Walking at night I keep my head down and my hands in my pockets. I am over six feet tall, over 230 pounds. I am a man. Walking at night I often wear black—I often wear black anyway—which makes me cautious of drivers, for I know they may not see me. I am sometimes embarrassed when, walking at night, I inadvertently startle a driver, the wraithlike “O” of the driver’s mouth through sheen of overhanging green light on the windshield, the sharp juke of the car’s grill away from the side of the road.

I am not irresponsible. I leave clear the roadway. I avoid becoming a human hazard. But even on a sidewalk, several feet from the street, a figure clad in black can surprise an unsuspecting driver. The sudden appearance of a previously unseen pedestrian unveils one of those dazed moments of complacency all drivers experience, inspiring the driver with palpitating awareness of violent vehicular potential. Ensconced in four thousand pounds of plastic, rubber, glass, and steel, a driver is lulled into a euphoric sense of solitude, of sedation, of somnambulism quickly broken by the sudden appearance of an apparition along the road.

Walking at night I am sometimes yelled at by passersby. Teen boys, drunk on puberty and parched for common sense, hurl epithets racist, sexist, homophobic at the straight white man walking. Tall pickup trucks gear-headedly declare their aversion to mufflers and catalytic convertors. Junk Mazda two-doors stay too long at stop signs, their intensions made uncommunicable by the onyx impenetrability of tinted glass.

Walking at night, I was once accosted by a drunk who followed me for one block on the opposite side of the street, taunting me, begging for a fight. I pretended not to hear him, and, like a car-chasing dog, he eventually turned and went back home.

Once, disenchanted with my own neighborhood yet encouraged by insomnia, anxiety, boredom, I drove to another city at night looking for a new place to walk. It was 2 a.m. I was in the middle of a divorce.

That night in a strange place I drove residential streets. I drove purposelessly, lawfully, with my speed somewhere under the posted limit but over the kind of B & E-casing crawl that might warrant suspicion. I watched wealthy suburbs of Tudor architecture and diagonally checkered chem-lawn cease like glacial terminus upon moraine of liquor stores with diagonally checkered chain-link windows and neon signs announcing “LOTTERY” and “COORS.” In Post-Themysciran neighborhoods walked by men alone, I drove past inebriated zombies and gazing loiterers and the crossed green owl eyes of a Tobacco Shop poster reading “KOOL”. A nodding, complacent driver, just like the ones I sometimes startle at home, I lingered too long at a stop light turned green. A woman hollered at my passenger door. She ran on high heels, waving as if I were her friend. As she reached my car, the light still green, I waved politely and drove away.

Walking is easier nearer home.

Once when I was in my twenties and lived in a rural county, I was walking on a starry night. Sober but sloshing from two beers, I stepped into the trees along the State Route, in search of a place to pee in the dark. From the trees I saw a drunk in a Jeep careen up a brittle bank of dead roadside grass. Nearly capsizing, the Jeep came down hard upon the asphalt. It sat idling in the middle of the road, with its headlights shining at an oblique angle off into the night. I do not think the driver saw me, and the Jeep eventually drove away. The Jeep looked like the Wrangler one of my classmates drove in high school. I am almost sure it was his. I will not say his name. A few years ago, in his forties, he died from a drug overdose.

I have always been drawn to walking at night. I grew up watching movies about nocturnal underworld journeys: Taxi Driver (1976), After Hours (1985), The Fifth Horseman is Fear (1965). The first time I read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” (1933), I was already among the walkers at night.

Walking at night I sometimes startle or am startled by other pedestrians. I am over six feet tall, over 230 pounds. I am a man. I keep my head down and my hands in my pockets. I nod when police cruisers go by. I take a wide berth for women in the street. I stay away from young people. If I round a corner into someone who looks afraid, I say something innocuous like “Howdy.” I say it quietly. I say it in code. I say it so, beneath the code, the other walker can hear “I am not dangerous. I am only a walker at night.”

Despite my efforts to be kind, I see very few women walking at night. When I wave at the police cruisers, I become aware of my gender, my age, my race. I know that I can code-shift from belligerent hillbilly to innocuous college professor and not be betrayed by some preconception about the way I look or speak. Walking at night is not for everyone.

Walking is privilege.

Walking at night I notice neighborhoods that have sidewalks and neighborhoods that do not. I notice walkers in wheelchairs stymied at curbs. I notice kids walking to school in the middle of the street, sent walking into traffic by interstices of hawthorn or by long stretches of roadside mire.

I notice walkers who walk for dogs or for health. I notice walkers who walk to work because they lack car or license.

Like adequate city planning, like public trains, like neighborhoods, like gardens, walking at night is no longer common.

Walking at night accompanies, sometimes traverses, the borders that separate luxury from danger, from fear.

Walking at night is socially marginal.

Walking at night is minority opinion.

Walking at night often proceeds unseen.

I think it is generally safe to say evidence suggests climate change threatens us with extinction; nevertheless, it has been a long time since I used social media to post about climate change.

There are many reasons why:

· Because the denial of scientific evidence in general is omnipresent.

· Because the denial even of visible empirical evidence in local and national politics is omnipresent.

· Because for several years in a class called Ecological Discourse, I witnessed students’ extraordinary stress when I shared the Climate Reports and other measured sources of data.

· Because the low enrollments in those classes (6-10 students per class) suggested that, in a university of approximately 30,000 students, not very many were being encouraged to take seriously our obvious environmental distress; and, given that I saw more environmental discourse on our campus than at most public and private institutions of any sort in my northern Appalachian region, I began to wonder how to introduce the discourse without unduly burdening these young people with the “and I only have escaped alone to tell thee!” (Job 1:15) of climate.

· Because recent legislation in my state censoring pluralism in the name of pluralism indicates the best way to spread the climate news would probably be to be censored for teaching it.

· Because I am fatigued by more than a decade of sharing this information; because I am not a climate scientist and, by sharing this information, take time away from my teaching and scholarship about literature and film to present information about which I have limited ethos; and because I fear sharing the climate news with limited professional ethos may contribute to the noise of accurate information and misinformation that is partly the reason our politicians and community and business leaders do next to nothing biospherically efficacious.

· Because I am not sure how to convince people with their heads in the sand that this matters; and because recent political developments have shown me that the response to the terrible reality of this dilemma will mostly entail punishing powerless marginalized groups of people with institutionalized violence while privileged groups of people disenfranchise the rest of us and stockpile to “win,” which is to say they “win” so that they can lose last, e.g., when the security and custodial staffs in their (real or fantasy) bunkers simply kill them like the Romanovs.

A friend recently posted a Substack essay and video by University of Arizona emeritus ecologist and biologist Guy R. McPherson. From the Wikipedia page on McPherson:

“In November 2015, McPherson was interviewed on National Geographic Explorer with host Bill Nye.^[13] Andrew Revkin in The New York Times said McPherson was an “apocalyptic ecologist ... who has built something of an ‘End of Days’ following.”^[13] Michael Tobis, a climate scientist from the University of Wisconsin, said McPherson “is not the opposite of a denialist. He is a denialist, albeit of a different stripe.”^[14] David Wallace-Wells writing in The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) called McPherson a “climate Gnostic“ and on the “fringe,”^[15] while climate scientist Michael E. Mann said he was a “doomist cult hero.”^[16]”

In a discussion thread beneath the McPherson post, Kevin Hester writes, “At the risk of repeating myself ad infinitum, I continue to quote the late great Albert Bartlett. ‘The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to truly understand the exponential function.’” Hester refers to the following type of discourse by physicist Bartlett, who died in 2013:

Again, McPherson’s ethos has been questioned (see above block quotation from Wikipedia), yet I share here the post from McPherson, not out of any insistence that he be followed, but rather for context and, frankly, because climate Jeremiad seems to be at an ebb these days with so much other attention-grabbing institutionalized violence to choose from.

Admittedly, McPherson gets more likes than my Substacks on Sonny Chiba movies Karate for Life (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1977), The Decisive Power of Aikido (Shigehiro Ozawa, 1975), and Doberman Cop (Kinji Fukasaku, 1977), which is to say the McPherson post above has 23 likes at the time of my writing.

If all publicity is good publicity, my reposting McPherson is either a productive lighting of a fire under an ass or two or an unproductive contribution to doomsday discourse; and I wonder what publicity I am possibly hoping for here: For climate action? I hope so. For McPherson? I don’t know. For me? How can I pretend to not seek an audience when all of us on Substack seek an audience? For Sonny Chiba movies? Have you seen the stuff people care about? I mean, why not Sonny Chiba movies?

