Cynical Cinema

Rawhide is one of those classic TV shows that remains cool to this day mostly because of the star power involved.  In this case, the star power rests almost exclusively with Clint Eastwood, who played Rowdy Yates, the cattle-droving ramrod.  Most of those words don’t even make sense to an audience of today.  Cattle-droving?  Ramrod?  Yes, there was a job called “ramrod”.  On cattle drives.  And Clint Eastwood had that job on Rawhide.  Fitting, no?  In previous seasons, it has been a fun pastime to pick out the guest stars who went on to become huge, or who were winding down their careers.  In Season Two, Volume Two, Peter Lorre appeared as a creepy slave trader.

In Season Three, Volume One, there are not many guest stars of note.  Perhaps the biggest would be Leonard Nimoy, who went on to be Spock, revered by nerds the world over.  But there is no one of Peter Lorre’s stature, and that’s too bad.  The show remains great, though.  I like the fact that there is a massive cast, people with different jobs on the world’s longest-running cattle drive.  Each episode focuses on just a couple of those characters, which means that each episode has a totally different, if still totally western, tone.

For example, there is an episode called Incident of the Blackstorms, where a notorious outlaw named Sky Blackstorm uses Pete Nolan and the simple-minded Mushy in order to kidnap his son.  (Blackstorm is apparently native, but is clearly a caucasian actor with a painted face.)  This episode features only Nolan and Mushy, and later on the cook and a few others show up.  But the trail boss (Eric Fleming) and his right-hand man (Clint Eastwood) don’t appear in the episode at all!  Perhaps this is a way to give actors a break.  Like when rock bands used to include 10-minute drum solos in their live shows so the rest of the band can go backstage in order to abuse substances and groupies.

The next episode is all about Fleming and Eastwood.  A crazy, weird rich woman sues Gil (Fleming) and forces him to stop the cattle drive in order to figure it all out.  The other characters appear briefly, but this is the Fleming and Eastwood show (Rawhide at it’s best).  And then the next one is just Eastwood and Sheb Wooley, primarily.  The one complaint I have about Rawhide is that the end of episodes is not always satisfying, and it doesn’t always make sense.  At the end of the Sky Blackstorm episode, the outlaw’s own men conveniently turn on him for some strange reason, but it certainly helps us feel better, as it means he will die as he should, just after turning out to be the decent man he ought to be…it’s weird.

Then there’s this crazy-woman episode, where Gil somehow goes undercover at a fancy place in order to change the woman’s mind.  He’s totally smashed on whiskey, and then an hour later he has nice clothes and a shave and a haircut and appears to be totally sober.  So…he woos this woman, and makes her gunslinger helper jealous and angry, and then she buys the herd from him and installs her gunslinger as the leader, with the intent of having him shot…it makes almost no sense at all.  It’s an episode of Rawhide as difficult to follow as a Steven Seagal direct-to-DVD movie.

But it’s worth muddling through some of these complicated and poorly executed plots, because Rawhide remains badass.  With the theme song and Clint Eastwood.  What more is there?  Season Three, Volume One comes out December 9th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Only four of the sixteen episodes on The Untouchables: Season Two Volume Two actually deal with Al Capone and bootlegging in any way, but the series is still top-notch. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Season Two, Volume Two on Tuesday, August 26th, and it remains one of the coolest, most watchable old shows available on DVD. Robert Stack as Elliott Ness is as cool as ever, and the staccato delivery of the narrator gives the show a documentary-style 1950s feel. Dated, but still really cool. Adding to the cool factor is Telly Savales, who co-stars in the episode titled “The Antidote”.

Mobsters, G-Men, bulletproof cars, guns, drugs, booze, showgirls and crooked politicians. The Untouchables is one of the greatest examples of television film noir in history. The one complaint I still have about the series is that Elliott Ness is the hero, and Al Capone is the obvious nemesis, but the series deals with Capone only occasionally. Capone is played by Neville Brand, and he is so magnetic that I just want to see more of him. There are so many episodes about different bootleggers and mobsters and gangsters, that it seems as though they might as well have made those about Capone, instead of a new nameless bad guy each time. The Untouchables is still one of the best classic shows available on DVD, and Season Two, Volume Two is available today.

The best reason to watch Rawhide, the TV series, is that it is good. The second-best reason is to watch Clint Eastwood in the TV show he did before he was CLINT EASTWOOD. As Rowdy Yates, his TV persona is just about as powerful as his Man With No Name persona (the one he filmed while on a summer hiatus from Rawhide during Season Five). Season Three, Volume One is on DVD May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it is well worth it. The other major star of the series was Eric Fleming, whose deep voice and stoic character are perfectly suited to his role as Trail Boss Gil Favor. There are some irritating characters, the ones you would expect from a Western TV series in the 60s. Like, the cook always has to be an eccentric and crotchety old coot with a beard. And his assistant has to be a man with the brain of a child but lots of brawn. But Rawhide rises above these stereotypes, and succeeds at being a very good show. Sadly, Eric Fleming didn’t continue on to a Eastwood-calibre career after this show, he was drowned in Peru during the filming of an adventure series called High Jungle in 1966. But he could have been big.

Another huge reason (for the movie buff, anyway) to watch Season Three of Rawhide, is that this will be the only chance you ever have to see Clint Eastwood share the screen with Peter Lorre! Lorre, on the downside of his career, and looking about as fat and bloated as Orson Welles, was as creepy and glib as ever in Episode 5, called Incident Of The Slave Master. (All the episodes are called the Incident of something or other.) He is running a slave operation in the west, and the cattle-driving gang put a stop to it. With, of course, gunfire and horses. Lorre died in 1964, before Eastwood released A Fistful of Dollars later that same year, and it’s not like the two would have been cast in similar movies. A small moment of trivia for the rabid film fans.

Also for the rabid fans in Season 3 - the only on-screen pairing of Eastwood and Lorre’s Maltese Falcon co-star Mary Astor, in an episode called The Incident Near The Promised Land. Astor retired in 1964. And Mercedes McCambridge, who lit up Hollywood with her screen debut in All The Kings’ Men in 1949, appears in Incident Of The Captive. McCambridge guest starred often on Rawhide and other TV shows like Gunsmoke and Laverne and Shirley and Bonanza. But she is likely best-known now as the voice of the demon in The Exorcist. Too bad - she really had a great career that added up to much more than that.

And the last reason I can think of is that theme song. One of the best theme songs in TV history - load ‘em up! Move ‘em out! I think most of us under the age of 50 are mostly familiar with the song because it’s the one Ackroyd and Belushi sang at that country and western bar in The Blues Brothers. And that’s how I know it too, and it always brings back fond memories. Rawhide is a solid Western TV show from the 60s, it involves Clint Eastwood, and that’s a good enough reason for a Western nut like me to want to pick it up. I love them cattle drivers. It isn’t Red River (the all-time best cattle driving movie…yes, there is an all-time best cattle driving movie, thanks to the Duke), but it gives me my western fix in the meantime.

There were certain roles in the history of movies that could be played only by Charlton Heston. Moses, Ben-Hur, Michaelangelo, and El Cid. Heston was never much of an actor when it came to emoting. He was quite the actor, however, when it came to puffing out his chest and speechifying. He was also very adept at looking heroic, twisting his face into furious and righteous anger, and talking justice with his deep, powerful voice and square, stoic chin. Very good stuff, these Heston epics. I’m going to go ahead and assume that everyone has seen The Ten Commandments, because it’s all over TV at Easter time. I will also assume that everyone is aware of Ben-Hur, because it is one of those all-time classics that is on TV so often that it is difficult to miss. Perhaps the same goes for The Agony And The Ecstasy. And I will further make the assumption that virtually no one has seen El Cid, since I have never come across this epic on television or in the video store. The reason it hasn’t been in the video store is that it was not available on DVD. Until this coming Tuesday. El Cid is being released by Alliance Films on DVD in a glorious three-disc set this coming Tuesday. And it is a must-have for any epic film buff.

This is one of those sets that comes with everything. A booklet detailing the massive preparations for shooting this massive epic. A comic book from the 60s that takes us through the entire El Cid movie, such that we don’t even have to watch the film if we would rather take ten minutes to flip through a comic book. And it also has a written introduction to the film by Martin Scorcese, and a bunch of postcard-sized movie posters that nerds like me enjoy putting up on their walls. The El Cid posters are now up beside the similar ones I got in the special editions of The Good The Bad and The Ugly and To Kill A Mockingbird. The three-disc set includes some very cool special features - interviews, behind the scenes stuff, and an endurance-testing feature-length commentary. El Cid is more than three hours long, which means the commentary involves talking for more than three hours straight. That must have been tough.

El Cid is the true story of a Spanish hero named Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, who managed to unite Christian Spain with the Muslim Moors in order to repel an attack against Spain by an evil warlord, Ben Yussef (played wonderfully by Herbert Lom). It is the sort of role Heston was born to play, and the supporting cast is good as well. Watching a young Sophia Loren in the role of Heston’s wife, as they go through a love-hate relationship, certainly lends credence to the idea that she really didn’t start getting really hot until she hit her forties. Sure, she’s attractive in this movie, but the Sophia Loren I think of is far better looking, and also far older. I could go through the rest of the excellent cast too, but there are way too many to mention. In the 60s, you see, there was no CGI, and therefore when you see a crowd of thousands of people, or a battle involving thousands of soldiers, it is actually thousands of actors and extras, and not computer-generated! And that really makes a difference, much as some technophiles would have us believe it does not. The musical score is terrific, and the panoramic battle scenes must be seen in HD or at the very least on a large television in widescreen.

El Cid is not quite the cinematic achievement that are some of Heston’s other best works. It does not quite reach the heights of Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments. Director Anthony Mann, while he was a very capable director, never really lived up to his promise, and this may be his best film. (Also excellent were The Bend In The River and Winchester ‘73.) But really, El Cid bears the imprint of Saumel Bronston, the producer, as much if not more as it does the talents of Anthony Mann. Bronston followed up the massive production of El Cid with a few great films, such as King of Kings and The Fall of the Roman Empire, and for a few years was the king of the sweeping cinematic epic. Heston will always be the number one star of the biblical epic and this kind of gigantic film, but Mann will never be considered among the greats of the genre. That title could well go to David Lean, the man behind Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago. (This run of three consecutive movies is likely unparallelled in the history of cinema. Perhaps only Francis Ford Coppola comes close, with The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather Part II.)

El Cid is not an all-time classic, but it certainly bears watching. And this three-disc set would be a fantastic addition to the collection of any true movie fanatic. Don’t miss out - it gets released by Alliance Films on Tuesday.

Matlock was a series that began in 1986. At that time, it’s audience was, as is my understanding, comprised entirely of people over the age of 70. I know this because I watch the Simpsons - Maaatloooock! The first season of the show replaced another cautionary tale of 80s television, The A-Team, on ABC on Friday nights. That first season saw it’s release on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Now, I don’t want to question Paramount’s judgement - they have been good to me. But exactly who do they think might be buying this? The people who watched the show in Season One are now, at least, 92 years old. Which means that half of them are dead, and the other half are old-timers who are resistant to new technologies, and who don’t own a DVD player.

I have a lawyer. He is fairly competent, I think. He knows his way around the law, and he is doing some fine work for me right now. And if I ever get arrested for that murder I never committed, I would likely hire him to save me. However, while I’m certain he would be able to defend me on legal grounds, I doubt he would have the ability to investigate and solve the crime all by himself. For that, I would rely on the police. Matlock, on the other hand, can do it all. Amazingly, in every episode of Matlock over the course of the show’s nine years and 195 episodes, Matlock was never asked to defend someone who had actually committed a crime. This is the kind of luck that befell Jessica Fletcher only in reverse, on that other much-loved-by-octogenarians show, Murder She Wrote. Matlock was anchored by Andy Griffith, who plays Ben Matlock as some kind of cross between Columbo and Perry Mason. Both of which were superior shows to Matlock.

Which brings me to another DVD set released today. The 50th Anniversary edition of Perry Mason, a show anchored by Raymond Burr. I like Andy Griffith, and I like Raymond Burr, but what made Perry Mason better than Matlock was, for the most part, the fact that Perry Mason showed up late in the episodes. The beginning of the episode would deal with the crime itself, and the various people who could possibly have committed that crime, and then halfway through, Perry Mason would somehow become involved and solve the case. The 50th Anniversary edition is four discs, full of some great episodes and even better guest stars. A very young James Coburn, a very young Robert Redford, an aging Bette Davis, and many others. Can you imagine Matlock with Julia Roberts and Robert DeNiro as guest stars? No? That’s why Perry Mason was better.