Hardcore (1979)

Hardcore begins in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Christmas day, where much of the congregation from the Dutch Reformation Church has gathered together in the house of Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott).  Even allowing for the fact that it is a Christian holiday, we see that for these people, religion permeates every aspect of their lives.  And while this movie can be enjoyed by those that know next to nothing about Christian theology, I believe an appreciation for this film is enhanced by an understanding of the particular version of Christianity that these people believe in, especially since the story can be understood allegorically.  For that reason, and because I have always been fascinated by the doctrine of predestination, I shall indulge myself in a preliminary discussion of it.

In one room, some men are discussing the unpardonable sin, rejection of the Holy Spirit.  Actually, the verses in the Bible that mention the unpardonable sin, Mark 3:29 and Luke 12:10, speak of blaspheming against the Holy Ghost, but these men are apparently construing that as rejecting the Holy Ghost. One man questions whether one can be guilty of that sin unwittingly. That suggestion is dismissed by another as verging on the Pelagian heresy.

Pelagius was a British monk who, on his visit to Rome just before the turn of the fifth century, was disturbed by the effect that the idea of predestination was having on people.  It was thought that because of Adam’s original sin, everyone is born sinful.  Only with the grace of God could a person be saved, but man is so corrupt that he cannot sincerely ask for God’s grace unless he already has it.  This is known as the doctrine of prevenient grace.  Then, once one has God’s grace, one’s salvation is assured, and one has no choice but to follow the path of righteousness, known as the doctrine of irresistible grace.  And as God ordained all things in advance, it was already determined before man was born whether he would receive God’s grace and be saved or not.  Pelagius concluded that these doctrines were causing people to become fatalistic.  If everyone is predestined to either be saved or damned, there seems to be little point in trying to be good.

According to St. Augustine, a contemporary of Pelagius and a strong proponent of predestination, man did have free will, but without God’s grace, all he could do was choose one sin rather than another.  Pelagius countered this by arguing that man’s free will was such that he could choose to be good all on his own, and that he could ask for God’s grace freely.  Subsequent Pelagians continued this line of thought, maintaining that Adam’s sin was not passed on to subsequent generations, and that there were men without sin before the coming of Christ.  Of course, this called into question the whole need for Christ’s crucifixion:  if man was not all that sinful, there seemed to be no need for God to atone for man’s sins by suffering on the cross.  As a result, this line of thinking came to be known as the Pelagian heresy.

With the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin took predestination one step further.  Whereas Augustine had maintained that man had free will, but that it was not worth much unless accompanied by the grace of God, Luther and Calvin rejected the idea of free will outright.  There was no such thing.  All had been ordained by God from eternity, including who would be saved and who would be damned.  As Calvin said, everyone deserves damnation, and all salvation is unmerited, granted by God to a select few, not because they deserved it, but because it pleased God to do so.  It is this Calvinistic theology that Jake’s congregation believes in.

Referring back to the man who wondered whether one could commit the unpardonable sin of rejecting the Holy Ghost unwittingly, he was suggesting that if such a man knew he was doing that, he might choose not to.  But that would seem to suggest that he had the power to choose otherwise, which implies free will.

While the theological discussion among the men is going on in one room, in another room a bunch of kids are watching television with Joe VanDorn, apparently Jake’s father.  On the television, some men dressed in Santa Claus suits are dancing to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”  Joe gets disgusted, stands up and turns the set off, saying that the people who make shows like that are the kids who used to live in Grand Rapids and then left for California (a harbinger of what is to come).  “I didn’t like them when they were here, and I don’t like them out there.”  It seems like harmless enough entertainment, but Santa Claus and Christmas trees represent a secularized form of Christmas, not to mention the fact that a lot of Calvinists regard dancing as sinful.

Jake voices some concern about his teenage daughter Kristen and her cousin Marsha going to a Youth Calvinist Convention in California.  He expresses his misgivings somewhat jokingly, because he knows they will be heavily chaperoned, but as it turns out, such concern was more warranted than he imagined.