Currently I help family and students as much as I can, while I work on a project on Orson Welles; try to market three novel manuscripts; draft, publish, or often fail to publish short stories; await peer review on two articles; and pick away at research for an ongoing work of period fiction. Otherwise, I’m not doing much about climate change. If you want to get mad enough at me for that to inspire yourself to do your part, have at it. Perhaps I can do better for the climate as a cynic and disappointment than I can as an “influencer.” Frankly, though I love the arts and understand the value of authorial branding, I despise the influencer racket. Those insufferable influencers are everywhere. But that is the subject for another hypocritical essay.

I think the main thing that keeps me from posting is that I fear my friends and acquaintances will think my enthusiasm lies with extinction rather than with movies, books, and music. I’m not sure what would be more deeply cynical: for me to continue failing to spread the bad news of climate change, or for me to spread the bad news as if spreading bad news is what I really want to do with my time.

In any case, the following link is not Jeremiad. It’s a collaborative scientific report. Feel free to read it: 2025 Climate Report.

When Groucho Marx turns up as a mystery guest on What’s My Line? (April 23, 1967), he is quickly guessed because he has been in town all week promoting his book. That the celeb panel on the show guess someone as distinctive as Groucho from the relatively small and, in industry-insular terms, event(-ful) world of show business interests me less than the business’s by-definition ongoing non-insular project of sharing the banal current events of the industry with the industry’s fans.

One of E.D. Hirsch’s points in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1988) is that “gatekeepers” (bosses, teachers, the members of the great American yacht club) can help one cash in one’s cultural capital; and for about a decade after Hirsch’s book became the fad, gatekeepers and first-year composition students argued questions like “Who keeps the gate?” and “Just how faddy can something be and still get through the gate?”

Cultural literacy, both a subcategory and construct of language, is like the new words that get added to the dictionary.

Cultural literacy is a collection of the fads that stick.

Q: Why do some fads stick? A: The collecting itself.

Q: Who collects them? A: The fans, of course, and the gatekeepers helping to manufacture or maintain the fans.

On the aforementioned episode of What’s My Line? the quickly guessed guest Groucho—like Bart when he is forced to keep repeating “I didn’t do it” on The Simpsons: “Bart Gets Famous“ (S5: E2, February 3, 1994)—is encouraged to repeat his famous Friars Club story. This sort of thing goes on until Groucho self-deprecatingly aborts another story about his correspondence with Marx Brothers fan and cultural-literacy collector T.S. Eliot.

The line in question from Groucho Marx’s Friars Club story:

“Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that’ll accept me as a member.”

Woody Allen famously paraphrases the Groucho line in Annie Hall (1977), noting that the line appears “originally” in Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

My temptation to use the words like “famous” or “famously” demonstrates part of Hirsch’s point about gatekeeping, i.e., that by insisting these allusions to Groucho, Woody, the Friars, and Freud are “famous,” I am essentially enforcing these allusions supposed fame and reinforcing my position as arbiter of what gets to be and does not get to be famous. Fandom’s insistence on the famousness of its subjects is funny that way.

Fandom is many things, not least of which an imagined community—like Great Britain, like MAGA, like Texas, like The Ohio State University, or like The Swiftie Empire—but among other things fandom is an aggrandization of (and, by association, a self-aggrandization within) some topic.

In other words, fandom is a form of gatekeeping.

But what does it mean to be interested in these cultural phenomena while doubling down on “I don’t want to belong to any club that’ll accept me as a member”? I am asking for a friend, or, less needily, I ask this question on behalf a friend.

Okay, frankly, I ask the question for myself.

In fact, I have previously asked this question about the original series Star Trek, which I have come to love but with the caveat that I do not want to lock this topic in at the bar, nor do I want to attend the conventions.

Star Trek: “The Man Trap” (S1:E1, September 8, 1966) and “Charlie X” (S1:E2, September 15, 1966), both recent rewatches, are strong early episodes for the series.

That “Charlie X” is basically The Twilight Zone: “It’s a Good Life” (S3:E8, November 3, 1961), but during the dangerous teenage years and with an ending that allows the Star Trek universe to move on to other things, is part of a charm thoroughly generic but also historically contextual insofar as the episode, like so many episodes in both the Gene Roddenberry and the Rod Serling series, recycles a plot type from the great SF “sea of stories” while also contributing to a discourse popular at its time—in the case of “It’s a Good Life” and “Charlie X” that popular discourse being some constellation of growing up, teendom, and/or delinquency.

All these cultural elements, along with Star Trek’s amalgam of TV-room bridge, garish crayon-box mise-en-scène, and Kennedy-era re-colonization/de-imperialization of the frontier mythos, interest me plenty. But for the love of Charlie X, just don’t meme me the Uhura song or make me wear the stupid plastic ears!

Cultural literacy is both fascinating and annoying, and I suspect the reasons for this paradox are deeply psychological, if not necessarily segregated to the unconscious.

Indeed, it is not so much that “I don’t want to belong to any club that’ll accept me as a member” as that “I don’t want to belong to any club at all.” And though I would love to have a round of drinks at a table with Zora Neale Hurston, Orson Welles, and Groucho Marx, ongoing Epstein-file updates make me grateful I am not in any club that would have Woody Allen or DJT as a member.

Does that mean I have Fandom Derangement Syndrome (FDS)? Maybe so.

But as far as most of these culturally canonical things go—e.g., Star Trek, Annie Hall, Freud—and considering the alternative, I will happily remain a fair-weather fan.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed., Verso, 2006.

Freud, Sigmund. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton & Company, 1960.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Vintage Books, 1988.

AI “enhancement” is now being foisted upon faculty directory shots at my institution.

Above in red flannel is an unaltered iPhone selfie of the person in question, i.e., me.

Below is a recent Matt Wanat-approved professional headshot by Zoë Cranfill, an excellent human photographer:

And next see an AI-altered shot of me that turned up without my permission on our organization’s website (complete with a line from the email I just sent up the chain of command):

Notice the elongation of my skull, the Hulk-villain Masterminding of my brow, the pushing together of my eyes, the “neatening” of my beard, the squaring of my jaw, the straightening of my patently crooked nose, the general symmetrization of my facial features (proof that hyper-prescriptive neoclassicism in portraiture out-uncannies the gothic), and the basic cut-throating of my demeanor. As much as I enjoy the character-actor assholery of my stare—like some mashup of Wall Street, Presidential advisor, Ozymandias, and Lex Luthor; or perhaps like a mashup of serious Matt Wanat and serious Jon Stewart—my guess (and it is only a guess since I am unsure which Oz-behind-the-curtain, human or posthuman, to ask) is that the red-flannel pic I took (see above) has been fed through a machine that has twisted my head forward and matted it to a business suit collar.

For the record, it was not our public relations expert who changed this shot, I have complained, and the mistake has been quickly and kindly rectified. I remain in good humor and post here not to talk out of school but mainly for the posthuman discourse heap, which is located adjacent to the Uriah Heep.

In any case, Homer Simpson called it (S10:E5, November 8, 1998: “When You Dish Upon a Star”) when the wise sage said that when dead

“you’ll all be in commercials dancing with vacuum cleaners.”

On the web (via social media, via directories, via intrusive data sites) we all get to feel a bit of the joy of being a celebrity in a deepfake. I eagerly await the fake Wanat nudes.

There are two questions quietly informing this SubStack—one related to aesthetics, the other related to individual choice.

Aesthetically, I would encourage (and nothing more than encourage) others to consider that air-brushing, touch-ups, and, surely, AI enhancements on selfies overwrite part of one's character in ways that are artistically dubious and a potential micro-erasure of selfhood.

I have said this before and will continue to say it. Asgard looks like an anxiety-provoking site

; meanwhile, the Scottish coastal village where Thor gets fat looks like a pretty nice place to live:

In other words, CGI realities mostly suck.

That said, one's being at liberty to control one’s own image is, I think, sacrosanct. In other words, if you disagree with my points about air-brushing and AI-enhancements and want to avatar yourself up, rock on! You do you, which is neither my job nor my right.

I have Facebook friends who do delightfully playful digital selfie matting online, much of it fun, none of it presented as reality. More importantly, even when I see heavily altered pics of friends’ faces on social media and think to myself, “Hmmmm? Doesn’t look like Mike to me,” I am comforted by the selfie-poster’s right to choose. Context and agency matter.

