to be just storytellers.
So, as we continue our journey in parts two and three,
I'd like to show you how I think they need also to be illusionists,
sometimes smugglers...
and even at times iconoclasts.
That is, if they intend to express their own personal vision.