The next day at his furniture factory, Jake talks to a woman he hired to design a sign for his business.  He doesn’t quite like it because it is too “overpowering,” although if anything is overpowering, it is Jake’s personality.  The woman says she has worked really hard to get the color just right, but she says she will change it, if that is what he wants.  He says he would not have hired a display designer, if he did not trust her taste.  But he keeps expressing misgivings until she agrees to change the sign the way he wants it.  Once she consents to making the sign the way he prefers it, Jake says, “If you say so.”  This recapitulates the whole business about God and free will discussed above.  The display designer supposedly has free will in choosing the color for the sign, but the color that will end up being on the sign has been ordained by Jake.

Jake gets a call from one of the counselors, informing him that on a trip to an amusement park, Kristen disappeared.  Jake and Marsha’s father Wes, Jake’s brother-in-law, fly out to California, where Marsha tells them that there was a boy there that Kristen met.  At the police station, the detective suggests that Kristen may have run away.  When Jake becomes angry, saying his daughter was not the type to run away, he gets his first of many doses of culture shock when the detective informs him that her being a runaway is the best they can hope for, as he points to pictures of other girls who may never come back at all.

Jake decides to hire a private detective, Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), whose hardboiled, irreligious talk disturbs Jake, even though he realizes Mast is the kind of guy he needs to help find his daughter.  Mast apologizes for offending Jake’s religious beliefs, noting that he is a practitioner of Mind Science himself, as if that is supposed to be reassuring.  Mast tells Jake and Wes to go back home and says he will call them when he knows something.

Several weeks later, Wes tells Jake that we can’t always understand the Lord’s ways, that the Lord his testing him, that he has to have faith.  This is an irritating trait that some people have, presuming to advise those suffering from a misfortune about the mysterious ways of God, but considering the community in which they live, it is not surprising.  In any event, Jake expresses his contempt for the remark about having faith.  As is often the case, it is easy to talk about God’s ways and having faith as long as the bad stuff is happening to others.  But now that something bad may have happened to his daughter, he begins to have doubts.

Mast turns up in Grand Rapids with an 8mm hardcore movie, which he shows to Jake in a “stall” theater that he has use of for an hour.  Today, Jake would be told which adult website to look at, but back in the 1970s, when this movie was made, before cable, video cassette recorders, and the internet, most pornographic movies were seen in adult movie theaters or in adult bookstores with private stalls.  The movie shows two men having sex with Kristen, which has a devastating effect on Jake.  Mast promises he will find her, and he heads back to California.

Jake gets tired of just waiting around, so he drives out to California and surprises Mast while he is in the middle of “doing research” (slipping the panties off a porn star).  Jake becomes so angry, he runs Mast out of his own apartment, and then goes through some of the evidence that Mast has accumulated (pictures, names, addresses) and decides to see if he can find his daughter himself.

The structure of this movie from this point is like that in Dante’s Inferno, where Jake gradually descends into the sex trade, at first by looking at the street prostitutes and advertisements, then by pretending to be a customer in an adult book store where he looks at the various adult novelties and magazines.  He does fine as long as people think he just wants sex, but as soon as he starts asking questions, trying to find out if anyone has seen his daughter, he runs into trouble, at one point being bounced from a whorehouse.

Since that gets him nowhere, he decides he will do better pretending to be a producer of pornographic movies, which will allow him to meet a lot of people in that business.  He goes to see Mr. Ramada, a movie producer whose name Jake got from Mast’s files.  Ramada gives Jake some advice.  “Start small.  Start with the kiddie porn.”  Well, that makes sense.  Children are small.  Ramada is serious, but clearly Paul Schrader, the writer and director of this movie, is making a sick joke, although one with a purpose.  I said that this movie has the structure of Dante’s Inferno, where we encounter increasingly worse aspects of the sex trade as the movie proceeds.  Child pornography is the worst form of pornography, belonging in what would correspond to the lowest circle of Hell.  But Ramada makes it sound as if child pornography corresponds to Limbo, where one finds the unbaptized infants.

The reason Schrader dismissed child pornography in this manner was to get it out of the way.  He wanted snuff films to be the worst form of pornography in his movie, especially since it would directly threaten Kristen.  Technically, the 8mm movie showing Kristen having sex would today be counted as child pornography, because she is a minor.  But what Ramada is referring to, of course, is prepubescent children, which is vastly worse.