Nevertheless, we will see more built-in violations of people's right to self-determination in the AI add-ons that have crept into everything. These are not entirely about recent AI; they go back into the 19th-century history of photography and portrait painting; they extend something that live-action CGI has normalized for almost four decades of filmmaking; and, of more immediate concern, mediation of one’s image gives some rein to the medium doing the mediating.

I hope that a critical mass of us can agree that the trend of some agent, human or machine, just willy-nilly farting around with a person’s image is not good.

Apropos of nothing except a reminder that technologies, ideologies, and energy uses have consequences, a picture of Charles Bronson next to bison bones, referencing a Manifest Destiny-induced spike during the Holocene extinction.

Gender and the Generic Imperative: The Curious Case of Billy Jack

Sometimes parodied or derided by the public memory, Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin & Delores Taylor, 1971) is nonetheless a fascinating mixed-genre film, not least of which because of the film’s fight choreography. The film uses basic martial arts filming and editing techniques like selling the strikes—

—and axial cutting on action—

—to create simple, effective action scenes, occasional discontinuity notwithstanding (see discontinuity in axial cut above). These visual devices, when combined with low-volume foley on the sounds of strikes, essentially understate the hero’s otherwise conventionally borderline superhuman fight prowess.

Most interesting, however, is the film’s resolution insofar as the closing scenes of Billy Jack offer a curious variation on gender expectations in the Western.

Billy Jack, played by the film’s director Tom Laughlin, is a part-Indian Vietnam vet and practitioner of Hapkido who protects a Southwestern American Indian reservation and a progressive school on the reservation from the bigotry of residents of a nearby town. Among the series of altercations between Billy’s friends and the town is Billy’s using Hapkido to kick local bigot butt after racists harass the school’s kids; the school’s harboring Barbara (Julie Webb), the pregnant daughter of an abusive Deputy Sheriff (Kenneth Tobey); Freedom School director Jean Roberts’s (Delores Taylor) being raped by Bernard (David Roya); and Bernard’s subsequent murder of a Native American teen named Martin (Stan Rice).

After killing Bernard, who is the rapist of Jean and the killer of Martin, Billy Jack in the film’s final scene has been cornered by authorities in an old church. Freedom School director Jean Roberts, motivated by her interest in saving the controversial school from public-relations fallout, talks Billy into giving himself up

Numerous elements of this scene merit discussion. As someone with an interest in both conventional Westerns and less conventional genre films, I have always thought of Billy Jack as a curiosity, a kind of hard-to-define mixed genre movie. But I will argue here, as Eric Litchenfeld has done elsewhere, that it is worth defining Billy Jack, at least provisionally, as a contemporary Western and action film.

While the film’s creators were insistent that the final cut include some of its least generic scenes—including playacting exercises designed to build community and heal a culture wounded by political and intergenerational divisions—the film’s main plotlines bear clear structural similarities to Westerns and other male action films, including violent retribution for violence against women and a siege-style standoff at the film’s climax.

Billy’s standoff with authorities and the American Indian rights elements thereof resemble other cultural conflicts of the early seventies and eerily predict mid-seventies incidents like the FBI’s descent upon Pine Ridge and members of the American Indian Movement, which culminated in the famous and controversial incarceration of Leonard Peltier; but the Billy Jack siege also recalls numerous similar scenes in American Westerns, with movies like the film Hombre (Martin Ritt, 1967) serving as clear examples thereof. In other words, Billy Jack is a sociopolitical document, circa 1971, but also a male-centered action film drawing on familiar conventions of the Western.

As such, Billy Jack is a good example of what Michael Coyne, in his book The Crowded Prairie (1997), might call the Western or genre film as “sociopolitical allegory,” although in the case of Billy Jack there is nothing particularly subtle about the film’s historical timeliness or its politics.

Most secondary sources on Billy Jack concentrate upon the film as counterculture indie, or upon the film’s somewhat compromised interest in American Indian rights, and the movie is certainly interesting in both respects. But my interest here is to argue that Billy Jack’s siege scene represents a refreshingly unusual turning upside down of the expectations of the Western and of the male-protagonist rape revenge plot; and in this I think I am in agreement with some of the observations of Lichtenfeld, who claims Billy Jack “engages Western conventions by subverting them—or put more accurately, inverting them” (Lichtenfeld 9).

Feminist critics from Molly Haskell (1974) to Jane Tompkins, the later in her book West of Everything (1992), have described a particularly patronizing and male-centered response to violence against women in sixties and seventies cinema and in Westerns in particular. In fact, retributive violence of man against man, often presumably in defense of a woman, is so deeply ingrained in the history of the Western, and in its prehistory in captivity narrative, as to constitute a generic imperative, i.e., a kind of foregone conclusion.

So deeply ingrained is this expectation of violence that it is only really in satiric parodies—from Crane’s “Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898) to Tom Petty’s “Two Gunslingers” (1991) to comedic diversionary tactics in “Bugs Bunny Rides Again” (Friz Freleng, 1948) or Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974)—that we see this violence avoided. So deeply ingrained is this expectation, in fact, that even in Westerns notoriously critical of the genre’s retributive violence, film’s like Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), we are often given the violence anyway, albeit with doses of complication and irony.

In this respect Billy Jack does more than reconcile its period’s pacifism to the obligatory violence of male action genres; rather, the film has the rape victim, played by the script’s co-writer Delores Taylor, speak her own peace, a peace that acknowledges her anger, her fear for her anger, and her fear for her school.

Roger Ebert’s review of the film emphasizes Billy’s tendency towards violence. Ebert writes,

“I’m also somewhat disturbed by the central theme of the movie. ‘Billy Jack’ seems to be saying the same thing as ‘Born Losers,’ that a gun is better than a constitution in the enforcement of justice. Is democracy totally obsolete, then? Is our only hope that the good fascists defeat the bad fascists?”

The problem with Ebert’s reading is that the film does not ultimately advocate Billy’s view; rather, it advocates Jean’s view; and given the didactic qualities of the film, it is hard to watch the ending of Billy Jack and not see that ending as representing Delores Taylor’s or Tom Laughlin’s or both writers’ views. This is not to say that Billy Jack, which is among other generic things an action film with action-film violence, does not have it both ways, or perhaps have it more than both ways. But it is to say that Billy Jack’s ending forgoes the ironic resignation to generic imperatives of violence characteristic of films like Unforgiven in favor of something fundamentally—didactically, yes, but also, I think, subversively—discursive.

The ending of Billy Jack surely represents a series of sociopolitical comprises—the people of the reservation are asked to put their faith in a federal government that has historically been untrustworthy, and Jean puts her school and its kids before her own anger, as Billy is asked by her to do with his own anger—but to me the most interesting, and under-examined, feature of the ending of Billy Jack is its tendency to put Jean’s voice before Billy’s violence, a feature of the film that departs radically from the typical generic imperatives of the cinematic period, of the Western, and of the male action film in general.

As Jean tells Billy, “It’s so easy for you to die dramatically. It’s a hell of a lot tougher for those of us who’ve got to keep on trying.” To me, this is the most interesting inversion in Billy Jack, the care with which it marginalizes the Western and male action film’s imperatives for violence in favor of the voice of the woman who has been victimized. This, in the Western and the action film, is a very rare thing.

Works Cited

Billy Jack. Directed by Tom Laughlin, Warner Bros., 1971.

Blazing Saddles. Directed by Mel Brooks, Warner Bros., 1974.

Bugs Bunny Rides Again. Directed by Friz Freleng, Warner Bros., 1948.

Coyne, Michael. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. I.B. Tauris, 1997.

Crane, Stephen. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” McClure’s Magazine, 1898.

Ebert, Roger. “Billy Jack (1971) Movie Review & Film Summary.” RogerEbert.com, 2 Aug. 1971, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/billy-jack-1971. Accessed February 19, 2026.

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974.

Hombre. Directed by Martin Ritt, 20th Century Fox, 1967.

Lichtenfeld, Eric. “Prelude 1971.” Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle & The American Action Movie (2007): 9-22. Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text. Web. 19 Dec. 2012.

Petty, Tom. “Two Gunslingers.” Into the Great Wide Open, MCA Records, 1991.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford UP, 1992.

Unforgiven. Directed by Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 1992.

Wanat, Matt. “Captive Subjects: Point of View and Initiation in Hombre.” Western American Literature, vol. 43, no. 3, 2008, pp. 279–304. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/wal.2008.0016.

The White Buffalo (J. Lee Thompson, 1977)

An interesting mess of a movie, The White Buffalo’s biggest liability is not its rocking-horse-quality animatronic attempt at the titular beast, a slow pitch to Mystery Science Theater 3000, but rather its multiple expository gaps.

