Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012)

Until today (and since the death of Marlon Brando) the earliest-surviving winner of the Best Actor Oscar, and active in Hollywood until very recently, having appeared as the most superannuated of the stars of 2010's Red, one of American cinema's great heavies and one of its seemingly indestructible men has passed away. Borgnine was one of the few nonagenarians whose demise can be described as shocking news. He carved a niche for himself in mean roles in such films as From Here to Eternity (in which Montgomery Clift knifed him to death) and Bad Day at Black Rock (in which Spencer Tracy karate chopped him into submission with one hand literally tied behind his back), but proved with Marty that he could play a flawed but benign everyman. At his early peak in the 1950s, he could even be a romantic lead, as he was, perhaps to Alan Ladd's surprise, in Delmer Daves's The Badlanders. Borgnine's stardom ebbed enough to make TV attractive in the 1960s, and after he was done with McHale's Navy he was ready for another run of movies, including his most likely greatest performance as William Holden's sidekick and conscience in The Wild Bunch. Borgnine aimed higher but suffered crushing disappointment when Paramount wouldn't cast him in the role he most coveted, Vito Corleone in The Godfather. He could still play brutes (as in Hannie Caulder and Emperor of the North) as well as violent men of honor (as in A Bullet for Sandoval), but who knows how his last forty years would have differed had he got the Godfather part. He was good enough to allow us to imagine him in Brando's place. He enlivened every picture I can recall that he appeared in. This is a sad day.

 

Follow this link to see past Mondo 70 reviews of Borgnine pictures.

SEPTEMBER 11 (11'9"01, 2002)

Has it been nine years already? Was it that long ago that Alain Brigand's portmanteau production premiered around the world. Maybe it doesn't seem that long ago to me, as an American, because it didn't premiere in my country until the summer of 2003. I remember that there was some concern that certain episodes might offend overly sensitive Americans, or that some were downright anti-American. I've had the DVD for awhile but haven't gotten around to watching it until this oppressively commemorative weekend. The anthology's reputation promised an antidote to the monotony of mood prevailing during the extended observance of what the vulgar call the "ten year anniversary" of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. I dimly remembered what the various segments were about from the reviews I read, but I wasn't sure what attitude I might encounter. I ended up being surprised at the prevalence of irreverence over solemnity or stridency. Brigand promised his eleven directors "complete freedom of expression" as long as their segments wrapped up in eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame of film. It wasn't nine minutes, eleven seconds and one frame because this was a European project and they put the day before the month, sensibly enough, and that gave the directors more time to work with. As for complete freedom of expression, judge for yourselves.

Brigand opens provocatively with a segment by an Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf, which sets the irreverent tone that keeps creeping into the proceedings. Her episode is a kind of thematic sequel to her movie Blackboards, since it focuses on a teacher desperate to impart knowledge to people mainly concerned with survival. It takes place in an Iranian refugee camp for Afghans where the children help make bricks in biblical fashion until a teacher lures them into a makeshift classroom. The day, of course, is September 11, 2001, and the teacher wants to tell her students that something of global importance has happened. But they know already: two people fell down a deep well, and one or both may be dead. She's clearly freaked out and expecting nuclear war ("You can't stop atom bombs with bricks," she tells the workers) but her explanation of what's happened in New York, and her insistence on a moment of silence only inspires a childish debate on whether God actually kills people and why he might be crazy enough to do so. Finally, to get them to at least visualize the enormity of the event, she takes them to the base of a tall brick-kiln smokestack and hopes they can imagine it falling. Whether they do remains uncertain.

How many heavyweight French directors turned Brigand down, do you imagine, before he finally recruited Claude Lelouch? He had his moment in the sun with A Man and a Woman back in the Sixties, but I doubt anyone would automatically think of him representing his country in this sort of project. Nor does he do his nation much credit with a gimmicky segment about the stormy romance of two French deaf-mutes living in New York and apparently breaking up on the dread day. In a gambit that makes his episode a bookend to another we'll see later, Lelouch films without sound to emphasize his characters' obliviousness to the awful events playing out on a nearby TV screen. He aims at empathy with the bereaved by teasing a lover's regret at wishing her beloved gone without realizing that he may well be very gone -- but the sooty reappearance of the beloved, who's apparently had a very eventful day, allows for a cheap, happyish ending. This may be the lamest segment of the film.

But it has competition from Egypt's Youssef Chahine, the only director narcissist enough to put himself in his segment. He's just returned from New York as the disaster happens, and is pressed by a female reporter to comment on it at a press conference. He begs off, needing time to think, and goes to Lebanon, where he meets the ghost of an American soldier killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The ghost, who proves to have once been the fiance of the reporter, asks for empathy for his and other Americans' suffering, while the director is torn between his humanist instinct and his desire to reprimand an American for his insensitivity toward the victims of American violence. Still, he finally feels compelled to visit the soldier's grave at Arlington, where he meets the reporter again, as well as the soldier's father and the ghost of a suicide bomber who chides Chahine for showing sympathy to an enemy. Sometimes you try to do the right thing and you just can't win, and that pretty much describes Chahine's segment. But his heart was in the right place.

Bosnian director Denis Tanovic (of No Man's Land fame) contributes a trifle that takes the news from New York to a small town that holds a vigil on the 11th of each month to remember the Srebrenica massacre. It focuses on the friendship of a wheelchair-bound man and a young woman who lost loved ones in the massacre. It's one of several episodes that implicitly deny the centrality of the attacks on America by emphasizing the preoccupations, rational and irrational, of other peoples and nations. In this case, there's a call to cancel the monthly vigil because of the atrocities in America, but the protagonists insist on carrying on as usual to honor both their own losses and those of the Americans. The episode is well-meaning and unobjectionable but is also probably the least memorable of all the segments.

The goofiest segment by a wide margin comes from Burkina Faso and director Idrissa Ouedraogo. It has the naive absurdity of an Our Gang short, as a group of young protagonists become convinced that Osama bin Laden is hiding in their town and hope to collect the $25,000,000 bounty by capturing the terrorist leader. The kids seem to have some visual basis for their suspicion, but their target, whoever he may be, proves slippery, altering his itinerary whenever they plan an ambush. The boys rush about hoping to nab him with spears and machetes, only to see him disappear into an airport, where a guard insists firmly that bin Laden is not in the country. But as far as they're concerned, their chance at fame and fortune is flying away. Hope springs eternal, however, since President Bush may visit the country soon. Surely he'd be worth a large ransom, wouldn't he?... I'm not sure what point Ouedraogo wanted to make with that apparition of bin Laden, but I found this episode charmingly silly and admired its inclusion in the anthology.

A couple of the directors are ringers insofar as they don't actually represent their nation's reaction to or reflections on the terror attacks. One of these is the U.K.'s Ken Loach, who uses his time to commemorate the events of September 11, 1973 -- the day when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Marxist government of Chile. Narrated by a Chilean exile in London, this is a mostly documentary segment with stark, dramatic footage of the Chilean upheaval, perpetrated with American encouragement, climaxing with black and white footage of a burning building, the presidential palace blasted by bombs from a seditious air force. This is the sort of segment Americans were probably expected to bristle at, but Loach's point is not to suggest that the U.S. deserved what it got because of its role in the Chilean coup. Instead, we should take its closing lines at face value; the Chileans will empathize with Americans every September 11, and hope that Americans will someday reciprocate.

If Claude Lelouch can get away with a silent segment, then Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will try to top him with a mostly sightless segment. He confronts us with a black screen as he builds a tower of found sounds from September 11, from the noise of explosions and crashes to the angry words of call-in ranters. Every so often the screen will flicker to life with footage of people jumping from the twin towers, and it will roar to life with footage of the towers falling -- only then the screen goes silent. The screen finally lightens so Inarritu can close with the textual question, in Arabic and English, "Does the light of God guide or blind us?" His is probably the sort of segment most people would have expected from this film. It's the only one that confronts the attacks directly or tries to convey the horror of them without a mediating personal or national perspective. As such, apart from the technical gimmickry, it's one of the least imaginative segments, though it may well have the purest raw power.

Israeli director Amos Gitai takes a "welcome to our world" stance, showing us a car bombing in his own country that gets upstaged by the news from New York to the chagrin of a pushy TV reporter. In a hard-boiled segment shot in a single take, Gitai illustrates the terrible normality of violence in Israel by showing reporters, first responders, police and bystanders all jostling for space and attention in the absence of the awe Americans felt during their own admittedly much larger disaster. The overall effect is blackly comic, though I'm not sure if Gitai really meant it that way.

