-
Website
http://www.newcritics.com -
Original page
http://newcritics.com/blog1/2008/06/19/on-the-symbolic-nature-of-a-broken-air-conditioner-in-the-heat-of-the-night-and-the-rise-of-the-new-south/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
IMDB quotes an exchange from Heat of the Night that somehow encapsulates his career:
Ofcr. Sam Wood: Where you keeping the pie tonight?
Ralph Henshaw, diner counterman: I ate the last piece just before you came in.
Nobody played one of life’s eternal losers better than Warren Oates.
Anyone remember his death scene from Major Dundee? He knows he’s going to get shot for desertion, and he accepts his fate. He squints up at the bright sky, at the world, for one last time. He tells Charlton Heston’s Dundee that Dundee’s just doing what he has to do, but he curses him anyway, and God-blesses Robert E. Lee. Then to spare him the firing squad his former commanding officer, Richard Harris’s Tyreen, draws his gun and shoots him dead. Brilliant.
And what a brilliant if brief career as a leading man. Nobody else could have come close to what he did in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This is probably one of my personal top ten movie performances by a male actor. He just dives into the heart of darkness, and he never comes out.
they can bring these epiphanies of brilliance to movies that aren't
completely good, or in the case of Garcia, understandably not to
everyone's taste. E.g., nearly every movie buff justifiably looks on
Major Dundee as a flawed movie, but Oates's death scene is a classic
-- we must give Peckinpah primary credit for that scene too of
course, but, man, if the rest of the movie had been up to that level,
it would be a masterpiece.
But then again, the final river-fight sequence in Dundee -- these wide shots with all these goddam riders coming off the far hilltop -- briilliant movie-making. And Charlton Heston rocked in that movie too. Heston was one of Peckinpah's short-listed actors for Pike Bishop in the Wild Bunch, and as great as William Holden was in that, I wonder how Heston would have fared? Just being Heston he might have added this whole scary dimension to the part.
I always cite the final cavalry clash in the Rio Grande as an example of how modern "epic scale" films
don't have the same artistry and craftsmanship for battles as did Peckinpah, Lean, Ford, Kubrick. Not only
the sweep of that scene, but the grim humor and the pathos.
As good as Heston is in Dundee (heck, was he ever better?), I just don't think he had the range
Bill Holden brought to Pike Bishop. When he utters "let's go" before the climactic battle, you're ready
to follow him straight to hell -- of course, the expression on Warren Oates's face before he replies,
"why not?" makes the scene -- heck, could Samuel Beckett have asked for more?
scenes is they always go for the goddam CGI. Enough with that crap. I
get it already, you can make anything happen, you can make ten
thousand Mexican horsemen ride over that hill, but y'know what? For a
lot less money and time you could hire a hundred extras and horses
and make it real instead.
Oh, right, and the expression on Holden's face as he gets dressed in
the brothel, as he's making his decision to go back after Angel. The
prostitutes. And, yeah, Oates's face after Holden's "Let's go."
"Why not?"
His last line in the movie. The Wild Bunch isn't a perfect movie, but
that scene is perfect. They just don't make 'em like that any more.
Another guy who was in line for Pike Bishop was Lee Marvin. He
would've been great too, but Holden was perfection in that role.
Sorry to be dangerously O/T here, but Marvin would have been great as Dutch Angstrom
or as Deke Thornton, as memorable as both Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan were in
those parts -- particularly as Thornton, since no one would have any trouble imagining Marvin
as someone who used to ride with Pike Bishop and getting captured as depicted in the
flashback.
how the lines in The Wild Bunch are so sparse, but they feel etched
in stone.
"You're not gettin' rid of anybody. We're gonna stick together, just
like it used to be. When you side with a man you stay with him, and
if you can't do that you're like some animal. You're finished. We're
all finished. All of us. Mount up."
Beautiful.
I wish we could discuss The Wild Bunch or In Cold Blood or even The
Professionals, or the Hustler or The Cincinnati Kid, or King Rat, or
the Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner instead of Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner or, uh, Dr Dolittle.
Foul Owl
I just got your notes on Heat.
Better late than never?
this is pretty fast and easier to read, too.
I love the speed and the ability to go in an edit your comment post-typo!
