The Bridge on the River Kwai

I have now seen enough films (two) by David Lean to know that if you want a good but not amazing British war epic made in the middle of the twentieth century, he's your guy. Like the slightly-more-heralded Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge features strong work by Alec Guinness, soldiers of different nationalities setting aside their differences to achieve something, and won a ton of awards including Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Guinness plays the commander of a British unit that surrendered to the Japanese during World War II, and is being forced to build a bridge in Thailand. Guinness initially rebukes Colonel Saito for ignoring the rules of the Geneva Convention, but after compromises are made takes on the job as a personal mission, placing his pride in the ingenuity and workmanship of British soldiers over the possibility of sabotaging their captors. He works harder towards the bridge's completion than even the Japanese do, and his award winning performance is an impressive and impassioned one.

William Holden plays the flip side of the coin, an American captive who wants no part of the project and attempts to escape. The interplay between the two men is the most interesting thing about the film, and their last encounter at the end is part of a truly outstanding climax that overshadows the rest of what I thought was a solid but less than amazing film. The performances are good and it's a pretty nice looking movie for the time, helped by being in full wide-screen color when a lot of movies were still black and white. It does a good job of taking you to another place and giving you an idea of the toil of prison labor in war time, without ever letting it get too grueling. I just didn't find myself invested are actively interested as often as I'd like, which is similar to my minor issues with Arabia. These movies are so big, I don't see why they're stimulating my brain less than some much smaller dramas of the time. I mean, the goals aren't quite the same, it just seems like war as a subject should never veer anywhere close to boredom. Good movie though, especially the ending and Guinness' work.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch is another of 1969's famous westerns, and while I didn't like it as much as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it is arguably the more important film considering the direction the medium has taken since then. It's a brutally violent film that asks you to root for guys who are by no means anywhere close to good. Butch and Sundance were criminal outlaws, sure, but they avoided bloodshed where possible. The members of the wild bunch care about each other a lot, and that camaraderie is built effectively over the course of the story. But they're very hard, very bad men, and director Sam Peckinpah doesn't white wash anything they do.

An aging-but-not-quite-old William Holden and Ernest Borgnine lead the bunch, crooks who rob banks and shoot anyone who gets in their way. After they're set up on a big job by a posse led by an old acquaintance of Holden's, they're forced to stay in the game and deal with someone they'd rather not, a Mexican general who wants a shipment of guns. It proves to be a pretty fateful final mission. What's interesting about comparing The Wild Bunch to Butch Cassidy is how their endings are so similar yet so different. The content is essentially the same, but The Wild Bunch is much more explicit, reveling in violence rather than implying it. The movie would be notable for its bloody shooting even if that's all there was to it, but the way it's shot is important too - quickly editing between various angles and maintaining a deranged coherence among all the mayhem and gore makes it extremely influential over the future of action filmmaking.

It's not just violent though. They do a good job of developing and explaining the history among the gang members and also their main pursuer ended up on their trail, making it a more complicated and interesting story than a lot of older westerns despite appearing a lot less classy due to the explicit content. A lot of the plot is actually pretty clever - the train robbery is one of the best early heists I can think of. It's just a great example of how well constructed an otherwise simple adventure movie can be, and probably more important to the development of this kind of movie than I can really fully grasp. Solid acting, good direction, fun movie.

Network

Sometimes it's a bit difficult to watch these older movies, where a single line can hang over its entire legacy, and leave you waiting for it to come while you're trying to enjoy the story. Network's mad as hell line earns that fame though, in one of the film's most memorable scenes out of many. What's even more remarkable about the movie though is how much what its central ideas are still seem familiar today. It came out 35 years ago, but what some of the characters say about the world being a business rather than a collection of nations and people is still being said today. It's kind of a scary thing to think about, and I had no idea people were already seeing things that way back then.

So Network is roughly equal parts drama and dark satire. Things start when a retiring news broadcaster at a dying network named Howard Beale declares one night that he will kill himself on air a week later. The executives try to quiet him up and get rid of him, until Faye Dunaway as a programming developer realizes the ratings potential of a "mad prophet" cursing and yelling at people on the air every night. They keep him around, shifting it from a news program to a variety show with a number of segments with Beale as the star, preaching wildly to a studio audience and 60 million viewers at home. It's a pretty ridiculous scenario, but it serves as a solid platform for a lot of black humor and well written, apocalyptic speeches.

The movie is a showcase of talent as much as anything made in a long time, getting nominated for and winning a ton of awards, including five performances nominated for acting Oscars, three winning. Beatrice Straight's supporting actress win makes it the briefest role to ever win such an award, making me think it was kind of a light category that year, but pretty much everyone in the movie is excellent. Peter Finch won a posthumous award for playing Beale, and Dunaway also won playing a pretty unusual sort of woman. The last time I saw William Holden he was twenty five years younger, but he's also good as the first casualty of the internal conflict arising at the network, and Robert Duvall is solid as well. Sidney Lumet directed, showing off more of his talent for making scenes consisting of little more than people talking to each other for minutes on end completely compelling. The movie could have easily failed utterly, but they managed to turn a string of monologues intro truly compelling cinema.

Sunset Boulevard

Billy Wilder can definitely shoot film noir. Double Indemnity is one of my favorites of the genre, and Sunset Boulevard was quite good too, especially for it's slightly different take on it. It's not about a hardened, streetwise detective solving a murder or something, it's just a down on his luck Hollywood writer who gets involved with an aging silent movie star trying to make a comeback in the world of talkies. As far as movies about the film industry itself go, it was one of the least annoyingly self massaging, although part of that might be I wasn't that familiar with the real people who made cameos (and Buster Keaton was too aged for me to recognize him on screen). But most of it is that it doesn't really sugarcoat Hollywood, in fact it makes some aspects of it seem pretty dire. Talented writers are forced to write schlock to get some money, and the second the public doesn't want you anymore you're pretty much done. It's a surprisingly effective backdrop for a story that begins with a body being discovered in a pool and then flashes back to show how we get there.

The movie mostly hinges on the performances of William Holden and Gloria Swanson. The former brings both a smarminess and a likability to the writer protagonist, and generally nails the noir narration, and the latter does very well as the aging actress, a role that was probably very close to home for her. A unique relationship develops between them as she basically forces him to become her companion with the promise that she'll pay him handsomely if he fixes up the screenplay for her comeback. Unfortunately for her ego, he ends up getting close to a younger woman while trying to get away from the mansion once in a while, and along with what's happening in her career, she becomes pretty mentally warped, heading towards an obvious breakdown. The ending is one of the most famous in cinema, and played brilliantly when it could have easily gone wrong. Just the right amount of creepy insanity. It was pretty much the last good thing Swanson did, but it was a hell of a way to go out.