jemnyc
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Posts posted by jemnyc
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Hey, Mrs. Cooper, regarding:
<I'm probably the only Gary fan who really loves Beau Geste, but I can't help it.>
Count me in, please. That opening sequence alone, at Fort Zinderneuf, with everyone dead, brilliant. GC and Brian Donlevy are terrific together.
There's an odd bit of trivia with GC in Beau Geste -- He's the only actor to have ever played in a sequel before starring in the original. GC did Beau Sabreur, the sequel, in 1928.
Marty Feldman used a clip of Cooper in Beau Geste for his weird send-up, The Last Remake Of Beau Geste.
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Miss G:
<And then you have those action heroes on the opposite end of the spectrum.>
While I usually don't care for today's action movies, I really like the three Bourne films. Which is odd, since I don't usually like all the unnecessary editing/quick cuts, can't stand car chases -- one of the great things about living in NYC is that I can go weeks without ever having to be in a car -- and yet, the Bourne films have all of that and I still really like them. I think Matt Damon has developed into a very fine actor, though he's so natural that he's tagged with the usual nonsense that he only plays himself. Anyone who saw him in The Good Shepherd and then the current Bourne film can't say the man isn't acting. Two entirely different uses of his body language, his voice, his eyes, etc.
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Miss G:
<I read your comments about Wayne with interest, even though I'm really totally non-political and dare I say it here, a John Wayne movie fan! Hee! I hope you won't hold it against me, John.>
If I were to act like that, I fear there'd be few people indeed I could ever chat with!
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Dan, regarding:
< John, as a documentary maker do you have any views on the Bright Leaves and My Sister Maria docs,>
I very much enjoyed Bright Leaves. McElwee is a fascinating filmaker, always hitting his subject from an off-angle. His take on tobacco and the Duke family and Bright Leaf is very engaging. It's odd, though, about using Bright Leaf, because if I'm not mistaken, the novel Bright Leaf took place in Connecticut (could well be wrong, often am), which would eliminate the Dukes as the b.g. for Bright Leaf.
My Sister Maria is so very moving, Maximillian Schell's utter love and admiration for his sister fills every frame. Some don't care for the re-enactments, but you can't deny his passion for the subject.
When Maximillian Schell did the Broadway play of Judgement At Nurmeburg in 2001, I tried to get together with him to discuss his being a talking head for what we hoped would be a doc on Hanging Tree (it was still locked up in its legal cage at the time). We never hooked up -- I was doing pre-production n Coop/hem and was hopping out to LA, Idaho and Montana a lot -- but he said on the phone that he'd be happy to do it.
If you like Bright Leaves, check out McElwee's doc from the mid-80s -- Sherman's March. It's wonderful, again hitting his subject with a behind-the-back pass.
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Miss G:
<I'm trying to think of the last time I saw an interesting leading male character depicted in a movie. I feel like I have to go all the way back to Russell Crowe in The Insider, maybe.>
Did you happen to catch Viggo Mortensen in A History Of Violence? Nothing girly-guy about him; in fact, it's actually an updating of Man Of The West, a loose (and sometimes not so loose) reworking of it. As is, and this bugs me how few critics spotted this, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven a reworking of Man/West.
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Hi, Frank: regarding:
<As a youngster in the early-80s, I used to watch pro wrestling. ... Hulk Hogan. Hogan's muscles and strong personality made him the darling of pro wrestling and it allowed the "sport" to crossover to a mainstream audience. ... many boys wanted to be the next Hulk Hogan, which meant bulking up... .>
I certainly appreciate your angle, Frank. And don't necessarily disagree. But I can't help wondering if there weren't parallel tracks occurring? Willis and Stallone and Arnold were cranking out their stuff at the same time ... girls/women were making their presence felt in so-called traditional male bastions. Concurrently, muscles and huge guns are dominating movies.
I don't know why I keep returning to this sense that this was a reflection of male insecurity when faced with self-confident and accomplished women.
Interestingly, since this is a Cooper thread, in 1944, when Cooper became the first star to form his own company, he chose as his first production -- Along Came Jones -- a story about a man who can't shoot or fight and a woman who can. Indeed, she has to save him in the final gunfight. Cooper was warned by several industry people that he was making a mistake in playing that role, audiences didn't want to see a movie in which the woman is better than the man at these things. Cooper ignored them and it was a huge hit.
Little known, but Cooper was nominated as Best Actor by the NY Film Critics for his perf. I have never understood why it isn't recognized as one of the supreme comic performances in the history of Hollywood. It is a tour-de-force. So multi-layered, running the entire gamut.
As a follow up, for his company's second production, he chose Casanova Brown. In which he becomes, in affect, the mother with the baby. Again, he was warned not to do this, ruining his stalwart male image by doing so-called female work. He ignored the warnings and it was a hit. Though I've often thought that had Hawks or Wilder or a couple of other directors done it, it would have been a far better film.
Cooper's philandering is by now common knowledge. It was epic. Interestingly, he was drawn to strong women (his wife Rocky was all of that and then some), women of substance. Which is indicative, perhaps, of a man very at home in his own skin and a man who knew who he was, especially back then.
This is born out especially with his friendship in 1930/31 with Anderson Lawler, a NY actor trying to make it in Hollywood and, heaven forfend -- gay! Cooper was warned by Paramount execs to distance himself. Cooper ignored them, remained friends. Hunted together, shared a house, palled around. Lawler eventually moved back to NYC, became a successful Broadway producer (Tennessee Williams, etc.). Cooper and Rocky spent summers in the Hamptons from 1940 on, and also spent time in NYC during the winter months. They would have dinner with Lawler, publicly, Cooper never let the small-minded run his life.
Last bit, promise. Cooper was also warned by industry people in 1943/44, that he was too chummy with some of the Jewish people in Hollywood -- this while we're at war with Germany and the concentration camps and the Holocaust, but that's another topic -- so, Cooper being Cooper, he formed his company ... with three Jewish men.
The End
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Miss G:
<I wasn't talented enough to make it anyway, ha ha! So off my soapbox.>
Perhaps it was ... timing ... rather than talent?
Nor were you on a soapbox:
<I was in Hollywood long enough to find myself constantly at odds with the idea that any character was worth playing. I never wanted to even audition for parts that went against my deepest values, but no one else I knew felt that way.>
That's anything but a soapbox. That's merely being true to yourself, no? Perhaps rather out of fashion these days, but definitely not a soapbox.
James Stewart, who knew a thing about combat -- and understood to his very marrow Hemingway's piercing line from Across The River and Into The Trees: "If a man has a conscience, he might think about air power some time." -- refused to do a war film after WW II. He knew ...
Similarly, GC enlisted in the army soon after Pearl Harbor, and was rejected on medical grounds. He was 40, but nonetheless felt tremendous guilt that he wasn't taking part in WW II, when so many of his friends were -- Glenn Ford, Leslie Howard, David Niven, Stewart, etc. So, GC rejected the slew of war films offered him, the only exception being Dr. Wassell, and that only because it dealt with Wassell's extraordinary evacuation of wounded troops from Java. Hemingway told GC that he was worth more to the country making pictures than carrying a rifle. But even after the war, GC was bothered. Hemingway told him: "Never feel bad about missing war, Coop."
Compare Stewart and Cooper with Wayne, who ducked WW II (by claiming that he was sole support for his children, as if teachers, and bankers and cops and farmers and firemen and lawyers, etc. weren't; but then, because he was embarrassed and ashamed about this, Wayne put out the story that he couldn't serve because of an old football injury), and then churned out all those war flicks. And then had the nerve to tell kids in the sixties that they were cowards for not going off to fight and die for their country. I was in the Air Force during Nam, and some of the marines I knew, stationed at El Toro and Pendleton, in S. California, used to mock Wayne and his perf in Sands Of Iwo Jima. Thought he was a bag of wind.
But Wayne's most disgraceful moments were during the blacklist, one among many of those moments was when he threatened Cooper with being blacklisted, his passport lifted, if he didn't walk off High Noon. Cooper being Cooper, he called a press conference and praised Carl Foreman as being the finest kind of American, he was proud to be doing High Noon, and Foreman's politics were his business and his alone -- Foreman had been a member of the Communist Party. Producer Stanley Kramer caved to Wayne's demand that Foreman's name be removed as screenwriter on Noon. Cooper (and Fred Zinnemann) went into Kramer's office and warned they were walking off the film if Foreman's name wasn't kept on as screenwriter. His name was kept on, but it was the last time for many years that he received credit.
