DVR Diary: I DIED A THOUSAND TIMES (1955)

Raoul Walsh's High Sierra is my favorite Humphrey Bogart movie. The first of Bogart's 1941 breakthrough pictures that made him a leading-man star, it's overshadowed by the other one, The Maltese Falcon. So successful was Falcon that Warner Bros. stopped making films of Dashiell Hammett's novel after that third try. The studio did not retire W. R. Burnett's source novel for High Sierra, however. Walsh himself put it in western dress as Colorado Territory in 1948, and seven years later Stuart Heisler brought the story back into the 20th century with a brand new title that suggests something closer to despair than the tragic grandeur of the original movie. Admittedly, the High Sierra story could benefit from color and Cinemascope in ways not obviously beneficial to The Maltese Falcon. While the location work often looks good, Heisler lack's Walsh's more poetic sensibility and his feel for atmosphere. He makes a mistake right out of the gate, dispensing with the opening scene in which Roy Earle, an aging Dillinger type, is released from prison. In the original, you immediately get the contrast between imprisonment and the freedom that matters so much to Earle -- not to mention the mockery of freedom resulting from his surprise pardon, engineered only so he can take part in a hotel heist. Heisler's film opens with Earle already on the road to the tourist camp where his partners await him. Blame that on the script or on studio editing, but Heisler lacks visual flare. He usually stages scenes in long shots that emphasize the wide screen in a way that makes the sets, particularly the criminals' quarters, look oversized and artificial. The color throughout is overly bright and garish. The most interestingly thing Heisler does occasionally is tilt his camera, but you get the impression that he does that mainly so he can fit the heads of tall actors into shots where other performers are laying down. That and the actors are what you'll most likely remember about this film.

The actors face a greater challenge than Heisler. The biggest challenge faces Jack Palance, the remake's Roy Earle. I Died comes from the brief period when Hollywood contemplated making Palance not just a star but a leading man, maybe a Bogart for his time. He's just a little too young for the role, however -- bear in mind that Bogart himself was made to look older to play Earle. Palance is too strange a figure with his height and his angular face to match Bogart's everyman gravitas -- in his dark suits in the film's bright settings he becomes something like a piece of abstract animation. There's an odd serenity about him, when he isn't shooting people or keeping his punk partners in line, exemplified by his line, "I'm not angry at anybody." Maybe coldness is the word I'm looking for, but his co-star is partly to blame for that. If Palance is no replacement for Bogart he's at least an honorable alternative, but in place of High Sierra's Ida Lupino I Died casts Shelley Winters, and it's game over right there. If Palance seems too young for his part Winters definitely seems too old for the role Lupino played. She's too intense, compared to Lupino's slow burn, yet without achieving any real chemistry with Palance. I suppose her performance does help you understand why this film's Earle is initially more interested in the clubfooted but pretty Velma (Lori Nelson replaces Joan Leslie), whose surgery he pays for only to be rebuffed by the shallow girl. But you believed it anyway the first time, while it's harder to understand Earle's attraction to the Winters character. You really shouldn't have that problem watching this story.

Otherwise, this film is a feast of familiar faces, from Lon Chaney Jr. having an easy time (and a good scene) as a bedridden, boozing gangster to Lee Marvin implausibly cast as a mere "punk" whom Palance pistol-whips in one of the few scenes more impressively staged here than by Walsh, to fleeting glances of Warners prospects Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams. The cast deserves a better film than Heisler made, and the idea of remaking High Sierra with modern movie technology wasn't a bad one. But if Heisler was just going to plant Palance in soundstage mountains during the climax while the second unit romps on the real mountain, you can't help asking why anyone bothered.

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: