Art Clokey (1921-2010)

The creator of Gumby died this weekend.

(uploaded to YouTube by falsebaroness)

"Once he was a little green slab of clay..."

LORNA'S SILENCE (2008)

These days people are pretty desperate to live in Belgium. I suppose it depends on where you start life. Lorna, for instance, is an Albanian -- from the country, not the city in New York where I live. Some of us Albanians might want to move to Belgium, too, but Lorna's the one with the system. To be more accurate, she's a cog in the system. Here's how it works. The local mafia makes a deal with a native Belgian, paying him to marry Lorna. They stay married long enough to not look suspicious, then they break up. By then, Lorna has a Belgian passport. Now she can marry some guy from the east and get him Belgian citizenship. Pretty efficient.

The complication, in this particular case, is what to do with the first husband, the Belgian. Lorna has married Claudy Moreau, known to most of her associates as "the junky." And that about sums it up -- except that he's trying to kick the habit. A deep, aching emotional neediness emerges as he embarks upon the ordeal. While Lorna prefers to deal with her husband on a purely transactional basis, he desperately needs her to be near him, to talk to or play cards with. She's the one constant in his life, someone he can set goals around to structure his time and keep his mind off the junk. But she'd rather keep her distance. It's a marriage in name only, of course; Claudy sleeps in the living room on a mattress Lorna keeps stuck between her mattresses during the day. She resents his neediness, especially when it means calling her home from her laundry job on some feeble pretext or another. But despite all the annoyances and her desire to hook up eventually with her Albanian boyfriend Sokol, she can't help pitying Claudy, especially when she realizes that the people who placed her with him specifically matched her with a junky because it'd be easy to make her a widow by arranging an overdose. His resolution to clean up complicates their plans, especially since Lorna's next husband, "the Russian," is on his way to Belgium. They want to be rid of Claudy as soon as possible, but Lorna would rather he didn't die.

So she tries to arrange a divorce to let Claudy can get away clean, even though her handlers claim that a quickie divorce would look suspicious. Her idea is to claim abuse and to get Claudy to hit her. But as she's discovered compassion, he's discovered honor. He doesn't want to go on public record as a violent case. Lorna thinks he owes it to her to clobber her because she stood by him during his withdrawal, but the best he can manage is a tepid slap. She has to bruise herself and bash her head against a wall to make it more convincing. The irony of the situation is that she's trying to save his life, but he feels that she's abandoning him, and that drives him to the brink of falling off the wagon. Lorna realizes suddenly that she can't let that happen. Her solution is to offer herself, naked, to him, abruptly redeeming their parody of a marriage.

This is probably the happiest moment for our main charcters, but things change fast.

This takes us to the halfway point of Le Silence de Lorna, but it becomes hard to describe it further without diluting the shock value of subsequent story twists. But I think I've described enough to get fans of crime cinema interested. This is definitely a crime movie, but of a subset that might be described as lowlife pathos, dealing with the desperate struggles and sorrows of the little people at the bottom of the food chain. It's a mode the Dardenne brothers have worked in before, particularly in the only other film of theirs that I've seen, The Child. They practice a kind of ragamuffin romanticism in naturalistic style and have won awards doing so. Their films (co-written and co-directed) look lived-in rather than art-directed, which is entirely right for their subject matter. In tone they're the opposite of hard-boiled. I call theirs crime films but they're not gangster movies and have nothing to do with fantasies of power or violence. The Dardennes do crime movies, I suppose, because crime is what the people at the bottom are reduced to. But they're an exception to the generic rule because compassion rather than cynicism is their object.

In Lorna's Silence the Dardennes have teamed a genuine Albanian actress of limited experience, Arta Dobroshi, with one of their favorite actors, Jeremie Renier. While their sudden burst of sexual passion is really a little hard to believe, the two performers do have a chemistry that makes the characters' evolving relationship emotionally convincing. In the second half of the film the spotlight is really on Dobroshi, who must leave you guessing whether she's having a moral epiphany or has just gone mad. The movie itself lets you keep on guessing, and Dobroshi gives you good reason to guess either way. The film ends sort of in medias res in a way that leaves you guessing, perhaps for the wrong reasons, but as a whole it's an eye-opening window into a Euro underworld, the humanity of which can't be denied.

Here's the trailer, uploaded to YouTube by moviestride:

I'd Like to Thank the Blogosphere...

In particular I need to thank three stalwart bloggers who've passed awards on to me. The blessed Rev. Phantom of Midnight Confessions has selected Mondo 70 for the Kreativ Blogger award, while the learned Professor Brian O'Blivion, pastor over at The Cathode Ray Mission, and that "subterranean beatnik bastard" Jonny Metro of Midnite Media have both tapped me for the One Lovely Blog award. Take a look at my shiny new prizes!

With rewards come responsibilities. A Kreativ Blogger is supposed to pass the award on to seven other blogs and list seven interesting things about himself. Let's do the awarding first. Here I'll follow the Rev's precedent by saying that my bestowal of the award doesn't obligate these lucky seven bloggers to go through the whole routine. Here we go:

1. Antagony & Ecstasy. One of last fall's most impressive movie-blogging achievements was Tim's exhaustive survey of Disney's line-animation features. He's also found time to do a James Cameron survey and a 1939 survey while covering many of the latest releases. It's all brilliant stuff.

2. Cult Movie Reviews. dfordoom is a fairly regular commentator here, and "her" own blog is one after my own heart for its range of films, including some that I honestly hadn't heard of before but now want to see thanks to "her" reviews. Now that d informs me below of his masculinity, however, I hates him, I do! ;)

3. Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! is not my Tourette's outburst but Todd's consistently fascinating blog dedicated to "world pop cinema," which in recent weeks has ranged from Egyptian sci-fi from the Fifties to a Philippine Wonder Woman knockoff of sorts. As another fan of the Nikkatsu Noirs he deserves my support and I think he'll earn yours.

4. Giallo Fever. Keith Brown is several steps ahead of most of us in the hunt for cinema "off the beaten track," and comes back regularly with illuminating reviews of genre cinema from Italy and the rest of Europe. This is another blog where you'll discover films you hadn't heard of before, and Keith is a judicious guide to the virtues and vices.

5. Goodfella's Movie Blog. Last year Dave put himself on the movie-blogging map with a countdown of the best films of each year from 1930 through 2008, often surprising me with unexpected choices while making strong arguments for each choice. He's about to make his mark on 2010 with a Top 100 list of film noir, a genre he knows well, so consider this an invitation to get on board next week.

6. Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies. The Vicar of VHS and Duke of DVD were early friends of my humble blog and their enthusiasm for cult cinema is benignly infectious. Passionate champions of Paul Naschy, Coffin Joe and other worthies, and themselves expressing the spirit of the films they love, they're like the host characters of the movie mag that EC Comics never published, but should have.

7. The Mill Creek Massacre. This blog blinks in and out of existence but Aaron deserves some recognition for his reckless bravery, and encouragement to persevere in watching every film in Mill Creek Entertainment's 50-movie Chilling Classics box set. Any Mill Creek aficionado knows the risk Aaron's taking with his sanity with this project, and that's why I honor his effort here.

And now, seven things about me:

1. Born in 1766, I migrated from my New England birthplace to the rising industrial town of Troy, New York, where I established myself as a meatpacker. During the War of 1812 I supplied beef to the U.S. Army. Soldiers somehow knew that I supplied the stuff, for they started joking that the U.S. on the meat barrels stood for "Uncle Sam," not "United States." I got identified with the government so much that cartoonists started drawing pictures of me to represent the whole country, and in 1961 I was recognized by Congress as the original Uncle Sam. By then I'd been dead for 107 years.

2. On the 2ooth anniversary of my first birth I was reborn under another name in Troy.

3. I'm not sure of when I saw my first movie on a big screen, or which from those I remember was the first. I'm inclined to narrow it down to The Man Called Flintstone or a double feature of Cinderella and Charlie and the Angel. In those days we had two movie houses in Troy, an old Proctor's downtown and the Oxford uptown. By the end of the Seventies both were closed.