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes,

“One would have to consult Richard Sale‘s novel to determine whether the freakish gaps, detours and red herrings are ascribable (in whole or in part) to the original source. As the movie version stands, the bewildering lack of motivation for Hickok‘s recurring white buffalo nightmare—from which he invariably wakes blasting away with pistols in each hand—suggests, along with a lot of other [imponderables], that a great deal of background exposition has either been eliminated or drastically reduced, leaving a peculiarly disassembled narrative in its wake.”

Kim Novak exists in the movie apparently so that Kim Novak can exist in the movie, eager to sleep with Charles Bronson’s incognito Wild Bill Hickok even after Hickok shoos away her character, Poker Jenny Schermerhorn, claiming he has an STI.

Old friends like Poker Jenny give Hickok a past from which to flee, but it is a past that seems too pleasant to abandon; meanwhile, the audience is left to guess that the leaden-but-underclear symbolism of the white buffalo is partly the curse of the gunfighter.

As Gene Siskel, whom, like Rosenbaum, is quoted on the film’s Wikipedia page, notes,

“Hickok, who hates Indians, and Crazy Horse, who hates white men, grow to respect each other through the film. Courage kills racism. It’s a shame this theme isn’t developed more.”

Indeed, the film is about a warrior reconciliation of Crazy Horse (Will Sampson) (degraded to the name “Worm” after the death of his child by a white buffalo attack) with Hickok (degraded to incognito after a life of violence).

Hickok’s white-buffalo nightmares look corny and, as Rosenbaum notes, barely make sense; and the buffalo bucks around like a mechanical bull. Consequently, a scene with Linda Redfearn as Crazy Horse’s historical wife Black Shawl—

a scene in which Black Shawl clings to the couple’s daughter, killed by the beast—becomes oddly stage-bound and patently stagy, an inadvertently(?) dreamlike death otherwise, though clumsily, somewhat reminiscent of the Indian camp raid by Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956).

More immediate is the buffalo attack’s allegorization of the Bluewater Massacre (September 3, 1855) or, anachronistically, the Wounded Knee Massacre (December 29, 1890) of Lakota by U.S. Cavalry; or of the Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864) of Cheyenne and Arapaho; the latter a massacre in which the Indian-hater Charlie Zane (Jack Warden) in the film is claimed to have participated.

In other words, just as the titular buffalo symbolizes Hickok’s violent past, which includes killing Indigenous allies of Crazy Horse, the buffalo and its whiteness symbolize the settler colonial genocide against Native Americans, callously referenced by Zane in the film as extinction.

The film’s director and frequent Bronson collaborator J. Lee Thompson referred to The White Buffalo as “Moby-Dick of the west,” recalling the famous description of Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965) as “Moby-Dick on horseback.”

But whereas the reference when applied to the Peckinpah film, itself a notoriously messy production (see Wanat in Engel), makes for an apt description of the titular Peckinpah hero’s Ahab-like obsession and of the Babel-like diversity of Dundee’s troop, the most effectively Moby-Dick-like element of The White Buffalo is not the heroic quest itself, but rather, especially in the film’s final battle of man with beast, the bucking animatronic buffalo’s homage to the superior effects in John Huston’s 1956 adaptation of the Melville classic.

Make no mistake that most of The White Buffalo’s staginess is less attributable to any New Wave stylings than to production shortcomings, and the scene of the death of the Lakota child would work better as realistic location shooting sans mechanical buffalo entirely than it does shot on a studio set with fantasy-film aesthetics. Nonetheless, the mostly inadvertently cinematically self-referential elements of Thompson’s film age better for me than Hickok’s motivation does insofar as The White Buffalo, effects warts included, is a trippy and certainly a filmic experience.

Split diopter shots create a proto-Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015) cinematicism, particularly in scenes with Jack Ward as Zane, an Indian-killer with a mythical Indigenous moniker based on a prosthetic eye—disappointingly revealed as phony to Crazy Horse, whose bafflement over Zane’s removing the eye is quickly disillusioned, one more of the, to Crazy Horse, vapid wonders of settler-colonialist STEM.

As if to emphasize further the strangeness of Charlie Zane’s split lens diopter shots, actor Jack Warden is directed at one point to walk through the transitional wall in the lens, creating a bizarre distortion that, frankly, I find expressionistically rad!

And other scenes are also shot effectively, including a scene Gene Siskel descries, incorrectly I think, as “standard barroom shootout,” and including also a spectacular altercation in a snowy mountain pass.

With effective sound design and blocking, the shootout in the mountains—between Hickok and Zane, on one side, and a gang led by villain Whistling Jack Kileen (Clint Walker), on the other—works remarkably well, recalling a similar, but better, mountain-shootout sequence in Ride the High County (Sam Peckinpah, 1962); and this despite the fact that director Thompson and accomplished Peckinpah D.P. Lucian Ballard and Peckinpah editor Frank Santillo, both of whom worked on High Country, were likely challenged by the vast space of the extremely long and exterior establishing and re-establishing shots, which threaten to give some of the full shots of characters the disorienting effect of inserts.

Given the challenge associated with the mountain shoot-out scene, the scene is narratively compelling, both diegetically and visually.

Most critical to the sequence is the arrival of Crazy Horse to fight beside Hickok in return for Hickok’s having helped Crazy Horse earlier in a fight with a group of Absaroka (Crow). With bow and arrow, Crazy Horse shoots both Gyp Hook-Hand (Scott Walker) and Whistling Jack, maintaining one of the film’s most salient motifs, i.e., the dedication to “old ways” amid technological progress that is often effective—see, for example, Hickok’s and Zane’s swapping of long rifle and Winchester at the beginning of the scene—but is as often obscene:

Earlier in the film, outside a depot in The Black Hills, Hickok is startled by a heap of buffalo bones reminiscent of the historic 1892 Michigan Carbon Works pile and, like that historical photograph, this cinematic carnage is emblematic of the virtual extermination of the bison by the late-1870s.

Hickok wears fogged glasses, with which he fumbles in the aforementioned mountain-pass skirmish and which in the film triply signify: first, his need for disguise; second, his degradation of body and public security via a life of violence; third, his apparent physical need, the latter recalling the use of reading glasses by Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) in Ride the High Country.

In the buffalo-bone scene, these specs, along with the train, signify a settler colonialist technological “progress” barely bothering to conceal its collateral devastation.

The iconography of Bronson’s face—tired, oily, shriveled, yet hewn like carved knotty alder—is perfectly, because nonchalantly, absurd.

Accoutred as an Orientalized and otherwise ethnic, Elliott-Landy-photographs-of-The-Band version of a “dude,” the obsolete Hickok looks back over his shoulder, physically and psychologically and metaphorically, as if to wonder how any of this nightmare constitutes an “improvement.”

(Don’t look forward! Look back.)

The White Buffalo’s greatest face is, of course, Charles Bronson’s, but the film is also fully loaded with interesting star and character-actor faces: Clint Walker, Will Sampson, Slim Pickens, Kim Novak, Stuart Whitman, Ed Lauter, Martin Kove, and John Carradine.

I will not pretend that this film, with its $6 million budget and bucking-bronco taxidermy effects, is some underrated masterpiece. The White Buffalo is a movie loaded with talent and that, like another Dino De Laurentis creature-feature property of the same year, Orca (Michael Anderson, 1977), has become a largely forgotten mess.

The White Buffalo might have been more effective without the actual white buffalo, a prophetically sacred animal to many Indigenous people and cultures, which Richard Sale’s script only sort of seems to understand. Certainly, the film’s script could flush out several of its ideas and characters.

But I enjoy The White Buffalo for many of the reasons I have described. The movie is weird as hell—imagine this film with a script by an American Indian Renaissance author and directed by David Lynch!—and its allegory is more interesting than the execution thereof on screen lets on, not because of subtlety of conception—the idea is surely unsubtle—but because of the bestiary magic (sort of Indigenous, sort of Borgesian, sort of reminiscent of American literature and film like (The) Track of the Cat (Walter Van Tilburg Clark, 1949; William A. Wellman, 1954).

And though Wellman’s Track of the Cat is also a mess, there is something in this literary-filmic arcana—see, for example, Van Tilburg Clark’s disturbing and fascinating story “Hook” (1940)—that drags the 1890s cocktail of literary naturalism and literary impressionism into a postmodernist (or perhaps I should say “post-modernist”) landscape where cinema and its human creators attempt to mechanize and puppet-show their way through some aestheticized and anthropomorphized approximation of fellow fauna we clearly fail to fully understand.