Jake does not take the advice about kiddie porn, of course, but he does have some success posing as a producer of smut.  In pretending to interview “actors” for a film, one of the men he saw in the movie with Kristen finally shows up.  When Jake asks him where he can find the girl he was in the movie with, the guy says she abused him in the making of that movie and that he never wants to work with that “freaky bitch” again.  Jake becomes angry and beats the porn star until he gets some information out of him, which leads him to Niki (Season Hubley), whom Jake had already met on the set of a porn film being produced by Ramada.   Niki regularly works at a place called Les Girls, and if you ever wanted to find out just how disgusting the sex trade can be, the scene at that establishment alone is worth the price of admission.  Niki will become his guide into the lower regions of the sex trade, much in the way Virgil was a guide for Dante.  Virgil was a virtuous pagan.  Niki is also a pagan of sorts, referring to herself as a Venusian, as in Venus, the goddess of love.  She agrees to help Jake find Kristen.

Niki is perceptive.  She quickly figures out that Jake is not a producer.  He tells her he is a detective, but she sees through that too.  He finally tells her that he is Kristen’s father and that he is a widower, but later she asks him point blank, “Your wife’s not dead, is she?” to which he admits his wife left him. She is clearly thinking it was for the same reason that his daughter ran away.

In addition to being smart, Niki is likable.  In fact, we begin at this point to compare her to Jake’s daughter, who is a big nothing.  Kristen is so docile and passive that it would be easy to indoctrinate her into a religion, and then just as easy for someone to come along and talk her into running away.  We feel sorry for Kristen, who cannot help being what she is (there is no free will, after all), but we would much rather spend time with Niki.

She becomes curious about Jake’s beliefs, and he tells her they can be summed up by the acronym “TULIP,” which covers some of the things discussed above.  “T” stands for “total depravity,” which is the doctrine of original sin, that man is incapable of good.  “U” stands for “unconditional election, which is the belief that God has chosen a certain number of elect from the beginning of time.  “L” stands for “limited atonement,” which means only the elect will go to Heaven.  “I” stands for “irresistible grace,” meaning that one who has God’s grace cannot choose to reject the Holy Ghost.  And “P” stands for the “perseverance of the saints,” by which is meant that you cannot fall from grace once you have it.

Niki helps Jake look for Tod, the other guy in the film with Kristen.  She learns that Tod has been associating with Ratan, and she becomes visibly shaken, saying, “He’s into pain.”  Of course, the name “Ratan” is only one letter removed from “Satan,” which is appropriate, since he is the most evil man in the entire sex trade.  Mast, who in the meantime has been secretly rehired by Wes, catches up with Jake.  When asked, Mast tells him that Ratan is the kind of man who can supply child whores and sex slaves, and who can have people raped or killed while the cameras are rolling.  Niki sets up an appointment for Jake to meet Tod in an adult bookstore, where Jake says he wants to see one of Ratan’s most recent films, thinking that Kristen may be in it.  It turns out she is not, which is fortunate, because what starts out to be a phony bondage flick turns into a snuff film in which a man and a woman are murdered by Ratan with a knife.  By the time the movie is over, Tod has disappeared.

Just as we compared Niki with Kristen, Niki begins to think of herself as Jake’s daughter, telling Mast that Jake will take care of her, get her out of the sex trade.  Mast ridicules the idea.  When Jake returns, he demands that Niki tell him where he can find Tod.  She is afraid to talk, saying she is afraid Jake will desert her.  He slaps her and threatens to beat her with his fists until she tells him.  Then he kisses her on the forehead and promises he won’t forget her.

Jake catches up with Tod at his bondage business and beats him until he tells Jake where Ratan is.  When Jake finds Ratan in a strip joint, Kristen is with him.  Ratan slashes Jake with his knife and runs out.  Mast had followed Jake, and he shoots Ratan, killing him.  Kristen is hostile to Jake at first. Her rejection of their way of life in Grand Rapids is like the rejection of the Holy Spirit, which is the unpardonable sin.  But the elect can never fall from grace, and Jake makes excuses for her, saying they forced her. Kristen asserts that she left because she wanted to, but there is no such thing as free will in their religion.  Jake admits his failures, however, and they reconcile.  After helping his daughter into the police car (they need her as a witness), he turns and sees Niki.  As he fumbles with his words, she realizes that Mast was right, that Jake has no more need of her.  Jake turns to Mast, asking him if there is something that can be done for her, if money would help.  But in so doing, Jake refers to her as “the girl” rather than as “Niki,” so we know he wants to distance himself from her.  Mast tells him to go home, that he does not belong there.

In his Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary makes the following observation in reviewing this movie:

By the time Scott [Jake] saves his daughter from the pimp who controls her, he believes he has learned to be a good father to her—but his sudden rejection of Hubley [Niki], as being unworthy to be his daughter’s adopted sister, shows he is a hypocrite.  … [The] ending is not very satisfying because the girl you care about gets the shaft while the other gets salvation.

Peary is right as far as how we feel about the ending, but that is precisely the effect Schrader intended.  Kristen is like one of the elect in Calvinism, someone who has been saved without seeming to be worthy of special consideration; while Niki is like one of the damned, whose exclusion from being one of God’s chosen strikes us as not only unfair, but also heartless.

A Day in the Country (1936)

In the movie A Day in the Country, a man, Monsieur Dufour, his wife, Juliette, his daughter, Henriette, her fiancé, Anatole, and the grandmother go the country for some fishing and a picnic.  Two men, Rodolphe and Henri, take one look at the wife and the daughter and decide to knock off a quick piece, although they have some disagreement as to who gets which one.  They manage to distract the husband and the fiancé by lending them fishing poles while Rodolphe and Henri each take one of the two women out on the river on a couple of rowboats.  Henri, the one who paired up with the Henriette, had some misgivings about getting her pregnant and ruining her life, but he finally decided to screw her anyway.  And it didn’t take him long, about five minutes after he pulled the boat to shore and sat her under a tree.

It must have been pretty steamy for the both of them, because they are still thinking about how good it was years later.  For some reason, Henriette marries Anatole, whom she no longer loves once Henri has had his way with her.  In fact, we wonder if she ever loved him, because she sure didn’t seem to.  But maybe she finally had to marry Anatole anyway, for the same reason that Henri feared.

The word is that Jean Renoir, who directed this movie, never got to finish it, so maybe that is why we never find out how Rodolphe made out with Juliette.  But as Rodolphe pointed out to Henri earlier on, when women are married, you don’t have to worry about getting them pregnant.

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)

Watching The Mask of Fu Manchu today, one is very likely to wonder if this movie was the inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Both movies are set in roughly the same time period, the 1930s.  In the latter, there is an American archaeologist who is searching for an ancient artifact (the Ark of the Covenant); in the former, there is a group of British archaeologists who embark on such a quest (looking for the mask and sword of Genghis Khan).  In the latter, the Nazis are also in search of the Ark, which has (supernatural) powers they believe will be useful to them in the coming war; in the former, an evil Chinese leader, Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff), is in search of the sword and mask for the (psychological) power he believes they will bring him in his ability to inspire hordes of Chinese soldiers by causing them to think he is the reincarnation of Genghis Khan.  The mask and sword are buried in the tomb of Genghis Khan, somewhere in the Gobi desert, where the team of archaeologists must get to before Fu Manchu discovers where it is.  Once they arrive, they are eventually captured, but eventually manage to overpower their captors, kill Fu Manchu and wipe out his followers.  And just as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark is deliberately lost again by burying it deep in a warehouse, so too is the sword of Genghis Khan buried again, this time at sea.

One major difference between the two movies is the unabashed racism in The Mask of Fu Manchu.  We are used to seeing racism in older movies, but there are different kinds of racism, and this movie is a good illustration of that.  One way of distinguishing racism is by the type of racial differences assumed to exist, of which there are three:  the physical, the mental, and the moral.