4. That left us with the Cinema Art, which as you might guess from the name was a porno theater by the end of the Seventies. One day in 1990 I actually gathered up the courage to visit the place. The building dates back to the 1920s, but you can imagine what such a place, that had been X-rated for decades, was like by then. It ran triple-features in those days, but I was really interested in a particular film because it was said to have an unprecedented lesbian orgy scene in it. I remember nothing of the other films, but I remember having to use the men's room, to my chagrin. It had old school urinals that were built into the floor, and the filthiness of this facility was really more threatening to me than the other patrons, who were few in number. After the experience, though, I felt that I could wait for anything else to come out on video.

5. I taught a movie history course for one semester in the early Nineties. I used Robert Sklar's Movie-Made America as my text on the recommendation of a department head, and I got away with showing the class Birth of A Nation, along with Public Enemy, Meet John Doe, Force of Evil, Breathless, Easy Rider and others that I don't immediately remember. The object of the course was to make students understand how the movie business evolved over time and how that influenced the creative process. It was an uncomfortable experience that I took up on short notice, and I never shook the feeling that I wasn't really communicating with the students.

6. Some time later I went to graduate school, emerging with an advanced degree in American history. I taught some classes while in school (including the history of Islam!) and had that same feeling that I wasn't communicating or reaching out to them as I should. I'd like to blame that on students not being prepared for undergraduate work, but I faulted myself as well. I'm a pretty antisocial character face to face and I suspect that that came through when I tried to teach kids I didn't really want to know. In any event, after getting the degree I never taught another class.

7. In both movie and political blogging I think I've found a congenial mode of communicating my ideas to people, and I'm gratified when people respond to my writings. You guys are all great, but I sometimes feel like I'm giving in to a planned privatization of experience that's driving us all from the public sphere where we might bond with our neighbors and build a real community, but that feeling could be just as much my fault as it is any money-grubbing conspiracy. This is a labored way of saying that I have a lot of fun blogging but sometimes feel guilty about it.

* * *

So, am I done? Not quite, because the One Lovely Blog award obliges me to name fifteen equally deserving blogs. But as Jonny Metro noted upon getting the thing himself, a lot of the people you'd like to give it to have got it already. So to cut to the chase, all the bloggers who got the Kreativ may consider themselves Lovely Blogs as well. Congratulations! That's seven. And by now the band is starting to play the music and those statuesque escorts are closing in, so I'm just going to drop some names and let you discover how good they are yourselves.

Ferdy on Films
The Horror!?
Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies
Italian Film Review
Korova Theare Presents
Lost Video Archive
Ninja Dixon
Twenty-Four Frames

You're all beautiful, people! Thank you and good night.

1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS (1982)

My recent viewing of The Road inspired me to crack open Shriek Show's Post-Apocalyptic Triple Feature box set and take a fresh look at how Italian genre directors imagined the collapse of civilization nearly thirty years ago. Enzo G. Castellari's action film is an early example of the Italian sub-genre, and reflects the influences available to him at the time. It's possible that Castellari could have seen Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior before filming this, but you can't really tell from the product. The Mad Max influence is arguably more apparent in The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland, also from 1982, but 1990 is more obviously influenced by more non-dystopian movies like The Warriors and the controversial Paul Newman cop film, Fort Apache, the Bronx.

For starters, Shriek Show's box cover lies brazenly when it describes 1990's setting as "Post-nuke New York City." There's no evidence of a nuclear attack, as all the landmark skyscrapers (including the World Trade Center towers, of course) are still standing, the better to lend epic scope to Castellari's location footage. Nor is 1990 about scarcity or the depletion of resources, as The Road Warrior is. There's no evidence of shortages and over in Manhattan civilization seems to be still puttering along quite nicely. The real problem, as a title card explains, is that government has lost the will to enforce the law and defend public safety in its worst neighborhoods. We may be meant to assume that New York can't afford to do so anymore, but it's just as dystopian to imagine a wealthy elite deciding to leave the rabble to their fate while shoring up their defenses in gated or otherwise segregated enclaves. We've seen this kind of dystopia as recently as George Romero's Land of the Dead, and we're likely to see it again.