The other ringer in the picture is Mira Nair, who while officially representing India contributes what's really the first of two American episodes. Based on true events, it follows an Indian Muslim family's trauma as their son goes missing on September 11 and becomes a terror suspect. His family is questioned by the FBI and increasingly shunned by their New York neighbors until the truth is recovered from the Ground Zero wreckage. The son, a onetime police cadet, had volunteered on the spot to aid rescue efforts and had fallen with the towers, dying a hero. This is the one segment I can envision being expanded into a feature film and improved by the expansion. As it is, Nair's segment is no great exercise in style, but the story has a truthful simplicity that's impossible to botch.

The official American episode comes from Sean Penn, who directs arguably the most crassly audacious segment of all. It is likely to offend, not because it makes any provocative political statement of the sort you might expect from Penn, but because it commits a twofold atrocity. It uses the destruction of the towers as a sight gag, and it compels us to look at Ernest Borgnine, admittedly then still a spring chicken of 85 years, in his underwear.  The mighty Borgnine plays a slightly senile widower who talks to his dead wife regularly and seems to live mostly in his own little skyscraper-shadowed world where he can't get a potted plant to grow. In a daringly obscene bit of magical realism, the fall of the first tower allows a strong ray of sunlight to shine into Borgnine's bedroom (the historic pall of smoke notwithstanding) and not only wake him but bring his potted plant to fully blooming life. The old man is overjoyed at the miracle and tries to share his joy with his beloved wife, but in a moment of illumination, if you will, he tearfully acknowledges that she simply isn't there. You may not believe what you've seen -- that is, you may not believe that Penn actually conceived and directed such an outlandish anecdote, but the episode has a primitive power in its preposterous play for pathos like something out of classic silent film.

The elder statesman of the creative team was Japan's Shohei Imamura, and that earns him the chance to top the Penn segment. In his final cinematic work, the great man tops the project with a dollop of "WTF???" in the form of a period piece set at the end of World War II. His protagonist is a demobilized Japanese soldier who's Kafkaesque reaction to the horrors of war is to become a snake. That is, he crawls about on his belly, never uses his hands, swallows rats and tries to bite people. It's all very interesting in a demented way, but its relevance to the overall project is tenuous or tangential at best. The problem isn't that it doesn't refer to the 2001 attacks directly, but that Imamura imposes relevance simply by inserting a sentence in which an officer declares the Japanese aggression a "holy war" and closing his segment, and the film, with the bald statement (pay attention, Muslims!) that "there is no such thing as a holy war." Thanks for clearing that up, Imamura-san!

So did you expect something besides a mixed bag? Had every segment been as sensitive and appropriate as some may yet think correct, had the whole film been about heroism or resilience or whatever the official theme of the decade is, it would have been intolerable. Instead, it's as wild and erratic an anthology film as you'll probably ever see, and that, the faults of individual episodes notwithstanding, is a good thing. Does it do justice to the event? I'm not sure. Does it honor people's losses? That doesn't matter. September 11 succeeds as a cinematic event and a collective, kaleidoscopic portrait of a moment in history, and it should have been part of somebody's television schedule during the commemorative weekend. Of course, you can watch it whenever you want if you can find a copy, and its historical value alone makes it worth your effort.

A BULLET FOR SANDOVAL (Los Desperados, 1969)

Perhaps we should tie spaghetti westerns generically to those Euro-historical films from the 1960s whose typical subject is the cruelty of the past, so that films like Sergio Leone's can be discussed alongside stuff like Valley of the Bees or Witchfinder General as well as alongside American westerns with which the Italian and Spanish films often have less in common thematically. I don't know enough about the history of historical films in Europe, but it looks as if by the mid-Sixties there was a major trend away from romantic, heroic or patriotic visions and toward a common concern with violence, injustice and overall backwardness. Placing spaghettis within this trend, or crediting them as progenitors of it, occurred to me this weekend while watching two films from 1969: Volker Schlondorff's Michael Kohlhaas (about which more later) and Julio Buchs's revenge western (with which VCI's DVD box requires him to share credit with an unbilled Lucio Fulci). Both films deal with presumably honorable men whose grievances escalate more or less out of his control (more in Kohlhaas, less here) into a sweeping bloodbath that destroys many arguably undeserving people. The movies share a paradoxical endorsement of revenge as the nearest substitute for justice in unjust times, yet can't help deploring the seemingly inevitable collateral damage that results.