African Americans, who belong to the “black race,” are typically assumed to be physically superior to all the others.  In Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks:  An Interpretive History of Blacks in Films, he distinguished different kinds of black stereotypes, the ones referred to in the title.  The “buck” is hypersexual and usually has a powerful physique.  In Gone With the Wind, for example, there is no question about who the strongest man in the movie is, and that is Big Sam, Scarlett’s former slave, who rescues her when she is attacked.

Other than that, Caucasians, who belong to the “white race,” are presumed by most racists to be superior in the other two categories, the mental and the moral, at least with respect the black race.  Native Americans, who belong to the “red race,” are depicted in old movies (movies made before World War II) as being equal to the white race physically and mentally, but morally inferior on account of their being thought of as savages.

The unusual thing about Asians, who belong to the “yellow race,” is that there seems to be an unmentioned fear that they actually have the edge on the white race as far as intelligence is concerned.  When Fu Manchu mentions that he is a doctor of philosophy, of law, and of medicine, each from a different British or American university, he brings to mind that sinister remark often uttered by Asians in the old movies, “I was educated in your country.”  At the end of the movie, he and his followers are destroyed by a machine capable of delivering a continuous stream of a million volts of electricity when the archaeologists get their hands on it.  As this marvelous machine was invented by the Chinese, that is further implicit evidence of their superior intelligence.

Like the red and black races, the yellow race was often depicted as being morally inferior, as is the case in this movie.  But whereas the red race had the excuse of being primitives, as did the black race when encountered in Africa, the immoral nature of the yellow race exists despite their advantages in civilization and education.  This makes them seem especially evil.  And this movie plays that up in a big way, for we witness many scenes of highly imaginative torture.

One aspect of the immoral nature of the so-called inferior races is sexual.  Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) is the daughter of Fu Manchu, whom the latter offers as a sexual bribe to the kidnapped British archaeologist to get him to tell where the mask and sword are, and she seems most willing to be the sexual reward for his willingness to talk.  In fact, she is portrayed as a woman who is aroused by witnessing torture and likes to have sex with a man just before he is put to death.

As for the men, there is a famous line where Fu Manchu, just before he offers up the sacrifice of a virgin white woman to the gods, as preparation for conquering the world, asks his minions if they would like to have white maidens like her for their wives.  When they cheer in affirmation, he says, “Then conquer and breed.  Kill the white men and take his women.”

Finally, there is the complete contempt for human life attributed to the yellow race in this movie.  Fu Manchu has what appears to be several black slaves, all of whom would fit into the “buck” category:  big, muscular men who mostly stand around with their arms folded.  In one scene, where Fu Manchu prepares a serum from a variety of venomous creatures, he pulls a poisonous snake out of a cask.  We expect him to milk the poison out of the snake by squeezing its glands, but that is apparently too much trouble.  Instead, two bucks hold a third while Fu Manchu lets the snake bite him, after which he draws out some poison with a syringe.  Then, as he continues preparing the serum, the bitten man slowly dies, at which point Fu Manchu waves his hand for the other two bucks to take him away.

But I guess the producers of the movie got to feeling a little bad about portraying all these Chinese people as being so evil and cruel.  And so, while the archaeologists are on a ship heading back to England, dinner is announced by the ship’s steward, who is Chinese.  Corresponding to what Bogle referred to as a “coon” in his book, a black man who is simpleminded and cowardly, this steward might be thought of as a “yellow coon.”  Whereas Boris Karloff and Myna Loy played Chinese characters in yellowface, the producers apparently decided to let this silly character, who looks all the sillier on account of having a missing tooth, be played by an Willie Fung, an actor who was actually born in China.  Commisioner Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone), who organized the expedition, asks the steward if he is a doctor of philosophy, law, or medicine.  When he answers that he is not, Smith extends his hand and congratulates him (for knowing his place, presumably). The producers were no doubt pleased with themselves for making this magnanimous gesture, confirming in their minds the intrinsic nobility of the white race in generously allowing that there is such a thing as a “good Chinaman.”

Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu has the most horrible looking vampire of any movie ever made. It is hard to believe that when they made Dracula in 1931, they just picked Bela Lugosi and let it go at that. The connection between the Black Death and vampires, which antedates this movie, is emphasized. It suggests either that vampires were a supernatural explanation for the plague or that deaths from vampires were dismissed as being the result of disease. This combines ominously with the movie’s suggestion that there is a connection between the vampires’ need for blood and sexual desire, in which case vampirism might be a metaphor for syphilis. Count Orlok (Max Schreck) gets very excited when he sees a picture of Ellen (Greta Schröder) and speaks of her beautiful neck. The fact that she is a “sinless maiden” makes her especially erotic, so much so that she is able to keep Orlok drinking from her neck when he knows he should be getting back to his coffin where he will be safe during the day.  As a result, he gets caught by the rising sun and is destroyed.

A point of trivia: this vampire casts a reflection in the mirror, unlike in Dracula, for we see his reflection while he is drinking Ellen’s blood.

Wings (1927)

Except for Clara Bow, I did not recognize the main actors in Wings, but that is not unusual for a silent film. So when I saw Gary Cooper, I was stunned, especially when it turned out that he only had a bit part. It is hard to believe that the producer of this movie did not immediately see his star quality and make more of it.

In any event, the story is about a couple of fighter pilots during World War I, plus a complicated side story of unrequited love involving a couple of women, one of which is played by the above-mentioned Clara Bow. The pilot named Dave (Richard Arlen) is obviously doomed. The sad farewell to his parents is the first clue. Then he tells his friend Jack (Charles Rogers) that he thinks the next flying mission will be his last, and asks him to see that his parents get his medal. Finally, he forgets the teddy bear that is his good luck charm. I’d call them clichés, but for all I know, this may be the first movie in which they occurred.

The only serious flaw is a scene in Paris where Jack starts seeing bubbles. It goes on way too long, almost as if the director, William Wellman, was so excited by this gimmick that he just could not get enough. There are plenty of action sequences to make up for this, however, much of it quite graphic, including a pilot spitting up blood, and another with blood spurting from his chest, something normally not seen in movies until the 1960s.

And, of course, no World War I movie would be complete without men climbing out of their trenches, charging the German lines, and being slaughtered by machine-gun fire. Has there ever been a movie in which the Germans get out of their trenches, charge the Allied lines, and get slaughtered in that fashion?  If you went by the movies, you’d probably think the Germans never made that mistake, in which case you have to wonder why they didn’t win the war.  In one scene, a soldier who has been blinded carries another soldier who cannot walk. Together, they continue to move toward the Germans along with the others. I don’t know what they thought they would do when they got there, except die, which is what they did. I guess we are supposed to admire their dedication.

White Squall (1996)

In the movie White Squall, which is based on a true story,the captain (Jeff Bridges) of the Albatross tells his crew, mostly boys of high school age, that the ship is not a toy, and sailing is not a game. But that is exactly what they are. These people are not sailing for some practical purpose like earning a living by fishing. They are going sailing for the fun of it. Of course, the fun masquerades as a rite of passage for the boys that will turn them into men, but whom do they think they are kidding? If they want to play sailor instead of staying in school and then getting a job, fine, but don’t insult our intelligence with a bunch of macho malarkey. When the title storm comes along and kills a bunch of them, I suppose the ones who survive get extra manliness points, but they still need to finish school and get a job.

Three Colors: Blue (1993), White (1994), and Red (1994)

Director Krzyszt Kieslowski decided to make three movies, one for each of the three colors of the French flag—blue, white, and red—and for each of the three basic ideas of France’s national motto—liberty, equality, and fraternity.  To drive the point home, he titled them Three Colors: Blue, Three Colors: White, and Three Colors: Red.  If the three movies were any good, this organizing scheme would be fine, but as it is, the whole thing just seems like a gimmick.

The first one is Blue. It’s about this woman Julie (Juliette Binoche), who turns her back on the world after a tragic accident. And that would be fine, except the camera keeps following her around, forcing us to be with her. I don’t begrudge anyone a little time to be depressed and grieve, but let her do it alone. Why do we have to be there? Of course, the movie wants us to think that all the strange things she does are evidence of a profound, suffering soul, thereby justifying all the screen time she gets. But I kept wishing the camera would follow someone else around for a while.

The next movie is White.  In that one there is this guy Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), who is a real loser. It is not just that he is impotent, for which reason his wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), divorces him. He acts like a worm. Because he keeps stalking Dominique, she finally has to drive him out of France.

Back in Poland, he inexplicably changes from being a loser into an entrepreneur, and becomes quite rich. But he is still small in spirit, because he still holds a grudge against his ex-wife. He leaves everything to her in his will, fakes his death, and fakes evidence to make it look as though she murdered him for the inheritance, resulting in her being sent to prison. But just before the police come to arrest her, he shows up in her bed, and they have sex. It must have been pretty good sex too, because when he goes to the prison and looks at her with binoculars behind the bars, she signals that she still loves him and wishes they were still married. And then he cries.

And people wonder why so many Americans hate foreign films.

Anyway, Red, the third film of this trilogy, is the best of the lot, but that is not saying much. Blue was irritating and White was dumb, but Red was sort of pleasant to watch. There seems to be some business about parallel lives, fate, and precognition, but to what end I do not know. Some people like the idea that everything that happens is destined to happen, and so I guess a movie like this will make them feel good.

Fortunately, there are only three colors in the French flag.

A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die (1968)

In most Westerns, the protagonist is mentally healthy. He may have a single-minded obsession about something, like John Wayne’s character in Red River or in The Searchers, but that is just part of his manliness. There are a few Westerns, however, in which the protagonist is mentally ill. There is Sterling Hayden’s character in Johnny Guitar, who is gun crazy, and there is Charles Bronson’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West, who does not simply want revenge against the man who killed his brother, but is an obsessive-compulsive, who keeps playing the harmonica that was in his mouth when his brother died, and he even wears clothing similar to what he wore on that day. In such movies, the music is usually in a minor key.

A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die is in that subgenre. The protagonist, Clay McCord (Alex Cord) has, or at least thinks he has, epilepsy, and is haunted by memories of his father having fits. When his gun hand starts acting up in moments of temporary spasms and paralysis, he thinks it is just a matter of time before he will meet with the same fate. Even though he needs his partner to help him out when his hand freezes up, he parts with him because he cannot stand the idea of someone else seeing him in that way.

He realizes that his days as a gunslinger and bandit are coming to an end, and so he decides to apply for amnesty, which is being offered in the territory of New Mexico. However, it turns out that he does not have epilepsy, but rather has been bothered by a bullet lodged near his spine, which is removed. Nevertheless, he applies for the amnesty anyway and gets it. But it is hardly a happy ending, because he still seems to be troubled by his past.

The movie is marred by a couple of absurdities. After being rescued from Escondido by a government agent, he rides with him in his wagon until a couple of riders approach. McCord kills both of them, and then tells the agent to unhitch one of his horses, because he needs a horse to go his own way. But the two men he just killed were riding horses, which are now saddled and ready for use, and all McCord has to do is get on one of them. As one of the agent’s horses is unhitched, however, we see the two dead men in the background, but not their horses, for some strange reason.

Second, McCord decides to hide out in a place called Beaver Head, which is a nice cabin, completely unoccupied and stocked with rifles and dynamite just sitting there for the taking. No explanation is given for the existence of this place, or why, with all the bandits around, it remains unmolested.

Those two absurdities notwithstanding, however, this is the best Spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone.

This Gun for Hire (1942)

This Gun for Hire is about a hired killer named Raven, and it uses a variety of means to make us like him. First, Raven is played by Alan Ladd, who is good looking, and we have a natural inclination to like good-looking people. Second, he has a cat for a pet, of which he is very protective, causing him to slap a maid when she runs the cat out of the room after it knocks over a can of milk. We tend to like people who like animals. True, we tend to not like men who slap women, but that is the sort of thing we would expect from a man who kills people for money. It is the positive qualities that he is given to make us like him, in spite of the negative ones that would ordinarily make us not like him, that are interesting.

When he goes to an apartment where there is a man he is supposed to kill, he sees a little girl sitting on the stairs with her legs in braces, probably a victim of polio. He doesn’t like the fact that she is a witness, but he continues on up the stairs. Once inside the room, he is dismayed by the presence of a woman. After he kills the man, he sort of apologizes to the woman, saying he was told the man would be alone, and then he shoots her too. The man he killed was a blackmailer, so we had no sympathy for him, but in killing the woman, who presumably was nothing more than a girlfriend of the blackmailer, Raven shows that he is not averse to killing someone who is innocent, if she happens to be a witness. As a result, we wonder if he will shoot the little girl too on his way back down the stairs. He is tempted, but takes pity on her and simply leaves after handing her the ball she dropped. That is another way the movie gets us to like him.

Furthermore, the movie gives us another villain, Willard Gates, whom we are encouraged to despise. Gates is played by Laird Cregar, who just has the look and manner of someone creepy. He is the one who hired Raven to do the job. He pays Raven off in ten dollar bills, and then double-crosses him by giving the serial numbers to the police so that Raven will go to prison where he cannot talk. At least, that is the idea, but it really doesn’t make sense, because the best way to keep a hit-man from talking to the police is by not double-crossing him. In any event, it turns out that Gates works for a chemical company that is selling a formula for poison gas to the Japanese during World War II. Compared to Gates, Raven seems to be a pretty good guy, for a hit-man.

Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), a showgirl, is enlisted by a senator to go undercover and investigate Gates and his company. This naturally results in her and Raven crossing paths. He almost kills her to keep her from talking, but she gets away. Eventually, they come to like each other, especially after he rescues her from Gates, who was planning to have her killed. Raven confides in her about dreams he keeps having of the woman who raised him as a child, who beat him regularly, and even hit him with a flatiron, deforming his wrist. This movie was made when psychoanalysis was familiar to audiences, who were therefore primed to accept childhood trauma as an explanation for mental problems later in life. Even today, we tend to accept this explanation for why Raven is the way he is, somewhat excusing his evil nature.

Raven wants to get even with Gates and with Brewster (Tully Marshall), the man Gates works for, while Ellen wants to find out if those two men are traitors. This leads them to cooperate with each other, with Ellen telling Raven where he can find the two men. Brewster is an old man in a wheel chair, which makes him the third person in this movie with some kind of physical disability, though there seems to be no special significance about that in this case, unless it is to provide a dramatic contrast between his physical weakness and his lust for power. In any event, when Raven forces Brewster to sign a confession, the latter dies of a heart attack, after which Raven kills Gates. This is a common ploy of the movies, having the protagonist act from personal motives, which just happen to be of great help for the war effort or some other noble cause. So this is another way the movie gets us to like Raven.

Finally, Raven starts to shoot a police detective, but when he sees that he is Ellen’s fiancé, he holds his fire. This consideration for her makes us like him some more. Then he is shot by a policeman and dies. Because his death is the proper punishment for the crimes he has committed, it balances the books, allowing us to like him without feeling guilty about it.

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973)

The theme of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing is rape. Catherine (Sarah Miles) is running away from Willard Crocker (George Hamilton), her husband. She stumbles into a train robbery and is taken hostage by the bandits. One of the bandits, Billy (Bo Hopkins), tries to rape her first. Then Dawes (Jack Warden) wants in on it. Jay (Burt Reynolds) stops them. Then some Native Americans come along and try to rape her. This may well be the last Western ever made in which Native Americans try to rape a white woman (the last movie in which Native Americans actually succeeded in raping a white woman was Ulzana’s Raid (1972). Most of the Native Americans in this movie are good, however, as are pretty much most of the Native Americans portrayed in movies afterwards, so this movie is transitional.

Anyway, Dawes finally gets his chance, and he succeeds in raping Catherine. Jay comes along and has a brutal fight with Dawes and finally kills him. Then we find out that Jay killed his wife, a Native American squaw, Cat Dancing, because a man had raped her.  Of course he killed the man who raped her first, but then he decided his wife needed killing too because she was defiled. Fortunately, he seems to have learned his lesson, because he does not kill Catherine. Now, you might think that having married one man who mistreated her, Catherine would be a little reticent about marrying a man that killed his wife for being raped, but that does not seem to bother her, however, because she and Jay end up living happily ever after.