1990 often leaves you wondering how post-apocalyptic things really are in a more-than-intact New York City (above) but if you want an explanation of societal breakdown, look no further than the malt liquor can on this stooge's desk (below).

By 1990, the script says, law and order in the Bronx has been left to the gangs. The situation is a little confusing, since the film portrays a gang leader played by Fred Williamson as the "King of the Bronx" who can allocate resources to different neighborhoods, while the title card claims that the real law in the benighted borough is the motorcycle gang known as the Riders. This is an utterly generic gang, as the name should have told you, lacking any kind of uniform compared to the pimpadelic Tigers (led by Williamson) and the hockey-fetishist Zombies (led by beloved Italo-brute George Eastman as "Golan," --which sounded like "Golem" to me). The Riders -- could they really not come up with a more intimidating name? -- look for leadership to a man named Trash, the hero of our film.

Trash is played by Mark Gregory, a Castellari discovery found in a gym. He's arguably the most post-apocalyptic thing about 1990, because -- I don't know, maybe it's just me -- he doesn't seem quite human. He looks misshapen, top-heavy. He walks in a very careful way, stiff-backed, chest out, and arms stiff at his sides, as if profoundly uncertain of what to do with his hands or concerned that if he didn't step just so the top half of him might topple forward and fall off. On the DVD, Castellari explains that he had to choreograph Gregory's movements very carefully; the result looks like a giant imbecile child's halting emulation of militant adulthood. Here is a man born (made??) to play Frankenstein's monster or a denizen of Goon Island in a Thimble Theater movie. His performance is riveting; watching him, you're in constant anxiety that he'll suddenly malfunction or come to a dead halt. And when he talks, from the mouth of this atavism comes a dese-dem-dose dubbed delivery that sounds about as futuristic as 1970: The Bronx Warriors, at the service of such dialogue as, "We were born dead. Life means nothing. Death walks with us....We carry its smell under our skin." Speak for yourself, Trash.

It's good to be the king, even of the Bronx, as Fred Williamson proves in this strangely interactive shot from 1990

Gregory isn't the only thing that's just sort of wrong with 1990. Frankly, the entire cosmic order is out of whack when Fred Williamson is in a movie and a character named Hammer is played by someone else. While Fred is assigned the role of "the Ogre," and attended by a tall blond whip-wielding "Witch," "Hammer" is the handle of the actual star of the film, Vic Morrow. Hammer is a Bronx-born mercenary (Trash: "He's an asshole who thinks he's God") who's under contract to the Manhattan Corporation, the firm responsible for 60% of world arms production. All that power comes into the hands of an heiress, Anne, on her eighteenth birthday, but she's run away to the no-mans-land of the Bronx, where she seems to be the only civilian apart from the occasional comical drunk. Assaulted by the rollerskating Zombies, she's rescued by Trash, whose consort she becomes. Hammer has to retrieve Anne and deliver her back to Manhattan despite her disinterest in warmongering. His plan includes provoking a general gang war, though I suspect the real reason to do that is so he can lead a flamethrowing cavalry into the Bronx to destroy them all.

The heroes of 1990: The Bronx Warriors fight mercenaries, "Zombies" and all ... that ... jazz!

So Hammer wanders around the Bronx assassinating folks and planting gang spoor to sow distrust, despite Trash's judicious skepticism ("You fuck," he answers one hothead, "it could be a pile of shit out of someone's asshole."). When the Zombies finally succeed in snatching Anne and all too easily laying out Trash, Hammer tries to buy her from Golan (I still like "Golem" better) while an all too rapidly recovered Trash goes on an anabasis to the Tigers, fending off subhuman Scavengers and Fosse-ite dancing fighters along the way, to recruit Ogre and Witch for a rescue operation. But Anne's rescue by Trash and the Tigers is only the prelude to Hammer's blitzkrieg, codenamed Operation Burnt Earth, the nearest thing to an apocalypse we'll get from this movie and, actually, a genuinely inspired gonzo gotterdammerung presided over by a transfigured, barking mad Morrow, for whom only The Twilight Zone was left after this. It turns out that Trash was right about this Hammer person, who we last see howling, "HAMMER! HAMMER IS GOD!" before being proven wrong.

Hammer commands! The horsemen of the post-apocalypse obey!

The final ten minutes of 1990 have an exhilarating and sometimes hilarious intensity that exposes just how halfhearted and misconceived most of the movie was. Castellari seems uncertain of the tone he wants to set and clearly had a hard time taking much of the story seriously. There are moments when he apparently wanted to impose a kind of musicality on the film, editing to the beat of a drummer who just happened to turn up at his location during a gang summit and opening the film with an almost glamorous montage of gang weapons, makeup and fashion. You could believe that the film he really wanted to make was Streets of Fire. As it is, there's an obvious artistry to 1990, which is really a meticulously art-directed picture thanks to Sergio Salvati's cinematography and Massimo Lentini's production design. It's pictorially ambitious in a way that later genuine post-apocalypse films wouldn't be. But as far as the genre goes, Castellari's New Barbarians (which I've seen only in its grungy American form) is a more aggressively imagined and more viscerally disturbing film than this one. I intend to watch the better version from the Shriek Show box set soon. Until then, I'll restrict my recommendation of 1990 to those looking for a lark through the slums of the post-Seventies collective consciousness on a purely tourist basis.

Here's an English language trailer (with Dutch subtitles), uploaded to YouTube by aylmer666:

And here's a sample of Mark Gregory walking and talking, sort of, uploaded by grumblenonymusbosch. Anne is played by the director's own little girl, Stefania Girolami:

Wendigo Meets NIGHT WATCH (Nochnoi Dozor, 2004)

When I put Timur Bekmambetov's international sensation on the to-do list for our weekly survey of vampire cinema my friend Wendigo was in a mood to dive under the table. He had heard nothing but bad about the Russian fantasy film, and wasn't even sure that it counted as a vampire movie despite the emphasis on vampires in the American promotion of it. Also, like I had, he had seen Bekmambetov's Hollywood debut, Wanted, and that admittedly would make one reluctant to investigate its director's earlier output. But I had found a copy in a bargain bin, and he had asked me what sort of exotic vampire films I had, so there it was.

Wendigo had been warned by fellow movie fans and fellow vampire fans that Night Watch was disjointed, confusing, a jumble of dubiously related stories, and fatally incomplete. After seeing it, he feels that some of the criticism was exaggerated, but much of it was justified.

We open with the medieval legend of the Light Others and the Dark Others and their epic, inconveniently staged battle on a high bridge. The leaders of the two armies realized that the only way to avert mutual genocide was to make a truce. Part of the truce is the establishment of the Night Watch, a corps of Light Others (benevolent beings who feed on light and goodness) assigned to monitor the activities of Dark Others (who feed on darkness and, in some cases, blood) and keep them within authorized bounds. We meet some modern Night Watch members in 1992 Moscow, where they break up some human dork's attempt, with the aid of a Dark Other, to induce a miscarriage in his onetime girlfriend. When the dork, Anton, sees them interrogating the witch-woman, the Night Watchers realize that Anton himself is an Other.

Anton is no vampire, but he can drink pig blood and tap into the vampire's call to a prospective victim. The little fangs are a side effect.

Once someone recognizes the special abilities that make them Others, they have to decide whether they'll be Dark or Light. Despite his dubious start, Anton chooses Light and is part of the Night Watch in the present day. He's assigned to protect a boy from a vampire and his recently-turned girlfriend. The Night Watch destroys the vampire, but his girlfriend, not quite knowing what to do with her new powers and hungers, escapes and wanders the city, still trying to mentally call the kid into her clutches.

One clever touch in Night Watch is the hero's ability to see invisible vampires in mirrors, though it has done Anton little good by this point. Below, the widow vampire wanders through Moscow traffic.

But while Anton remains on the job he's also drawn into the threat of the Vortex of Damnation, the opening of which through the unconscious agency of a mysteriously cursed woman will break the great truce and provoke the final battle between Light and Dark. As Anton solves the mystery of the curse, he must also save the boy, Yegor, from the vampire woman and the influence of Zavulon, lord of the Dark Others and an avid video game player. We learn that Zavulon's hobby is really a form of practice for a final showdown with Anton, with Yegor's future as an Other at stake....

Above, scenes from a Vortex. Below, a crucial scene from Zavulon's video game.

In an interview, Bekmambetov expresses surprise that something that he considered a very Russian cultural product (it's based on a 1998 novel, the first of four) caught on in the outside world, including the U.S. It sounds like he was unaware of the evolution of the "urban fantasy" genre in the publishing industry. The popularity of urban fantasy (think Laurel K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, etc.) prepared the ground for Night Watch's American release in 2006. Wendigo is an urban fantasy fan. He judges the Russian film a good fit for the genre. It's a dark fantasy with multiple magical races and, of course, it has a modern, urban setting shadowy enough for the supernatural community to exist beyond human notice. There's a paradoxical element of social realism in urban fantasy, and in Night Watch Anton lives a grubby working-class life with a vampire (who works in a butcher shop) as a neighbor.

While Night Watch is clearly an urban fantasy, Wendigo doesn't acknowledge it as a vampire film. That's because vampirism isn't central to the story. It's unclear from the film alone exactly where vampires fit in the Dark Other pecking order, and while vampires play important roles in the story Wendigo thinks those roles could just as easily have been filled by other magical creatures. Having said that, he was impressed by the film's presentation of the female vampire's predicament. If the film had been about her, or if all Dark Others were vampires, it would have been a vampire film. Even in a film like Blood Suckers when it's left uncertain whether the villain was a supernatural vampire, the threat of vampirism and humans' response to it makes it a vampire film in a way that Night Watch isn't.

Fantasy film or vampire film: is it good? Wendigo found it as disjointed as early critics claimed, whether because something was lost in the translation into English (we saw a dubbed version because Wendigo was uncertain of his ability to read the film's animated subtitles) or because Bekmambetov is an incompetent director. He understands that the film (which only adapts the first section of the Night Watch novel) is meant to be disorienting, but it's one thing to be uncertain of the larger picture and another to be uncertain of what's going on at any particular moment. Even as a small portion of the novel, the film may have bit off more than it could chew by encompassing both the Vortex storyline and the evolving struggle for Yegor's soul, which are not well linked. While the whole was wanting, many of its parts were conceptually and visually intriguing, and Wendigo thought both the Russian actors and the (accented) English dubbers did a good job with the material. The movie leaves Wendigo slightly interested in reading the novel someday so he can figure out how the world of the Others actually works, but it left him uninterested in seeing Bekmambetov's sequel, Day Watch. He'll still give the director credit for showing promise which, as far as Wendigo's concerned, hasn't been fulfilled yet.

The American trailer (which promises a trilogy so far only two-thirds complete) was uploaded to YouTube by SkinoReturns.

Silent Psychos: TOL'ABLE DAVID (1921)

Henry King's Tol'able David was a highly regarded film in its time, one that helped consolidate the stardom of Richard Barthelmess, who had two years earlier played the Chinese protagonist of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms. Barthelmess was 26 when King's film came out, but actually looks fairly convincing as a teenager thanks to his boyish looks and an effective haircut. David is a coming of age story set in rural Virginia, in which the title character hopes to emulate his older brother and drive the hack that delivers the government mail. He flirts with the neighbor girl, romps with his dog, and rejoices in the birth of his nephew, but feels held back by his ma's apron strings and the perception that he's just "tol'able" -- tolerable, that is, as in "just adequate" or "you'll do." He'll be forced into manhood when his family is virtually destroyed by the arrival on his girlfriend's farm of three fugitive cousins, the Hatburns. These are the days when you could shake the law by crossing the state line, and having done so the father and two sons impose themselves on their innocent kin, a father and daughter, until the heat's off across the border. Their appearance made me wonder whether the Hatburns could count as the ancestors of all the psycho hillbillies who've plagued American cinema ever since. They steal the film from a game Barthelmess, especially Ernest Torrence as the craziest coot of the three.

(l-r) Ernest Torrence, Walter P. Lewis and Ralph Yearsley as the outlaw Hatburns. Below, Torrence draws a bead on the law.