Sandoval has one of the most utterly downtrodden heroes of spaghetti westerns. John Warner (George Hilton) is a Confederate soldier compelled to desert on the eve of battle when one of the Sandoval clan, an aristocratic Hispanic family that dominates the border country, informs him that patriarch Pedro's daughter is about to give birth to Warner's child in the midst of a cholera epidemic. With two comrades Warner absconds, escapes after recapture, and finally reaches the Sandoval estate, where a coldly furious Pedro (Ernest Borgnine) informs him that the child is alive but the girl is dead. Pedro pushes the baby into John's clueless arms and sends them both away.

Still accompanied by one of the deserters, Warner wanders from village to village, desperately seeking milk for the baby, only to be turned away everywhere from fear of the cholera. Along the way, the two Rebs earn the company of a "lay brother," aka a rogue monk, but he can do nothing but pray for the starving child and help bury it when it dies. At the little grave, Warner vows universal vengeance.

Retracing his steps, Warner raids one village by stealth to get weapons, then drowns the selfish patriarch in a bucket of milk. Armed, he soon acquires followers, the ideal number being six -- "like the bullets in a gun." They terrorize the border country while Sandoval and other local leaders call upon Confederate military assistance.

Sandoval also hopes to resolve the matter in a one-on-one showdown with Warner, but his overzealous sons make such an honorable encounter impossible. The Rebel army at least compels Warner and his crew -- with shifting personnel -- to seek refuge in Mexico, and for a while both he and Sandoval seem content with the stalemate. But when Sandoval crosses into Mexico for a religious festival (with bullfighting) Warner can't resist the opportunity to take final revenge, unaware that larger forces are closing in for the kill....

Banditry rather than gunfighting is Sandoval's subject. Buchs and/or Fulci thus avoid the conventional shootouts of spaghetti westerns, preferring to tell the story with creative editing. The director cuts away before the supreme moment of a dramatically staged showdown in the rain between Warner and one of Sandoval's sons, to show us instead how Sandoval's people get the news of the result. Earlier, when Warner's men attack a town, the director takes a minimalist approach, reducing the battle to close-ups of hands shooting guns until some of those hands loose their grips.

The film wraps with a visually striking armageddon finish in the middle of a bullring with an audience of dozens of soldiers and Warner's gang in the place of the bulls. It's more a Butch Cassidy than a Wild Bunch finish, but since all three films appeared in the same year, maybe Sandoval took its cue from Bonnie and Clyde instead. The various visual tricks and the story's stark refusal of any idea of redemption lift Sandoval above the average of spaghettis and link it, I think, to the kind of theater of historical cruelty that was playing in other European (and American) cinemas at the time.

Also helpful, need I add, are an intense performance by Hilton and an authoritative one by Borgnine. Whether he thought he was slumming or not, he's all pro here and hits most of the right notes. He's sometimes saddled, however, with hopeless expository dialogue, and the hopelessness of it derives from the film having more bandits than it knows what to do with. While the film is known as "The Four Desperados" in some markets, the U.S. really made a big deal of "six, like the bullets of a gun," even though some of Warner's gang have but the sketchiest of personalities, and the turnover in personnel makes the supporting bandits seem even more irrelevant. In short, the film could be neater in its opposition of Warner against Sandoval without superfluous characters, but that flaw doesn't compromise its overall effectiveness. You may not like it if you need to see someone win, but the Sixties and Seventies seemed more open to the nobody-wins argument, and if you feel an affinity with that generation and its movies, you should appreciate if not enjoy A Bullet for Sandoval.