It looks like it's down to you and me. Might be time to call it a night. But before we do I've got to mention a few things that bug me about the movie.
Nighty night, guys! ( I'll check in tomorrow.)
And to anyone happening by tonight, tomorrow, next week, or whenever, the thread's still open, feel free to add your thoughts.
Another very vague thought here re cinematography: I never personally experienced this movie as black and white in fact (as on TV) or in memory, but I can see it as a color update of noir. I think there were a lot of movies trying for that, especially in the years immediately following this film. I'd have to think about this, but the "look" to me reminds me some of, say, Harper. (On the other hand, soon the noir movie ideal was bleached out in movies like Altman's The Long Goodbye. Yet he had made Thieves Like Us.) Just thinking out loud here. Plus I haven't seen most of these damn movies in a long time.
Good night.
The film doesn't have the significance in film history that Bonnie & Clyde has or the cultural iconic status of The Graduate, but it is far superior to both films as a social artefact -- it would be difficult to name another film that captures the tension of the South in the immediate post-Civil Rights Act era -- a tension that was actually pervasive in the country, but so much more palpable in the South, where an Endicott's hatred could be so visible beneath the thinnest of veneers of civility.
As great as the ensemble performances are in the film, and as good as Rod Steiger is, it really all hinges on Poitier. The John Ball character is no Philip Marlowe -- Poitier brings to life what Ball only hints at, and that's the Jackie Robinson dimension to Virgil Tibbs. All that competitive drive, intelligence and ambition is straitjacketed by societal strictures, and Poitier has to battle the bigots and himself all the way through the film. It works both as a terrific piece of acting and as a real movie star turn -- he grabs you from the opening frames.
To me the 60s were a real golden age of movie-making, but a lot of my favorites didn't make much of an impact at the Oscars. You had the tail-end of studio-system big-budget over-lit Hollywood studio fim-making, but you had the French New wave, the real heyday of Italian film-making (Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Germi, et al), the one-man genre known as Bergman, an onslaught of great British films (Richardson, Reisz, Anderson, Schlesinger, Richard Lester (from Philadelphia originally), Bryan Forbes; and in America the last years when film makers could make movies in black-and-white just because they knew the material (usually adult drama) would be better in black-and-white (Hud, the Hustler, In Cold Blood, etc.). And the 60s were also so rich in the sort of demotic "outsider' film-making that I love: the biker and horror and LSD movies from the Roger Corman factory, all those dozens of fabulous spaghetti westerns, all the great trashy James Bond rip-offs (not to mention the trashy great Bond films themselves), the bizarre yakuza movies of Suzuki, all the classic Zatoichi The Blind Swordsman movies. What a decade of riches. The year we've been discussing in this series was definitely a sort of watershed year, at least for mainstream American film-making, but there was already this great movement in cinema going on worldwide. A movement now sadly dead and gone.
Maybe some of these cool downbeat, black-and-white 60s movies, like
Hud, the Hustler, or King Rat. Or it might be fun to take as a theme
a great actor or actress: like, say, the first four or five films of
a Montgomery Clift, or Brando, or the three James Dean movies. I
recently watched Red River for the first time in a long time, and
Clift was so good in that, his first movie. Or you could do a series
on Howard Hawks, or Godard, or Fellini, or Jean-Pierre Melville...As
long as it's not, like, the films of Michael Bay.
In the Heat of the Night is either the first or second film that they see with me in class- always. It is a wonderful film to bring them into something outside of their comfort zone, but is easy for them to get into and relate to in some way. Whether it's Quincy Jones' score, the mystery, the racial tension and most definitely the acting- they all (without exception) get hooked on the film. If I had a commission for every DVD of the film bought after the class- I'd have a nice chunk of change.
I have begun to require a reaction paper on this film, and so far the results have been interesting. I always hear how they knew it was a tv show but had no idea it was an "awesome movie". I could easily break the film down into all of the individual components and identify what really pulls different people in, but the truth is the fact that all of it's parts are firing on all pistons so the whole film just draws you in. Then you go back to watch again for the individual components. In the Heat of the Night is the majority top pick for favorite film watched in class at the end of the semester as well. And I try to introduce them to many classics- and they have many favorites. I just think "Heat" hits them early on and hits them hard.