There are heroes and there are heroes.
Now, I shall step off my soapbox!
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<We've often discussed why he isn't as remembered and revered today amongst the general population as other classic actors and we have talked about his lack of Hitchcock/Ford films as one possibility.>
Couple of years ago, 2005, was out in Bozeman, Mt., for a festival. One of the events was a screening of The Westerner -- which sold out and received a standing ovation, teens, twenty-somethings, on up to retirees. I moderated a panel afterwards, Peter Fonda, who knew GC, Dick Shepherd, who at 28 produced Hanging Tree, and Michael Anderson, directed Mary Deare and Naked Edge.
More than one of the questions dealt with why they'd never heard of The Westerner, why it never played anywhere, etc. Dick Shepherd said what I believe, that because The Westerner was directed by William Wyler, who is persona non grata among the critical/film scholar establishment today, it is simply ignored. Peter Fonda brought up how fresh The Westerner is, perhaps the first buddy film, and, from an actor's pov, how remarkable is GC's performance. Simply magnificent. And I offered the thought that Stagecoach, from a year earlier, 1939, is terribly dated, yet because it's John Ford (who deserves the praise he gets!), it is discussed and taught where The Westerner isn't.
Just insert several other GC titles and can say the same thing.
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Dan, regarding:
<my 2 months shy of 10 year Airdale dog had passed away while trying to get fluids put back into her and I have just finished buring her.>
How tough, pets get inside you, for sure.
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<I can see bits of King Lear in Man of the West, don't you think?>
Very much. Man/West is almost Shakespearean in its themes, development, and working out of the plots. As much as I like several of the Mann/Stewart westerns, Man/West to me is Mann's masterpiece. When UA saw the finished film, they had no idea what to do with it, it was so grim, dark, bleak, downbeat, violent, that they dumped it into second-string grind houses. Was the first GC film not to open on Times Square, opened at something called the Brooklyn Paramount. Natch, was a box office bomb. Only now, so many years later, has it come to be recognized as the masterpiece it is.
Cooper, Mann and screenwriter Reginald Rose discussed having the female character be Cooper's wife, not a saloon singer. Thought it would make the violence and stripping and rape that much more powerful, and bring it all back to the Cooper character's murderous past coming home to roost, so to speak. But it was felt that Julie London couldn't handle the complexity of this, so they kept the role as in the novel and original screenplay.
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jemnyc
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< are you kidding? nine hours?! of course i wanna see that! heehee! so when does it come out on dvd? heehee...in my dreams.>
Be careful of what you wish for, nine hours is loooooooooooonnnng.
The contract negotiations with distributors -- covering theatrical, TV, DVD, foreign, etc. -- have become as complicated as slicing and dicing the nine hours down to two-and-a-half!
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<John, my mouth almost waters at the possibilities---I am not a fan really of Sam's pictures, he's just too violent for my tastes, but I think Gary Cooper directed by him would be a cat of a different stripe. He couldn't, as you say, portray a man who gets satisfaction from killing (the way, for instance, Clint Eastwood's anti-heroes seem to), so he could only bring a more human and complex character to any Peckinpah scenario. As much as I like both McRea and Scott, I would give much to have seen Gary in either role.>
GC was going to play the role which McCrea played. GC knew the good part when he saw it!
Peter McCrea, Joel McCrea's son, told me a fascinating bit of trivia, Miss G. Peckinpah sent Joel McCrea the script for The Wild Bunch. He told him he had the choice of either lead -- Pike Bishop (William Holden) or Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). McCrea appreciated the offer, but turned it down, reason being that it would go against everything he had tried to represent as an actor.
Your feelings about Peckinpah and violence, Mss G, you're hardly alone there. As much as I love The Wild Bunch, one of the great films to me, I've met very few women (including my wife) who feel the same.
<I'm just too excited to see the Coop/Hem documentary, it sound like it will shed much needed light onto Gary's neglected talents as an actor, one who passed from us at the peak of his craft.>
Well, I only hope it proves worthy of your excitement, Miss G. Feel like I've been living with it forever. The first cut was, get ready -- nine hours. Man, has it been a journey, now down to two-and-a-half, only hope I haven't drained too much out.
As far as GC the actor, I was amazed when I discovered in my research the amazing number of films he was asked to do, set to do, planned to do, the last five years of his life.
Night Of The Hunter -- Laughton chased him for three months, GC finally said no when Persuasion finally was ready.
Gunfight At The OK Corral -- GC (Earp) and Bogart (Holliday) had agreed, but Persuasion got in the way, Hal wallis agreed to wait, but when GC ready, Bogart's cancer was too advcanced. Hence, Lancaster and Douglas.
Hatari -- GC and Hawks agreed to do it, this was 1956, then GC did Love/Afternoon, Man/West, and was simply not well enough by the late fifties to do it.
Bridge On The River Kwai -- Ever since GC put his career on the line for Carl Foreman against HUAC and John Wayne during the making of Noon, Foreman sent GC his scripts for first refusal. GC knew he wasn't able to do Kwai and rejected it.
The Key --Foreman again, GC unfit to handle the rigor of the action, William Holden did it (as he did for Kwai, too)
Guns Of Navarone -- Foreman yet again, GC too ill, Peck took the role.
The Sundowners -- GC set, agreed, but couldn't get insurance, Mitchum took the role.
Ride The High Country -- GC owned, cancer, had to walk.
The Commancheros -- Wayne ended up doing it.
How The West Was Won -- Cancer
Sam Fuller and GC had been talking for several years about doing a film together. Not to be.
King Lear -- a western, which he and Anthony Mann had discussed and hoped to do. No go.
Alas ...
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< oh yes, we all love that you are with us john, i do hope you will stay a while. so in other words, take off your coat and have a cup of tea with us. heehee! tea parties can last for hours you know.>
With such words of welcome, how could I do otherwise? Thanks loads!
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I am so glad to know someone who realizes what a fine actor he was. The public and critics in general need to be disavowed of certain misconceptions on that score. They are missing a lot, by dismissing his skills. >
It's interesting about Cooper's rep as an actor. Among actors he is held in the highest regard. Jack Nicholson, in speaking of leading men, movie stars, calls GC one of six acting geniuses. While he wouldn't say who the other five were, he did allow that he was included in the six.
Whenever we're doing something on Cooper here in NYC, we try to get a "name" to host the evening, gives it a street cred. In 1992, we did a 50th anniversary night for High Noon, at Lincoln Center. Had a screening and a panel and a party afterward. We were batting around ideas on who to get, thinking only of NY-based actors, don't have to spring for travel, hotel, etc. Pacino is a huge admirer of GC, as is Harrison Ford, both live here in NYC. So, we settled on asking one or the other, don't recall which. But before a call was made, Liam Neeson happened to hear about it and, turns out his two favorite actors are GC and Cagney. He offered to host the evening. He was especially great because he lives only a few blocks from Lincoln Center, and said forget sending a car, he'd walk. Trust me, that is rare indeed.
When we did a similar evening for Pride Of The Yankees at Lincoln Center, went through the same process. Matthew Modine heard about it, turns out GC is his favorite actor, and offered himself, since he lives here, too.
In doing the High Noon doc last year, Maria Cooper happened to be seated next to Frank Langella at some dinner. She casually mentioned about the High Noon doc, that we had interviewed Bill Clinton for it, etc. Langella said, GC is my favorite actor and Noon is just about my favorite film, and said he'd love to do the V-O. He was leaving in a week to do a play in London -- Frost/Nixon, which just finished a run on Broadway last month and for which he deservedly won a Tony -- and could we do it over the next few days. I cranked out a final draft of the script, brought it over to his apartment, and, bang, he did it for us.
Neeson came through again when he found out we were doing a doc on Sergeant York. He also walked home from the recording studio, and it was raining.
What's interesting is that these actors range across many different styles, yet the one thing they have in common is that each admires GC, the actor.
I personally think that if GC's rep has suffered over the past couple of decades, it is due, perhaps to the fact that he made very few films with those directors annointed as auteurs, and therefore many of his best films and most fascinating performances are never studied, or written about, or taught. He made none with Hitchcock, Ford, etc. And the two biggies he made with Hawks -- York and Ball Of Fire -- are looked down on by the Hawks claque.
GC certainly isn't alone in this regard, but I think he has suffered more than others. Which is a topic for another time.
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Thank you for your gracious welcome, Miss G. I hope to stay active on the board.
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<I respectfully disagree with your muscles and male insecurity point. I believe the primary reason why strongmen took off in film was because the biggest filmgoing audience today is 14-year-old boys. The idea of super strength is highly desirable to boys. Since the mid-to-late-80s, the vast majority of role models for boys are presented as bulked-up athletes and fictionalized super heroes. Muscles equal power in the eyes of teenage boys. Muscles also equal chicks, too. Well, that's the story they are being told.>
Hey, frankgrimes, thanks for your take on this. Put that way, can't necessarily disagree with you. Certainly makes sense. But I wonder why -- since the mid-80s, as you point out -- boys have needed this absurdly bulked up male image as a role model? Although there have always been bulked up superheroes, cartoon/comic heroes, the regular heroes for boys weren't always so -- Dick Tracy, Red Ryder, whomever -- so I wonder why the need for the bulked up guy with a gun the size of a cannon seemed suddenly in vogue?
Is it possible that boys, in the late 70s/early 80s, were for the first time being confronted by girls on the baseball diamond, girls in the gym, girls in the classroom, and ... I don't know, needed in some way to maintain their (fictional) superiority?
Have no idea what I'm talking about here, so excuse the inarticulate stumbling.
Course, this doesn't explain Barry Bonds, Sosa and McGuire, does it?
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<If I was in the movie industry I think I would like editing the best. I'm more of a behind the scenes person anyway and it just seems like it would be fun b/c that's where the whole thing really comes together and takes shape. I've got a really good idea for another one that would have clips going through his whole career set to this great song called 'Movie of My Life' and it's a guy singing about how he feels like he's watching a movie of his life.>
Editors do have their hands on the controls, Angie, especially with documentaries, which are truly created in the editing room.
This next mini-doc of yours sounds intriguing, look forward to it. Your use of music which, on paper, might seem at odds with the visuals, is really clever. There's an old Clint Eastwood film which is barely known anymore -- Kelly's Heroes -- a WW II satire, deliciously cynical.
The credit sequence is Eastwood driving a jeep through a hallucinatory nighttime battle, explosions, firefights, nighttime sky, etc. And on the soundtrack is a pop song, very out of place against this WW II moment ... but it works! It's terrific. Song is called Burning Bridges, and I can imagine the producer's rep watching that credit sequence and throwing up his hands, what the hell are you doing, playing a rock song here!!!
Fortunately, the director -- or the editor, or the composer -- won. The fact that we don't know for sure who made the decision is why the auteur theory has become too prominent in critical circles. Making a film is a messy, messy thing.
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jemnyc
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< This Amazon review of They Came to Cordura may be from the same John (NYC) that posts here but not sure. It sounds like his assesment of the movie:>
Egad, Dan, I hit these boards and the first thing I see is an old rant of mine from the past. Had forgotten all about it.
We'd been talking with Sony about doing a doc on the whole history of Cordura, how GC had bought it in galleys, before it had even been published, why it struck a chord with him, the troubled production -- went months over schedule and a couple of million over budget -- horrendous working conditions, shot in the Moab Desert, Utah, temps 120+ -- it's still the only film ever made without an interior -- and then, when finished, how Columbia panicked and took it from Rossen, butchered it, etc., rave reviews from those who saw the 148 minute version, including the NY Times, Herald Tribune, Variety -- then opens and gets clobbered by critics, and is a box office bomb. Cooper was devastated, never really recovered. We get into this a bit in Coop/Hem.
Sony didn't want to hear about a doc. I spoke with the fellow at Sony who was in charge of its restoration. He assured me that he'd looked for the missing footage, couldn't find it. Rossen was in the process of trying to buy it back from Columbia to restore it to his original vision, but he died before anything came of it.
It's frustrating to watch some of the scenes, so clumsily edited -- one night scene, there are three fades, come back up and it's the same evening, little has changed. So, it's plain that there were cutaways or inserts which took you out of the camp, perhaps to the Mexicans who are after them, whatever it was, it would have added tension when we returned to the camp, ratcheted up the anxiety. Instead, the scene just sits there, no forward momentum to the fade outs and fade ins.
There's a terrific history of the western by Brian Garfield -- The Western -- and he has a wonderful review of Cordura, consders it a masterpiece even in its butchered state. Brian also believes that the western died when GC died in 1961. Not enough space to elaborate on his argument in this regard, but well worth reading. Brian believes GC the most representative westerner in film history, including Eastwood and Wayne.
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<Some of us have talked before about how put off we are by today's standards of masculinity in the movies and on TV. Action movies are definitely the worst. I'm tired of seeing men with more muscles than brains get shot at multiple times or severaly beaten yet they come out of it with nary a scratch and then easily take the bad guys out with an automatic weapon. Give me a man like Gary anytime who can be sensitive and calm yet powerful and in control of any situation all the same time.>
I wonder if some of this odious emphasis on men with freakish muscles and guns -- big guns, really big guns -- has anything to do with male insecurity in the face of the confident woman in the next cubicle, on the subway platform, in competition for a job, in the gym, etc.? Some of the guns that Arnold and Stallone and Willis, etc., heft are clearly photographed from angles which are meant to have these ridiculously humongous guns serve as symbols of male sexuality.
In doing the Coop/Hem doc, I asked several of the talking heads if they could ever imagine a Cooper or Hemingway hero putting a gun to a man's head, grin cruelly, and say: "Go ahead, make my day." Most said no, their heroes played by a different set of rules. But Elmore Leonard thought otherwise. He could picture it, especially Cooper. As he pointed out, Cooper is a cold hard controlling man in The Hanging Tree, having murdered his brother and caused his wife to commit suicide. In Man Of The West, he's a vicious ex-murderer. Given the change in the Cooper hero -- he even owned the rights to Ride The High Country, had already asked Joel McCrea to be in it with him and had also met with Sam Peckinpah, but his cancer forced him to sell the rights; yet it's intriguing to think of a Cooper film directed by Peckinpah! -- and given the societal changes in the sixties, perhaps Cooper might have changed.
But I can't imagine a Cooper character taking cruel pleasure in another man's misery and fear. That was what was always so admirable about the Cooper hero, he never took any pleasure in having to pull a trigger, in having to kill. His heroes always seemed to look for another way than a gun to solve a problem. Perhaps that's why he was so effective playing such characters as Alvin York and Jess Birdwell.
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Hey, Dan --
Cooper was offered the role of the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach and
turned it down (on the advice of Rocky, for some reason). Had he
said yes, Marlene Dietrich was to play the role of Dallas, the
Claire Trevor role.
As far as I know, that was the only film they might have done
together.
Certainly, given the bitterness between Cooper and Wayne after
High Noon, perhaps there was little interaction between Ford
and Cooper after that. Cooper was never close with Wayne after
his appalling and disgraceful behind-the-scenes stuff with
High Noon. Although, Ford was a liberal, so he was just as
disgusted with Wayne during the whole blacklist era, so not
sure why he and Cooper never worked together.
Cooper tried to get Goldwyn to buy the rights to Grapes Of Wrath,
he hoped to have Wyler direct it. But Goldwyn refused to buy it.
I think Wyler would have made a more powerful film than the
Ford version, though Fonda is outsanding.
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<Not at all, John! We love to hear stories and information on Gary, that's why we're here!>
Understood and thank you!
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Wyler apparently felt the same as you, since he considered Fonda,
then nixed him.
Cooper was offered -- and turned down -- both Barbary Coast and
Come And Get It, two mid-thirties films with which Wyler was
involved. Though it's hard to know just how much he had to do
with either film.
Wyler wanted Cooper to play the role which Frederic March
played in Best Years Of Our Lives. But Goldwyn, who had "lost"
Cooper twice, refused to let Wyler hire him. He was bitter that
Cooper hadn't signed with him after Barbara Worth and then had
refused to renew his deal after finishing Pride Of The Yankees.