Torrence may be best know to silent film fans as Buster Keaton's dad in Steamboat Bill Jr. Here, in his second film role, he's a hulking hayseed lunatic. In an interview included on the Image DVD, King makes clear that he envisioned Luke Hatburn as a kind of psychopath. He recounts instructing Torrence about his character, explaining that Luke doesn't act out of hate but out of a perverse enjoyment of violence. Having crossed the state line, Luke has to be restrained from shooting the sheriff. He doesn't want to kill the lawman, King told Torrence; he just wanted to see if he could knock the man from his horse. Throughout the film, Luke is a creature of uninhibited impulse, killing David's dog just for running past him, nearly killing David's brother with a rock moments later, and nearly raping his cousin, David's girlfriend, later in the picture. Torrence's facial expressions fit King's conception of the character, which he claims to have come up with independent of Edmund Goulding's screenplay: a savage, scarifying idiot.

The other Hatburns aren't exactly sedate. Ralph Yearsley as little brother Saul is arguably even more of a subhuman than Luke, though mostly less menacing. His big scene comes after Luke has stolen the government mail off David's hack, when David invades the Hatburn house to reclaim it. Saul shoots David in the arm and tells his dad he'd been trying to shoot the boy's ear off. Moments later, David shoots him.

Ralph Yearsley as Saul "Little Buzzard" Hatburn.

That sets off the patriarch, who had moments earlier smacked Saul for firing the gun. This is Walter P. Lewis's big moment, when he seems to turn from man to beast before our eyes, eyes glazing and arms lengthening like a gorilla's as he prepares to attack David with a chair. King films these moments of violence very well and for maximum emotional intensity.

Luke is outdoors chasing his cousin, who faints away in proper silent film fashion, when he hears the shots from the cabins. He starts as if feeling the bullets hit his own heart, then lurches back to the cabin, fearing the worst. Seeing it, it's his turn to go lip-twitchingly berserk as a build-up for one of the best dramatic fight scenes of the silent era, a figurative David-Goliath battle between the looming Torrence and the boyish Barthelmess.

Tol'able David is like a more serious and brutal version of Harold Lloyd's rural idylls like Grandma's Boy or The Kid Brother. Barthelmess takes what looks like a huge beating in the climactic showdown, redeeming himself more in his own eyes than anyone else's. His mother would not allow David to seek revenge on the Hatburns for paralyzing his brother and indirectly causing his father's death by heart attack, because David was now the provider for the remaining family and could not risk his life in what looked like a suicide run on the villains. From random village comments David assumes that he's regarded as the coward of the county, and King does a good job of understating this to the point where you could believe that this is more David's opinion of himself than anyone else's. David is a well-constructed story that treats the rural characters with respect rather than as hillbilly stereotypes. I think it would retain its dramatic power with audiences today if they'd give it a chance. The villains, Torrence especially, are a big reason for that, as they are probably the most familiar element in the film for modern viewers. Torrence is so good as a villain, in fact, that he helps Tol'able David retain its status as a silent classic.

On the Big Screen: THE ROAD (2009)

Cormac McCarthy has been well-served by the movies recently. Some literary critics have looked down on his two most recent novels, the best-sellers No Country For Old Men and The Road, as unworthy genre exercises, which may explain why they've proved so adaptable to film compared to, say, All the Pretty Horses. Rather than dismiss these popular books as thriller or fantasy, respectively, critics might be better off thinking of them as parables, especially once it sinks in that McCarthy is making at least one argument in both novels. Both books, and both movies, are critiques of rugged individualism from a professedly conservative perspective. The hunter in No Country is doomed, arguably dooms himself, because he won't accept help and thinks he can deal with all the drug dealers and hitmen himself. As if he thought he hadn't made the point plainly enough the first time, McCarthy restates it in a more allegorical context in The Road. The father is a moral man and teaches his son the right lessons, but seems to have lost the meaning of some of them himself. He claims that he and his boy are "carrying the fire," but the boy eventually questions where and to what purpose they do so. The father claims, with much justice, to be one of "the good guys," but the son recognizes that his righteousness has shaded into self-righteousness. Father and son still live by a moral code (i.e., they don't eat people) but the father has lost focus on anything other than his own truncated family's survival. While he fights to purge his memory of painful memories of past ties, the son strives increasingly to reach out to others. He understands, either by instinct or by thinking through implications of his father's teachings that the father himself has forgotten, that carrying the fire and being a good guy are meaningless unless they are directed toward some goal larger than yourself or your family. The son, seen as an angel by an old vagrant and called a god by his own father, represents humanity's small hope for both survival and redemption because he proves the survival of a social instinct or impulse. The tragedy of the story is that the son can only act on his best impulses after his father has left the scene.

Director John Hillcoat and writer Joe Penhall put this across quite effectively. I worried about Hillcoat as the director after seeing The Proposition, which if anything looked like an audition for adapting McCarthy's grotesque western Blood Meridian. The production delays didn't inspire any additional confidence. But while critical and public response seem to have judged The Road a failure I found it an essentially faithful adaptation. It's a stark film that could have been still more stark. I could have done without both the music and Viggo Mortensen's voice-over narration, as both tend to distance the viewer from the enormity of the father and son's predicament. I also think it was a mistake to open with the day of the event that ends civilization, a scene that is shown in flashback in the middle of the novel. But Penhall may have thought that we'd identify with the father more if we recognize him as someone forced from normality into his ordeal rather than some indigenous denizen of the film's blasted landscape. Despite these early missteps, the story retains its power and may well be idiot-proof. Events don't occur in the exact order I remember from the book, but The Road isn't so meticulously plotted that the changes harm the story. As for Hillcoat's tendency toward grotesque violence, he's actually quite restrained here. He passed up the opportunity to film the novel's most horrific scene, for instance -- the cooking of a newborn baby. He may not have had the resources to film the book's most expansive scene of devastation, the father and son's trek through a city center and hundreds of cars with corpses in them. There's still plenty of nasty stuff, most notably Mortensen's discovery of an abattoir full of naked human cattle for slaughter, but the film's real horror is in the unrelieved bleakness and near-emptiness of the ruined world.

The biggest innovation in the screenplay is the expanded role of the protagonist's wife, who appears in flashbacks throughout the film, including scenes original to the movie of the couple's pre-apocalyptic life. This might be written off as "heart interest" or something to keep female viewers interested, but Penhall seems to have more in mind than writing a part that justifies Charlize Theron's overqualified presence. Keeping her as a consistent presence in Mortensen's mind reminds us of his struggle to forget the past. It also prods us to ask what exactly drives the husband to survive, to compel his wife to bring a baby into a world where the living all too often do envy the dead. His wife wants to kill herself (Theron and Mortensen are denied the novel's powerful dialogue on Death as a lover) and many of their friends had apparently done so long before. Why is life so much more important to the husband that he would try to endure what so many find unendurable, and bring a helpless child along for the ride? Could it be something as simple as a selfish desire to see his seed go on? Is that all he really means by carrying the fire? The point of these questions isn't to question whether the protagonist is the good guy he claims to be. He is a good guy, but McCarthy's message, and the film's, is that there's another level of good that the hero's morality doesn't reach.

Mortensen isn't quite the protagonist I envisioned when I read the novel. I expected more of a hard man, closer to a counterpart to the hunter of No Country. That doesn't mean it had to be Josh Brolin, but there's a softness sometimes to Mortensen's performance that may fit with the film's vision of his constant struggle to harden his heart but doesn't quite match my memory of the book. But he is very good much of the time, and I also liked Kodi Smit-McPhee as his son. This was one time when I could appreciate a child actor who whines and cries a lot, because the boy's weakness and sensitivity are crucial to the story. Theron gives what her part requires (though one can imagine her surviving quite well in a different sort of post-apocalypse story) and Robert Duvall is uncanny in his brief appearance as a broken-down survivor. I get the impression that The Road is being bypassed in the new-year rush of lists and awards, but movie lovers shouldn't overlook it. At the very least, it's a strong antidote for anyone who imagines the end of civilization as a fantasy land of fighting and freedom. It might make a good second feature for the more popular 2012. Better still, maybe everyone who went to that should be made to see The Road.