Quickies: THE BADLANDERS (1958)

Delmer Daves ought to be mentioned more frequently alongside Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher as a leading director of westerns during the peak decade of the 1950s. Daves helped kick off the Fifties with Broken Arrow, the film that set a new standard of sensitivity toward Native Americans (and had the regrettable side effect of making Jeff Chandler a star). Like Mann, Daves worked in other genres during the decade (including Demetrius and the Gladiators, a sequel more entertaining than its progenitor, The Robe), but the westerns are probably his best work. He really hit his stride starting with Jubal in 1956, which he followed with The Last Wagon, 3:10 to Yuma, and Cowboy, to name the ones I've seen and admired, before making The Badlanders, his penultimate western, for M-G-M. This one is a trickier proposition than the others, because it's based on a novel by W.R. Burnett. That novel is The Asphalt Jungle.

That's right: Daves and writer Richard Collins converted the definitive noir heist story, already filmed by John Huston eight years earlier, into a western. The story actually converts fairly smoothly, Collins tightening things up a bit to establish a prison relationship between the two lead conspirators. In Huston's film the mastermind was played by Sam Jaffe, the muscle by Sterling Hayden. For Daves, the muscle is provided by Ernest Borgnine -- a fair trade. More risky is the exchange of Jaffe for Alan Ladd, who gets top billing. Ladd is Peter "the Dutchman" Van Hoek, a mining engineer who was framed for robbery by a corrupt marshall and sent to Yuma Penitentiary. Borgnine is John McBain, jailed for fighting back against the men who swindled him out of his ranch. The Dutchman wants McBain, scheduled for release ahead of him, to be his outside partner on some vague scheme, but the bitter McBain "wouldn't take God for a partner." They seem to become enemies when Van Hoek stops McBain from attacking a guard who'd abused another prisoner, but they end up in the same place when the Dutchman's good deed earns him an early release while McBain's thwarted attack is forgiven. Dutch ultimately convinces McBain to join him in a plan to steal a secret vein of gold from a mine that happens to be on McBain's old land. They'll be working for a mine owner who's poised to lose his mine in a divorce settlement but wants to start fresh with his mistress, for whom Dutch himself has an eager eye.

While Ladd gets top billing, Borgnine gradually dominates the film as Collins and Daves develop a romantic subplot for him and his real-life girlfriend Katy Jurado. This storyline takes Daves back to Broken Arrow territory, in a way, as McBain becomes a champion of the underdog minority, protecting Anita, a Mexican woman, from violation by white bigots. While the Dutchman schemes, McBain holes up in the Mexican neighborhood and laments its poverty. He teams up with Dutch mainly to help the Mexicans, out of his growing affection for Anita, who in turn sees the good man beneath Borgnine's brutish exterior. Jurado and Borgnine have authentic chemistry, and you get the feeling while watching that the film was rewritten while shot to spotlight the couple. The tension and distrust you expect to simmer between Borgnine and Ladd rapidly dissipates as we realize that both men are good guys after all, but both actors are likable enough that those who recognize the Asphalt Jungle template should be willing to follow the new directions the characters travel. This does become a challenge once it becomes clear that The Badlanders will have a happy ending, but if we take the film on its own terms, I think it works as a suspenseful adventure, especially during the impressively art-directed mine heist, with social consciousness thrown in as a bonus. Still, I couldn't help thinking what the Italians would have done with the concept a decade later. To faithfully translate Asphalt Jungle into a western, you'd probably have to make a spaghetti western. To deviate from Burnett and Huston's grim finish will understandably seem like a cop-out to some viewers, and the absence of real tension between Ladd and Borgnine after the first reels reduces Badlanders to minor Daves. But minor Daves still has a narrative drive and a knack for highlighting strong character that makes this movie worth a look for western fans.

Here's the trailer from TCM:

EMPEROR OF THE NORTH (1973)

Back when I reviewed John Milius's Dillinger I assigned it to a "country bandit" genre that might trace its roots to Bonnie and Clyde. But if anything the country bandit films are a sub-category of a larger "Depression" genre that also encompassed films like They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Paper Moon, Hard Times, Bound For Glory and Robert Aldrich's hobo-geddon pitting Lee Marvin against Ernest Borgnine, with Keith Carradine jockeying for position as a young punk aiming for homeless celebrity. Did all these films reflect a nostalgia for hard times, or did the Depression years have some other symbolic significance during the late Sixties and early Seventies? Maybe Depression films were a more relevant substitute for Westerns, providing a setting where loners had to learn to survive and fend for themselves. It seems significant that the opening crawl for Emperor of the North identifies Depression hobos as outcasts. They may have been objects of identification for youth audiences who might have seen themselves as outcasts from conventional society. I don't know how good an analogy that is, however, since there's some difference between a hippie drop-out and someone who's homeless because he has no money and can't find work. On the other hand, Emperor isn't as much about poverty as, say, an actual 1930s hobo movie like Wild Boys of the Road. You might not call it a transposed western, but it has a pulp quality that obscures whatever social context remains in this retrospective account of life on the rails.