Goldwyn swore he'd never work with Cooper again.
As Teresa Wright pointed out, had Cooper played the role, he'd have
been her husband twice and then her father.
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Nice stuff, Angie. Especially meshing Dolly Parton and her rapid vocals
with the softer visual pacing of The Westerner. Works very well.
Clever!
"... with a different woman every night..." catches the spirit, no?
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Catching up on various topics, noticed the Friendly Persuasion thread.
I, too, really love this film. Badly underrated, perhaps because William
Wyler is held in rather low regard by those adherents of the dominant
critical theory of the day -- the auteur theory.
Ridiculous, but there you are.
Originally, Frank Capra held the rights, and planned it as a Bing Crosby(?!?)
vehicle. However, he sold the rights to Wyler in 1946. Wyler felt that there
was ony one actor who could pull off the role of Jess Birdwell -- Cooper.
He said that the role needed an actor who could be both gentle, a
pacifist, i.e., lacking the (so-called) traditional male characteristics --
aggression, dominance, etc. -- and at the same time offer sex appeal
through his very being, through his (so-called) feminine side.
The scene in which Birdwell captures the Confederate sniper who has
executed his good friend goes against everything American masculinity
trumpets, flying fists, blazing guns, vengance. Instead of blowing
the sniper's head off -- and eliciting
huge YAHOOs and stomping feet from a bloodthirsty audience -- Birdwell
frees the man, lets him go. To me, this is one of the most
powerful and moving moments in the history of film. And only an actor
of uncommon depth (and a very secure sense of his own masculinity)
could have pulled off the duality of Birdwell: that he
is in fact stronger for not taking the sniper's life, for not acting like a "man",
but instead acting like a "woman".
Wyler keeps the camera close on Cooper as he frees the man and all
of the inner turmoil is evident in his expression, his eyes. Compare this
with John Ford's placement of the camera in The Searchers, when Wayne,
instead of killing Natalie Wood, lifts her up and tells her they're going home.
But the camera is on Wood, not Wayne, so we never see the inner
complexity of his turmoil, we only see Wood's shock and relief. But it's
Wayne's story, we should see his expression at this extraordinary
moment, but I've always believed that Ford knew Wayne wasn't capable
of capturing this complexity through his eyes and expression. Though
it's still a powerful moment, I'd still like to have seen it from Wayne's
POV. I mean, we've followed him for two hours! Imagine in Friendly
Persuasion, if the whole scene had been focused on the confederate
sniper, we'd have lost the powerful emotional impact of Birdwell's
turmoil.
Wyler and Cooper were unable to square their schedules and the years
ambled by. Fonda was briefly considered, but Wyler felt he didn't have
the requisite sex appeal. Finally, in 1955, their stars were in their courses
and they did it.
Cooper's screen persona is a fascinating study in masculinity. He's the
only star I can think of who would cry on screen -- not because he's lost
a spouse, a loved one, but because he's afraid, as he did in High Noon.
High Noon is studied in Feminist college courses -- not film schools --
as a positive example of masculinity in opposition to the normal frontier
masculinity so popular throughout literature and film.
Also, Friendly Persuasion is, as far as I know, the only big budget, studio
film out of Hollywood which is actually a pro-pacifist film.
Enough! This is turning into the length of Bleak House.
Any Gary Cooper Fans?
in Your Favorites
Posted
Miss G:
<I never even heard of either Viggo Mortensen or A History of Violence---I take it that is a feature film and not a documentary? Is it on dvd?>
Yes, it's on dvd. Not a doc, feature. Came out in 2005, a modest b.o. hit. Critics loved it. My wife, who does not care for extreme violence, was riveted from beginning to end. The violence in the title does not refer to slashing and all the other cgi-inspired nonsense.
You might have seen Viggo Mortensen without realizing it was he. He's the hero in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy -- Aragorn.
He was Diane Lane's lover in a very underrated film, A Walk On The Moon, which took place during Woodstock, upstate.
He's in Eastern Promises, opening in September, which looks very good. Directed by David Cronenberg, who also directed History/Violence.