The Iron Horse (1924)

I can imagine the toils of the men who built the Overland Route: sweat beading, muscles straining, hammers arching high and falling sharp with a metal-on-metal clang, driving spikes into the dirt. Again and again—so many times that they sang songs of it as they worked. And month after month—for so long that their wives and children and indeed their whole towns moved along with them across the miles. Home was where the work was.

John Ford’s The Iron Horse is about this story, and it will sweep you up in its greatness, given time—the greatness of the story, I mean. As for the greatness of the movie, that depends on your taste. For the first hour or so it feels like something you’ve seen a million times, and I think, for some viewers, it will never be more than that. It is formulaic, populated with vaudevillian archetypes, and frankly, could have used sound. But The Iron Horse also escapes its trappings. It makes you care about the people in it, by acknowledging that even archetypal characters in classic straits face real consequences, perhaps as a result of the roles they must play. There is real tragedy and real conflict here. And if that doesn’t win you over, there’s still the pleasure of witnessing genius in development: the work of a young John Ford, who already knew how to make simple gestures into huge moments.

To Die Like Man (2009)

All great art is in dialogue with its audience. But film, by virtue of its reach, and sheer volume and range of material (high and low, big and small), is the medium most in dialogue with itself; its artists constantly challenging its purpose and definition.

So directors: take risks. Please take risks; I watch a lot of movies and I remember the risky ones best. Just remember that there’s a line—not even a fine one, really—between taking risks and simply indulging yourself at the audience’s expense. A line João Pedro Rodrigues crosses with To Die Like a Man: a film seemingly in dialogue with no one; made for an audience of empty chairs.

It's the Old Army Game (1926)

Sorry for the paucity of content here lately. I’ve had a lot of freelance work on my plate; some of it challenging but most of it just really, really time-consuming. It’s kept me in front of Ol’ Trusty (my laptop) for enough hours that I don’t want to spend my leisure time there too.

I like to be busy though. When you work for yourself, you feel guilty if you’re anything less than grateful for work. It’s not free time you long for, but balance, because, in my field anyway, your work isn’t what drives you so much as the lifestyle it allows you to maintain. Things like this blog, and the anywhere-from-ten-minutes-to-three-hours of film watching that proceed every post, are possible because I can carve out a pocket of time for them. If I was nine-to-five, it would be harder. I know, because it was.

There are times, then—times lately—when one or two of the elements that compose my life rise up, tide-like, and swamp the rest. And so you wish for a pocket of time, where you could nestle yourself, to work on the things that matter most; or even, just, to get enough rest—just, to do what you want, when you want.

I write this in self-pity, perhaps, but also in sympathy. Elmer Prettywillie, the main character, hero, anti-hero and sometimes villain of It’s The Old Army Game, feels a similar pain to mine. He’s the town druggist, back when that meant you sold all kinds of things, and did a little surgery after-hours too, and he’s addled by a life full of people who will not let him alone. If he were a better man, it would be a tragedy.

Hot Water (1924)

If ‘Harold’ was a real guy, I’d want to know him. I’d want to know the man behind him, Harold Lloyd, too; but for different reasons. Harold Lloyd, comedy megastar of the silent era, was one of the few to survive it with career and lifestyle intact; he’d have a lot of good stories to tell. But ‘Harold,’ his character in Hot Water, is someone I’d want for a friend even if he amounted to nothing. He’s a simple, gentle, genuine man I could trust.

A flawed man, though. Here’s the best example: Near the end of Hot Water’s first sequence of gags, Harold is flung out of a moving streetcar, into the middle of a fairly busy road. He was ejected because he’d made himself an irritant onboard the car—overloaded with groceries and a live turkey he just won in a raffle. Now he’s sitting on the road, parcels strewn around him, half dazed. Cars bearing down on him. And the first thing he does is pin the turkey between his legs to keep it from wandering away while he fixes his necktie. Harold’s not a practical man, but he always wants to do the proper thing, and he’s earnest about it.

The Princess of Montpensier (2010)

A talkie, courtesy TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto.


The ones you love are never far from your thoughts, even when they’re far away.

I think that sentiment’s universal. I think that, if you said it to someone centuries ago, they’d nod their head, a little sadly, just the same. But they might see irony in it that we don’t. We’re a society that travels fast and communicates even faster, and for whom boundaries like marriage are fluid and frankly, not that strong. In other societies, in other times, ‘goodbye’ might have been the last words a loved one heard from you for years. Or there might be no goodbye at all: just the long torture of close proximity between you and your beloved… betrothed to another by unbreakable bonds.

Proximity is one of many themes in Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier: a bulky, moody, but mostly very good historical drama; a film at its best when revealing the consequences of expressing human feelings in circumstances indifferent to them. The setting is 16th Century France; the circumstances: the renewed Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots. The players: the French aristocracy and their attendants. In this unstable period, love was a luxury that had little, if anything to do with one’s decision to get married.