Neither of the principal hobos, Lee Marvin's "A-No. One" and Carradine's "Cigarette," seems motivated by necessity. Marvin seems to ride the rails to show that he can, especially when train bosses claim that he can't. Carradine seems intent on making a name for himself in hobo-dom, though he claims that he already has. Their ambitions put both men on a collision course with Ernest Borgnine's Shack, the boss of the No. 19 train, who claims that no man has ever rode his train for free. He, too, has something to prove after an incident in which Marvin and Carradine, trapped in one of Shack's cars and fearing a beating, burn their way out, creating an impression that they've already beaten Shack. That'd be a major event among the train men, many of whom hate Shack as a harsh taskmaster. He and A-No. One are celebrities in their own shared subculture of trains and hobos, and A-No. One's public announcement that he'll ride the No. 19 to the end of the line, both to spite Shack and to prove his superiority to the suddenly lionized Cigarette, sparks a betting frenzy up and down the line. So in a way they are like gunslingers, but they're also like the celebrity athletes who had begun to emerge by this point in history. Riding the rails, or driving men off them, is more a matter of mythic prowess than survival.

Emperor has very little social consciousness for a Depression film. It may not be fair to compare it with Wild Boys of the Road, which has a different agenda, but the stakes for Cigarette, the youngster of the story, never seem as high as they are for the teenagers forced onto the rails in William Wellman's film. The train bosses in the earlier movie are mostly no more merciful than Shack is in Emperor, but in Wild Boys they're pretty much faceless cogs in an unjust system, while Shack (why am I tempted to spell that with a q?) is the indisputable villain of the Aldrich film. There's no sense that Shack is just doing his job, albeit overzealously and with too much relish, and there's never a moment that reveals any special motive for his meanness. The trailer simply calls him "evil," though "sadistic" may be the better term. For Borgnine, this kind of part is a throwback to the brute villain roles that first made his name in the 1950s, and he plays the part with the necessary gusto. But the limitations of Shack's character, no fault of Borgnine's, show the limits of the film's ambitions.

That doesn't mean you can't enjoy Emperor for the oldschool he-man action film it is. The climactic fight between Borgnine and Marvin may not live up to the hype that dubbed it "the most sensational fight ever filmed" (and this was the year of Enter the Dragon) but it's an impressive piece of direction and acting. It looks like it was all done by the two actors on a moving train, with no process shots that I could recognize. Axes, chains, hammers and two-by-fours all come into play and the middle-aged stars wield them with vigor. If anything, it goes on for too long. Each actor gets the upper hand at one point, only to spare his foe so the fight can continue for fighting's sake. These should have been more ruthless men, but the pulp nature of the story requires the fight to last longer.

Keith Carradine takes a hammer to the head (above). He could have done worse (below).

The film itself might have been shorter if shorn of some pointless digressions into ham-handed comedy. One bit I could do without is when cop Simon Oakland chases Carradine into a hobo jungle and gets forced to call a turkey a dog and bark like a dog in friendship. Slightly less obnoxiousness is a scene that could have gone into O Brother Where Art Thou? in which Marvin submits to baptism and gets to ogle a bra-less convert while Carradine steals clothes from the other believers. But the most pointless part of the picture is the prologue, which is basically a music video for the theme song, "A Man and a Train," in which Marty Robbins reveals the gnostic truth that "a man is not a train and a train is not a man." Hal David did the dubious lyrics, but the music, like that of the whole film, is by the dreadful Frank DeVol, whose interchangeable stylings marred many a Seventies film. DeVol is incapable of establishing mood and his music makes Emperor more of a chore to sit through than it should be. But fans of Marvin and Borgnine should definitely make the effort.

Here's the trailer, uploaded by unseentrailers, whose vocation belies his name: