John Ford.
Here’s the deal, I like movies. Here’s another deal, I like to write. Write what? Just about anything, however poetry is the playmate with which I have my greatest longevity, notice I didn’t say “success.” But fun doesn’t stop at stanzaic forms, I also like writing fiction sometimes if it doesn’t demand too much rational thought; and from time to time I even enjoy trying my hand at non-fiction--hence this blog. Though in truth, the blog is more an outgrowth of loneliness and some amorphous wish for approval. From who? You I guess. Welcome to the psychological judgment forum of one Dennis M. Dorney. My, but the the world's indignities never stop.
Now I’ve completed my first paragraph and still haven’t decided what I’m even writing about, but I think it has to do with John Wayne, John Ford, Vera Miles and a Western movie I don’t value very highly (see entry from November 23, 2009). But it also has to do with Kent Jones, a film critic whose work I usually find in Film Comment. For years I’ve read Film Comment, a glossy film magazine one may find at most newsstands, usually with the picture of a recognizable star on the cover from their newest offering. It’s part fan magazine, part film criticism; once a rather staid textual organ published bi-monthly by the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Surfeit with scholarly articles on world cinema, it saw it’s readership begin to slide, and so Lincoln Center brought in a new, younger, hipper editorial board with fewer fusty associations. Whereas the magazine's covers at one time might be expected to feature a dour black and white still from Carl Dreyer’s Vredens dag, after the marketing department’s make-over we were given Jim Carrey from the Farrelly brothers’ 2000 comedy Me, Myself and Irene. As memory serves there was a letter from the new editor, Gavin Smith, promising to include a more eclectic emphasis, and a more insightful examination into contemporary culture and film, I think he may have even used the word “fun.” I was shocked. I liked my movie criticism dense with polysyllabics I didn’t know the meaning of, concerning films I’d never seen. It helped shore up the many insecurities I maintained in the realm of my would-be intellectualism by being able to summarize these articles and opinions, perhaps even embracing them as my own. Only later would I come to accept my obvious exclusion from the high-brow club; luckily it was about that time that a flood of advanced film degrees were offered at American Universities in critical theory; a time when PhD candidates in film departments began publishing books and articles on subjects which might easily include the Foucaultian insights of Jerry Lewis in Cinderfella. Post-Modernism had become the new catchall, even in the heartland. The dumbing down of America segued rather painlessly with my own acceptance of diminished critical abilities. People were heard at art gallery openings discussing the new Superman movie while balancing an appetizer and cheap wine in a plastic cup—whereas not long before the topic would have been considered déclassé, and been jettisoned in favor of the most recent Ingmar Bergman slog-fest, or the always dependable Jean-Luc Godard.
It was during that time, roughly the end of the millennium, that I began to read Kent Jones’ articles in Film Comment. Remember that I had a grudge against the new editorial staff who had replaced the ousted editor (my memory is faulty, but I want to say the prior editor was Richard T. Jameson). Anyway, I discovered that reading Kent Jones’ pieces was always thrilling, even when the movies he wrote about might seem uninteresting. Usually, the movies were shown to be much more complex and valuable than I had first believed. In no time he and fellow film critic/editor Gavin Smith among others had completely won me over. My knee jerk reaction to the changing of the guard was pleasantly amended. There’s something about reading a good movie critic that I find of utmost pleasure, it usually involves their balance of insight, wit, goofy obsession for all things celluloid and the grounded base which the best of them embrace—displaying knowledge and pliable facility with language, yet always remembering that snobbishness is a deal-killer. Talk down to the audience and you lose that audience, or at least you lose me.
So here we are, a hand full of paragraphs under the bridge and I still haven’t found any core to my ramblings, good thing I’m not being graded. But let’s push onto John Wayne and his part in all this, shall we? In 1962 the justifiably reverenced American director John Ford directed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Though I’ve watched many Ford films, not exclusively Westerns, but many non-Western dramas as well, I’d never seen his 1962 release. It starred John Wayne, James Stewart and Vera Miles. Certainly, I’d read about it, seen it on people’s lists of favorite movies, noted it referenced as part of the cinematic canon, even heard it quoted: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” As the years passed, not having seen the movie was becoming a larger and larger embarrassment and a secret. Oh, I’d had many opportunities to view it. The movie has played on double bills in revival houses and film exhibitions for thirty years, and it's certainly a perennial on television’s retro programming channels. Truth is, I had begun to view the film on more than one occasion, but I found it unwatchable and stopped long before its denouement. But last week with a fresh resolve, I finally viewed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in its entirety. It was bad, or using an exaltation I prefer even more, Holy Shithouse Mouse it was bad!
Unhappily, it placed me in a quandary. As I’ve admitted elsewhere, I’m becoming truly unsettled by disliking movies that others revere. Being a misanthrope isn’t really that pleasant a role, it also tends to reduce the number of people who want to talk with you, let alone argue the merits of a particular tenet, or movie. I’m 61 years old, I know having companionship is more important than being right, or defending some digressive opinion. Don’t I? So, why did I log onto the imdb site, enter the Western movie fans' comments section and write to all those Duke worshipers that I thought The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was a bad movie and John Ford was completely responsible for its many faults? It’s like going to a Republican Party Convention and pissing on a Presidential photograph of Ronald Reagan. There’s nothing to win except antipathy and loathing. By the next day emails were flooding in from guys named Buck45, RowdySidekick, and HighPlainsHondo. No, they didn’t want my friendship, but felt compelled to point out my errors in cognitive assessment; my ignorance of what constitutes great acting; my inability to grasp superior art in any of its dramatic forms—usually febrile blurts of text with exclamation points and capital letters throughout. Jeez, chill out cowboys.
But that wasn’t so bad, everyone likes to call people names on the internet. Problem is, maybe they were right--not necessarily about whether the movie was good or bad (it was a stinker), but on reflection and in rereading my comments I've realized that my assessment isn't written very well. It isn’t Kent Jones building an invincible superstructure of prose to protect his in-depth observations, but rather a guy sticking out his tongue at a crowd of strangers, at least metaphorically. I was neither encouraging anyone to see my position neutrally, nor was I admitting that the prevailing opinions of Western lovers might include salient points. No, I was throwing verbal pot shots from the safety of my shooting blind, and patting myself on the back for courageously pointing out the errors of their long-held misconceptions. I forgot that opinions just aren’t that important, one way or the other. Sounds almost religious in it’s sonorous simplicity, but nobody cares much what anyone thinks except themselves, so why raise a ruckus? Or to quote Thumper’s mother, "If you can’t say . . ."
So, how to exhibit my cinematic disapproval of what I consider a shabby film, and yet not ruffle the feathers of those who don’t agree? Well, Kent Jones would find a forensic solution I’m sure, one biting with wit and conversely hammered from genuine concern into universal acceptance, but as I’ve already admitted, the only thing Kent Jones and I share in writing is spell check. Eventually, the solution came to me. I retrieved the video tape of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from my library (yes, as a matter of fact, I still watch VHS tapes if I haven’t replaced them), then . . . well, perhaps it’s more fitting if I just show you a picture:
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.(Above black and white photo of John Ford was taken by Richard Avedon in 1972 a year before Ford's death. Color photo below shot by Nick Minkler, 2009)
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