Whatever is wrong with The White Buffalo’s effects and story is also wrong with the De Laurentis remake of King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976), and I am not convinced CGI would make any of it any better. In many ways, the textual and subtextual (diegetic and nondiegetic) warning in The White Buffalo against the technologies of imperialism has only gotten more urgent.

In an article partly reconciling the Indigenous White Buffalo Calf Woman legend with genetic science, Ruth Hopkins writes,

“When organisms like the buffalo suffer a huge die-off and must repopulate from a small pool of surviving individuals, a population bottleneck is created. Population bottlenecks reduce genetic variation because it changes the frequency of gene variants, called alleles. Here, we are discussing the dominant allele (gene variant) for fur color in buffalo, which is brown. Alleles in the offspring are a sample of those in the parents. In other words, the only genes available to a given organism are the ones found within its parents. If there are less available parents, there are less genes in the proverbial gene pool. The effect of genetic drift is larger in small populations, and smaller in large populations. As a result, recessive genetic conditions that are rare in large populations become more pronounced after a population bottleneck, which is created when organisms must repopulate based on a small population of reproducing individuals.”

The allegory in J. Lee Thompson’s The White Buffalo could use some developing, but the film’s underlying suspicion of extinction technologies reveals a world in which superstition goes both ways, applying not only to Bronson’s Hickok’s fear of his dreams and Samson’s Crazy Horse’s fear of Zane’s glass eye, but also to a settler techno-genocidal ethos that can, superstitiously I think, look at the following travesty of science and religion and somehow see “progress”:

Bibliography

Hopkins, Ruth. 2011. “Prophecy of the White Buffalo Calf.” Native Times, June 21, 2011. Accessed February 6, 2026. https://nativetimes.com/index.php/life/commentary/5575-ruth-hopkins-prophecy-of-the-white-buffalo-calf.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan (February 1978). “The White Buffalo.” The Monthly Film Bulletin. 45 (529): 32–33.

Siskel, Gene. “The White Buffalo.” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1977, sec. 2, p. 6.

Wanat, Matt. 2003. “‘Fall in Behind the Major’: Cultural Border Crossing and Hero Building in Major Dundee.” In Sam Peckinpah’s West: New Perspectives, edited by Leonard Engel, [page range if available]. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

The White Buffalo (film). Wikipedia. Last modified December 28, 2025. Accessed February 6, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Buffalo_(film).

I rewatched the “Space Seed” episode of Star Trek. This is the Khan Noonien Singh episode, which casts Ricardo Montalbán as simultaneously Orientalized and Aryan, the product of the franchise’s timeline’s 1990s “Eugenics Wars,” a fictive speculation which misses the reemergence of authoritarian ideological wish-fulfillment in the post-American-exceptionalism era by a quarter century give or take.

According to production history, the story went from ancient Greek to the villain as Nordic to the villain as Sikh. As is often the case when I revisit these episodes as someone with too many other irons in the fire and too little time, I tell myself that somebody has surely more thoroughly explored the geopolitical history of the episode’s choices.

Enterprise historian Lt. McGivers (Madlyn Rhue) is seduced by Khan’s pastness and by Khan’s authoritarianism, his Leif Eriksonness, his Richard the Lionheartness, his Napoleonness. The interaction between Khan and McGivers is twisted television sadomasochism, Sylvia Plath-cum-Starship Troopers, underwritten by a curious mashup of Genghis Khan, Nietzschean Übermensch, Latin lover, Ming the Merciless Orientalism, and mutiny plots.

Beyond the sadistic eroticization of power, there are a couple implications of the Enterprise historian’s behavior: first, her apparent desire to live anachronistically in some “old weird America” SF-updated from pre-WWII weirdness of the sort described by Greil Marcus to an alternate 1990s; second, and more alarmingly, the broader implication that this ship historian, who we are told is useless (or ignored) by Kirk at episode beginning, somehow needs Khan’s empire-building, i.e., history needs Khan’s empire-building; the latter a doubly-alarming implication insofar as this attitude represents a narrow, individualism- and authoritarianism-obsessed definition of history and this attitude implies that the aptly named Enterprise does not know it too continues to constitute (albeit a “kindler, gentler”) empire-building.

DeForest Kelley is very good in Westerns, in Warlock (Edward Dmytryk, 1959) especially, but also as Morgan Earp in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957); and just two days ago, I saw Bones in TV’s The Virginian (1962-1971), wherein he comes into play as a bad guy mid-episode. Among other things, of course, Star Trek is an obvious Western.

Bones delivers a great line to Khan early in the episode when he instructs the waking patient the best way to slit one’s doctor’s throat, but the episode is mostly Khan’s and McGivers’s shenanigans, with the screenwriting really wanting to be a feature film or TV two-parter and consequently suffering from a pacing problem in the middle. No wonder the second Star Trek movie is the best of the group, and better than any of the Star Wars movies as well. Khan makes for compelling film and television.

Montalbán is hypnotic, better than a Nolanized Batman villain precisely because the ideas in this Star Trek are still Kennedy-era pretention (i.e., Quixoticism) mixed with sixties hypocrisy (i.e., liberal “new frontierism”) rather than completely full of themselves (i.e., post-nineties cynicism disguised as authenticity, darkness for sake of marketing presented as “being real”).

That Abandoned Films film-noir Star Trek parody all the AI-kids are talking about has fun design elements, “where the final frontier is darker than you even imagined”; but it is the Crayola garishness of the original Star Trek’s mise en scène that hooks me. Much of what makes any of this work is the show’s design—its lurid colors, its living-room bridge, its pulpiness, its Alex Raymond, its Hal Foster, its silver-age Marvel Comics; Kirk’s judo, his resourcefulness:

“Control of The Enterprise has been regained,” Kirk declares. “I wish my next decisions were no more difficult.”

The episode ends with a Nuremberg Trial framed like a court martial at sea. Khan and Kirk share a Milton allusion and a fascination with the history of Australia, with Hell and with exile and with empire-building. McGivers’s empathy for a Black woman colleague, Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), temporarily trumps her desire for a “boot in the face,” but she cannot resist joining Khan in his exile, where presumably she will be able to someday paint the portrait of a historical personage if only the exiles can avoid starvation.

The mission in this episode, to someday “learn what crop [has] sprung from the seed” of Kirk’s decision to maroon Khan and his mutineers; to neither punish nor applaud Khan exactly, but rather to knowingly nod at some “naturalness” (i.e., ideology presented as “natural”) of the human (and Satanic) desire to “rule in Hell” rather than “to serve in Heaven.”

The “Space Seed” episode flirts sadomasochistically with the show’s often only-sort-of-repressed humanist preoccupation with power. Pure Kennedy-era postcolonial / neocolonial nexus.

Spock finds us—and that part of himself which is us—fascinating.

Adapted by Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Coe, and Edith Sommer from a 1946 play by Tennessee Williams, This Property is Condemned is frame-focalized through Willie Starr (Mary Badham) whose older sister, the protagonist Alva (Natalie Wood), is being softcore pimped out by her Mama, Hazel Starr (Kate Reid), to Mr. Johnson (John Harding), a bald well-to-do man, by Depression standards, who wants to pretend virility with the attractive young woman while remaining married to his off-screen invalided wife, and who eventually offers to set Alva up in Memphis.

Alva falls for Owen Legate (Robert Redford), a railroad company “spotter” (i.e., HR pink-slip man) whom the local railroad workers naturally hate. Legate is an idealist who kids himself that he is a pragmatist; of more immediate importance to the plot, he is a Depression-era man making a living by firing people.

At first disgusted (or pretending to be) by Alva’s flirtatiousness, which he interprets back to her as promiscuity, Legate eventually buys Alva a ticket to New Orleans, which he assumes she will not use because of her inability to free herself from her manipulative mother.

Meanwhile, J.J. (Charles Bronson), Alva’s mother’s seedy boyfriend, menacingly stalks and paws Alva, eventually leading a group of disgruntled pink-slipped railroad workers to kick shit out of the spotter Legate.

Frustrated with Legate’s distrust for her, and with her mother’s whoring her out to Mr. Johnson, Alva gets drunk, rubs her mother’s nose in the idea of Johnson “setting her up,” and, in front of her mother, offers to marry J.J., who scorns Mama for daughter, then, so we learn later, marries Alva, who subsequently rolls him and ditches him for New Orleans, where she meets up with Legate and, after one of those sixties-movie romantic interludes, Legate proposes. The whole thing ends about as well as you would expect, with Stanley Kowalski’s brutal realism split between pragmatist Legate (Redford) and bully J.J. (Bronson), and with Alva’s Romantic Blanche deserving next to none of her misery.

Rife with the usual Tennessee Williams misogyny for the matriarch, This Property is Condemned extends other typical Williams’s motifs as well into a warm-up for The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), minus the suburban Jewish coming-of-age of the latter, in favor of the sixties Hollywood brand of Southern Gothic.

(Bronson’s birthplace of Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania)

What the movie makes clear enough via plot, but never emphasizes via tone because it is too busy being Hollywood-does-Tennessee-Williams, is that most of these characters are trapped in a hopeless economic quagmire, with the father run off, the mother stuck with a precarious boarding house and zero options, the railroad men stuck somewhere between “Yes, Sir” and groping the Starr women, the spotter delivering bad news to avoid being on the working-class receiving end, the attractive older daughter in an endless cycle of tired dead-end courtships and slavering losers, and the younger daughter doomed to some version her mother’s or her sister’s cycles.

A deeply depressing movie made a little too pretty by its decade’s subgeneric story imperatives, but made stunning-cum-grimy by costumer Edith Head and director of photography James Wong Howe, This Property is Condemned sort of works and sort of does not, but the film is certainly well-acted, well-photographed, and well-dressed.

The same story, one decade later, might have better concealed its theatrical mannerisms, with Mary Badham’s little sister character more like Linda Manz in Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) and the dramatization more distant from both the theater and the television-era’s series Playhouse 90 (1956-1961) and ABC Stage 67 (1966-1967), series I like, by the way, but series that get translated best to big screen by some of the television directors (Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah) still just on the verge of doing their best big-screen work.

As it is, this property is condemned to its transitional era in Hollywood, a time influenced by television anthology-series and theatricality of method and source material that were in the process of becoming differently cinematic in the hands of directors like Cassavetes, Peckinpah, Altman, and Lumet.

For example, the scene in The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) where Deke (Robert Ryan) is shot and the scene with Aurora Clavel, partly because these scenes are flashbacks, demonstrate Peckinpah’s background directing Tennessee Williams for stage and working in television, especially on ABC Stage 67 for “Noon Wine” (1966), his adaptation of the Katherine Anne Porter story (1937, 1939). But these claustrophobically domestic scenes are integrated by Peckinpah into the narrative whole of the film through cinematic montage, which editor Lou Lombardo also partly learned working in television, making the anthology-drama-like theatricality parenthetic. Perhaps more impressive is the place-bound The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), the director Peckinpah’s underrated masterpiece and a film that fully integrates lessons of stage, television, and big-screen cinema.

(Olaf Helton (Per Oscarsson) in ABC Stage 67: “Noon Wine” [Sam Peckinpah, 1966])

In any case, there is a place in my aesthetic for what This Property is Condemned does well, even if the movie is made limited by some of its dramaturgical choices.

In “Notes on Film Noir” (1972), Paul Schrader writes, “As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.” Indeed, part of the humane attraction of This Property is Condemned comes from the 1930s-like proletarian class empathy lurking just beneath the film’s more Williamsian mid-century psychological themes. The brutality of Bronson’s character feels like a personality hewn by working-class frustration, and Hazel, the film’s increasingly villainous mother, is trapped by gender limitations within the million tons of glass ceiling falling upon working-class women during the Depression.

Though the character is relatively underdeveloped and, as such, feels a bit ancillary, Mary Badham’s Willie Starr, with her tomboy’s name and uncertain future, is the film’s attempt to articulate something humane beyond the psychosexual family dynamics and general Southern Gothic mannerisms of the film. In some ways, This Property is Condemned is a Matewan (John Sayles, 1987) trying to get out of The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams, 1944).

I just wish the film were more strident in its articulation of the real enemy in the film: i.e., the economy.

Karate for Life (1977) is the third part of Kazuhiko Yamaguchi’s Champion of Death series, which also includes Champion of Death, a.k.a., Karate Bullfighter (1975) and Karate Bearfighter (1975). The series is adapted from the manga Karate Baka Ichidai (drawing: Jirō Tsunoda; story: Ikki Kajiwara, 1971-1977), and makes for perfect PLEX pulp for your morning exercise; indeed, it is a good action film worth adding to your physical media.

Kyokushin Karate 7^th dan blackbelt Masashi Ishibashi, who acted with Sonny Chiba many times, including in The Streetfighter series and in Champion of Death, plays the sensei whom Chiba’s character Oyama humiliates in the first scene and who later challenges Oyama at the film’s end, but Karate for Life has a lot of subplots, all well-integrated into a film peripherally about degradation of Okinawa under U.S. occupation and exploitation of everyday people by organized crime.

“Power without justice is just violence” Oyama discovers in an aphorism made triply poignant insofar as (1) Oyama has matured over the course of the plot, (2) Oyama’s trip from the mainland to Okinawa has been marked by understanding of the effects of the occupation, and (3) Oyama has become surrogate big brother and sensei to a boy in a group of Okinawan Dead End Kids whose sister is a tubercular prostitute (Yōko Natsuki) previously raped by an American G.I.

The G.I.’s being African American plays into a racist motif I have seen in at least one other Chiba film, but also is an instance of a more pervasive motif of Japanese cinema—from High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) to Sympathy for the Underdog (Kinji Fukasaku, 1971) and beyond—films about post-war U.S. occupation wherein Black American soldiers serve as synecdoche for America and for the occupation itself.

In a take-a-dive plot reminiscent of classic crime film’s like The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949) and a real-fighter-turned-reluctant-wrestler plot reminiscent of Requiem for a Heavyweight (Playhouse 90, Rod Serling, 1956; Ralph Nelson, 1962), Oyama gets in trouble with the mob for refusing to play wrestling heel to bigger-but-inferior American pro wrestlers; and he finds himself in deeper when, disgracing himself to earn money for the sister’s medical treatment, he agrees to take a dive then reneges in the ring.

All of this culminates in some spectacular karateka-v.-mob ass-kickings, the grand finale of which pays homage to the mirror scene from Enter the Dragon (Bruce Lee & Robert Clouse, 1973).

You can watch Karate for Life on PLEX while walking the basement treadmill, complete with constant ad interruptions promoting reruns of Veronica Mars (2004-2007) or featuring Rachel Dratch hawking home warranties.

But this one is worth owning on DVD or Blu-Ray.

If I were to write about Aikido, Bullshido, and Seagal anti-fandom at greater length, I would begin by trying to carefully consider the complex authenticity politics of martial arts in popular online discourse, which often seems like a rhetorical aesthetics that presents itself as a pragmatics. In these online discussions (they are very easy to find with a Google search for “Seagal Bullshido Aikido”) ethos is constantly gained by accusing an action movie star of being what action movie stars are almost by definition, i.e., bogus and impractical in a real fight. No doubt some movie martial arts, e.g., boxing, are more practical than others, e.g., Wuxia wire-fu, when it comes to the schoolyard, but this accusation, as applied to movies, often misses the point that there is no purely authentic "discourse" (filmic or discursive) on fighting if the main criteria are to involve who can beat whomever up in “real life.”

I mean, sure, Steven Seagal is frequently full of shit, but it is not like either a Rocky movie or even a great fighter making commentary ringside is actually fighting. They are ALL just discoursing. Nor is the average person going to learn to fight by watching Rocky let Drago punch him in the head or by listening to Sugar Ray Leonard talk about a fight. Unless you are a young, trained, fit fighter up against a sixty-nine-year-old former fighter, Sugar Ray is most likely going to beat you up and there will be no “the student becomes the master.”

Fighting is fighting.

Sports apply judicial parameters to fighting, i.e., rules against this or that.

Conversation applies rhetorical parameters, i.e., words replacing deeds.

Cinema applies aesthetic parameters, i.e., by demonstrating fighting aurally, visually, and narratively through mise-en-scène, montage, and sound editing.

Though all of these types of parameters (athletic, rhetorical, filmic), along with let's say the historical reality of someone bayonetting somebody at Guadalcanal, overlap to a degree when filtered through another discourse (e.g., through film, through narrative, though commentary, through discussion thread, or through screaming as you bayonet your enemy), these sets of parameters also have separate, unique traits. In short, what I want to say about Seagal and Aikido and Bullshido is that when we are talking or filming about martial arts, we are TALKING or FILMING, not fighting.

I will hyperlink only one video from the Bullshido discourse online, because I fear you will want your half hour (or more like your very long day) back if I hyperlink any of the most blathering of the online discourse, which becomes quickly exhausting by constantly asking the audience to forget that bragging and dismissing and rhetorically defending are not fighting, they are discourse. I like the following video of an former Aikido student making the transition to other types of fighting, because I think thoughtful discourse on transitions—i.e., from art to contest, from contest to self-defense—demonstrates some of what I am saying about the complications, on one hand, of talking and/or filming about fighting and, on the other, of adding and eliminating rules from fighting. Rokas Leo, creator of Ultimate Self-Defense Championship, is, like every writer, producer, or director of anything, a content creator, i.e., he is engaged in discourse. This is not to say that he’s a charlatan; quite the contrary, my point isn’t “Trust no fighting discussion.” My point is that discussion, competition, filmmaking, and self-defense constitute a series of differences and Venn-style intersections; and when we are talking about or recording ourselves demonstrating some style of fighting, that is discourse mixed with fighting under some degrees of control.

A related and, I think, often exhausting discussion involves the characterization of Bruce Lee (played by Mike Moh) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019), which is in some videos contextualized by the director and in others exacerbated by the slippery slope of Tarantino’s appreciating stunt men as real by having an actor Brad Pitt, who is neither a stunt man nor a fighter, play a stuntman fighter to make some aesthetic rhetorical claims for Tarantino in an obvious alternate-history universe of cinema.

Much of the argument about whether Cliff, a fictitious character, can beat Bruce Lee, a fictionalize Bruce Lee, misses even the film’s more obviously heroic treatment of the historical Bruce Lee as a great teacher of martial arts, demonstrated by scenes of Moh as Lee teaching Margo Robbie as Sharon Tate. Of the career-long series of complaints that Tarantino should abstain from doing this with history, my only real complaint is that the Tarantino detractors on these grounds almost invariably fail to acknowledge that every historical film or novel does this with history.

Enter The Decisive Power of Aikido (Shigehiro Ozawa, 1975), one in a string of Sonny Chiba movies I have been using to unwind. One might expect a biopic about founder of Aikido Morihei Ueshiba (played by Jiro Yabuki in the film) to have stuff to say about the search for enlightenment and flowing alongside one's opponent's aggression and joint locks and avoiding weapons and all the other elements popularly associated with Aikido; and Ozawa's movie does all that stuff, somehow cramming a bunch of characters and subplots and ideas into 82 minutes.

But The Decisive Power of Aikido also just has a bunch of Japanese guys kicking the shit out of each other, all of which is thoroughly satisfying. Chiba, who has become my favorite martial arts star for his pure visceral energy and cragged visage, plays a secondary character somewhat neglected in the middle act but compelling all the same as a karateka who cannot seem to stop overdoing it and killing people.

His remorse over the slow quasi-tubercular death of Mine (Yôko Koizumi), a kind woman whose chest he has inadvertently crushed with a projectile of planking during an early fight with Ueshiba, drives him to a friendlier but nonetheless badass match with Ueshiba in a Badlands-like crevasse stone pit, where both he an Ueshiba get to play "The Good" while a morally degraded samurai plays both "The Bad" and "The Ugly."

This entertaining martial arts movie has hallmarks (e.g., training sequences, confrontation of styles) not only of seventies Hong Kong films,…

…but also of earlier Japanese cinema like Sanshiro Sugata (Akira Kurosawa, 1943) and Sanshiro Sugata Part II (Akira Kurosawa, 1945), though Decisive Power is not as good as the first of those Kurosawa films and, released in 1975, is free of the nationalistic shrillness of Kurosawa's more propagandistic, but still interesting, Judo sequel.

Whatever the "practical" value of Aikido, the cinematically "Decisive" Power of Aikido is that it is much more interesting to look at than a lot of undercranked White Crane boxing or contemporary Nolanized Keysi are—a subjective comment on my part, which means next-to-nothing with bayonets in Guadalcanal, but means a lot when I am trying to watch a movie.

By Matt Wanat

At least eighteen of Sonny Chiba’s more than 125 films were directed by Kinji Fukasaku. To put this number in perspective, Chow Yun-fat starred in nine films by either John Woo (Tsui Hark producing) or Ringo Lam, and Toshiro Mifune starred in sixteen movies by Akira Kurosawa.

Adapted from the Buronson and Shinji Hiramatsu manga Doberman Deka (1975-1979), Doberman Cop features Chiba as Kano, a pig-carrying rube cop from Ishigaki Island, who, convinced by a nora that the nora’s daughter Yuna is destined to be Kano’s wife, heads to Tokyo where he second-guesses Tokyo homicide’s conclusion that an incinerated murder victim’s purported name, Mayumi, is a pseudonym for the country-girl-gone-bad Yuna.

Convinced Yuna is still alive, Kano wanders around the big city with his pig, which he eventually kennels with a topless dancer enamored of man and shoat, around which time Kano becomes a local hero nicknamed “Tarzan” after rescuing singer Miki Haruno (Janet Hatta) from a stalker by rappelling proto-John-McClane-style through a hotel window.

After rescuing the singer Miki, Kano becomes convinced she is his prophesied bride-to-be Yuna (the one presumed by the police to be murdered and burned beyond recognition), an accusation Miki denies.

Convoluted subplots about falsely accused biker Hotshot (Koichi Iwaki), Hotshot’s motorcycle gang, the serial killer suspected of Mayumi’s death, and a gay sadomasochistic music promotor (Tatsuo Endō) accumulate, but most important is yakuza Hidemori (Hiroki Matsukata), who, Ike to Miki’s Tina, vicariously seeks Miki’s rising-star success as a means of extricating himself from a life of organized crime .

Fukasaku’s film then becomes a contest between cop Kano and yakuza Hidemori, as the two men grapple for the soul of singer Miki, the latter of whom is hooked on heroin and plays the appropriately mysterious and/or indecisive femme fatale…

…in an effectively stylized and often bloody hard-boiled film replete with excellent examples of Sonny Chiba’s trademark martial arts choreography and of Kinji Fukasaku’s ground-unsettling handheld camera and visceral editing; indeed, the two styles, to whatever degree they may be said to be separate, converge around judo throws and bodies ballistically flipped by bullets in scenes of extraordinary martial arts and firefight kineticism.

Though the country-lawman-in-city plot of Doberman Cop recalls the Clint Eastwood vehicle Coogan’s Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968), the Japanese film makes more explicit its debt to Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), with a .44 Magnum as allusion,…

…a big gun used to separate the men from the boys in a later torture scene, which also anticipates Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987).

A scene in Doberman Cop explaining the .44 Magnum resembles the opening sequences of both Dirty Harry and Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973),…

…but even more like the excellent Dirty Harry sequel is Doberman Cop’s twist revealing the serial killer to be a vigilante cop.

Doberman Cop is violent and exploitative and viscerally pleasurable, utilizing well Sonny Chiba’s martial arts prowess, most well-known in the west through The Street Fighter (Shigehiro Ozawa, 1974) and later appearances in films like Battle Royale II: Requiem (Kinji Fukasaku, 2003) and Kill Bill: Vols. 1 & 2 (2003, 2004). One of the greatest cinematic masters of action and violence, Fukasaku is a perfect director for Chiba’s skills, and Doberman Cop ranks high, in my estimation, as an entry in the rogue cop and vigilante subgenres widely associated with Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, but also with later transnationally classic entries by Takeshi Kitano.

Revealing the director to be an odd bedfellow among Japanese “New Wave” directors like Nagisa Ōshima and Seijun Suzuki, the initial five films in Kinji Fukasaku’s yakuza series Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973-1974), released after Suzuki’s baroque Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967), seem, comparatively speaking, less visually operatic than like someone sticking a half-dozen ferrets in a bag and shaking it. With this stylistic feature in mind, it is perhaps inadvisable to compare elements of Fukasaku’s cinematic vision with golden-age Japanese directors Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956), Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963), and Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998).

Exploring Mizoguchi’s subtle use of long shot and long take, David Bordwell describes a shot in The Love of Sumako the Actress (Mizoguchi, 1947) wherein “Mizoguchi’s simple panning movement turns a long-shot framing into a closer one, as [Sumako] comes forward and rightward to kneel before the memorial shrine.”

No critic in their right mind is accusing Fukasaku of Mizoguchi-like nuance, but the uses of long take and deep focus so lauded in the work of the golden-age Japanese master…

…are not out of the question in Fukasaku’s otherwise frenetically edited style, as evidenced in one nearly two-minute-long take from Doberman Cop wherein Fukasaku’s camera pans slightly from one to the other side of a lamp as yakuza Hidemori, Miki’s self-appointed “agent,” placates his artist.

First stealing Miki’s hypochondriactic thunder by claiming he is “the one who’s exhausted,”…

…Hidemori then patronizes Miki in a dialogue that is simultaneously about agent-artist, gangster-moll, dealer-junkie, and older-man-younger-woman.

But what on one level seems like Miki’s weakness coupled with petulant manipulation of the “responsible one,”…

…over the course of the two-minute take turns into Hidemori comparing his life as yakuza boss to that of an ambitious diva:

These dynamics of strength vs. weakness vis-à-vis Hidemori’s and Miki’s separate characters, and their romantic and business relationships with each other, continue to present ironic surprises as the film’s plot progresses; as does the film’s motif of rube cop Kano’s folk wisdom and perceptiveness regarding Miki’s choices; but I will leave these twists to you to discover. Suffice it to say that in the long take described above, Fukasaku, famous for dynamic montage and handheld camera, steadily explores a relationship through gently rocking camera and actors’ movements from foreground to background to foreground in the mise-en-scène.

Doberman Cop is, of course, first and foremost an action movie set in a 1970s Tokyo populated by yakuza and hippies.

But the movie is also a formally sophisticated genre film that foregrounds intersections of performance, power, gender, region, nation, and violence.

Doberman Cop (Kinji Fukasaku, 1977) is available for purchase from Arrow Video.

Work Cited

Bordwell, David. “Mizoguchi the Inexhaustible.” Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, davidbordwell.net, 2005 (book publication year), https://www.davidbordwell.net/books/figures_intro.php?ss=3. Accessed 12 Jan. 2026.

A quick stroll through Wikipedia will tell you that The New York Times calls Breaker! Breaker! “shoddy,” “wooden,” “sophomoric”—all effective adjectives appropriately applied for the generally considered unimpeachable purposes of prescriptive criticism. The first film featuring Chuck Norris as lead, Breaker! Breaker! is not what most journalistic critics would call “good.”

But the village-virus action subgenre, of which Breaker! Breaker! is an example, was codified not so much by Sinclair Lewis or Sherwood Anderson, but by Phil Karlson in The Phenix City Story (1955) and Walking Tall (1973),

and by Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, first, in the Australian, U.S., and U.K. co-production Wake in Fright (1971)—easily one of the most unsettling movies about booze and masculinity I have ever seen—and then in what is by a million magnifications of the widest possible margin the best Rambo movie: First Blood (1982).

Unsurprisingly, all these movies are better than Breaker! Breaker! is; and Convoy (1978), an uncannily dreamlike fad-film and a convincing candidate for Sam Peckinpah’s least successful feature, is also better than Breaker! Breaker!

And though Convoy, with its peculiar political collision of polarities, belongs most obviously in the same late-seventies ideological category as Breaker! Breaker!, I am less interested here in the CB-craze road movie (see also the Duel [Steven Spielberg, 1971] and Savages [Lee H. Katzin, 1974] horror types) than I am in the aforementioned village-virus action films.

Among the examples of village-virus action movies superior to Breaker! Breaker! I count not only the Karlson and Kotcheff movies, but also

Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955);

the beginning of the cinematic cycle emerging from the novel Red Harvest (Dashiell Hammett, 1929), including Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961) and A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964);

at least four subsequent Clint Eastwood revenge Westerns;

Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966);

a number of other action movies and Westerns;

and the middle act of Mad Max (George Miller, 1979).

The prevalence of the theme in American and Australian cinema likely speaks to bloody traditions of settler colonialism, deeply ingrained genre ideologies of retributive violence, backlash to the parochialisms of settlement, and the ideological re-rooting of manhood in some snake-oil drummer’s cocktail of each of the preceding.

As such, the subgenre is toxic and angry and heavy-handedly ideological, though the ideological nature of the subgenre crosses party aisles to kick shit out of bigoted local legal frauds, redneck rapists, corrupt local conmen, and various other bullies and big fish in small ponds that are, in North America and maybe Australia, basically everywhere waiting to be poisoned by the next wannabe local dictator.

That Chuck Norris has little affection for Breaker! Breaker!, but his father does, may signify “nothing”; and the tale of Breaker! Breaker! is not necessarily “told by an idiot” so much as by Jack Nance, the Greek chorus of the film’s first act, sucking down Coors at a local truck stop or Jack-‘n’-Cokes in his dining room.

And though also not necessarily “told by an idiot,” Breaker! Breaker!’s last half is focalized through a special-needs local (John DiFusco)

who, along with a good-looking waitress (Terry O’Connor) and her young son,

represents the moral minority of a shithole town that could be called absurd if centuries of lynching, local corruption, jockocracies, and bigot oligarchies were not in frequent and widespread evidence everywhere.

At the center of Breaker! Breaker!’s small but irredeemably corrupt piece of the parochial pie is George Murdock as Texas City’s fanatical sophist Judge Trimmings, and, boy howdy, does crooked old Judge Trimmings want killin’!

Breaker! Breaker! is not a great film, but in many ways it is Chuck Norris’s most subversive film, operating within the same fed-up progressiveness-against-corruption motif as many an episode of Kung Fu, though couched in seventies trucker-rights discourse and in the subgeneric familiarity of the nightmare parochial, a motif going back at least as far as the Salem Witch Trials, but, in genre cinema, a motif increasingly common after The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 atrophied the communal parts of the local, convinced consumer automobile culture that small places are either quaint or freaky, and pissed off the settler hegemonists who had gotten used to telling themselves they were “natives.”

Charlatan newsletters end with:

But do Charlatan pieces “Make sense of the week’s news”? I keep reading; they keep sending, sometimes making sense, sometimes triggering new thoughts more than “making sense.” On holidays, especially, they tend to shore fragments, a pastime I share. I am sharing it now.

Engaged in his usual ranking and canonizing, Harold Bloom writes in the introduction to Marc Simon’s “Centennial Edition” of The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986) that “Something of Crane’s vision survives the formal inadequacy of the poem’s continuities. The Waste Land, Crane’s anti-model, is aided by its curiously Whitmanian: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ a line that would fit well enough in Whitman’s Sea-Drift elegy, ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.’ But The Bridge needs to be more than fragments, and it is” (Bloom xvii). Bloom claims that from Kenneth Burke he learned “to ask: What is the poet (or critic) trying to do for herself, as a person, by writing her poem or essay?” (xv); and one might ask what Bloom is trying to do for himself with so much canonical agonism; but part of the answer has something to do with the importance of the shoring, lest the fragments dandelion spore away with the rest of these allergens in a World Wide Web of only intermittently poetic pollen.

An article from The Charlatan (21 December 2025):

The article is an exercise in Bruce Conner-like juxtaposition:

Is the article about taxes? For two more stanzas, yes, it is. After that, not so much:

Even though Joseph and Mary still must pay those Bethlehem taxes—I imagine they include school levies on which they are permitted to vote; wars with Mexico to extend slavery on which they have little or no say—religion itself and the extensions of empire and democratic freedoms become the Charlatan’s new main topics:

…and so on:

There is that bit about “upending colonialism,” a nice touch. Then Cold War and Civil Rights:

And just when the article seems like little more than the journalistic equivalent of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989), its author(s) bring it all back Abrahamic:

Fun piece. But I struggle with something myself, something with which I think the Charlatan writer(s) struggle(s): How to concisely contextualize without missing critical contexts of the contexts?

For example, though a convenient enough place to end Charlatan’s holiday greeting, Sam Altman’s apocalyptic warning, like Ike’s 1961 “Farewell Address”—but sans courage, sans prudence, sans loyalty, sans ethos of any except for a technofascist insider sort—is most obviously a case of the whiskey drummer putting snake heads in his turpentine libations and then moving the same snake heads over into his hangover detox tea.[1] The “Fraud Crisis” we are asked to ponder—and ponder we should—has Ponzi leaders surely. Sam Altman, for instance.

There are many fragments here now, so perhaps I should do a little shoring thereof.

We journal, on one hand, to avoid forgetting and, on the other, to document that we exist.

I repeat the Charlatan’s basically Billy Joel-like piece of journalism here because—like a lesson plan on Eliot, on Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), on Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” (2020)—it was repeated to me and bears repeating. But people can warn that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” without even remembering who said that; and I think some of these “history lessons” of the sort you are currently reading, and of the Charlatan sort I have screenshot above, are recitations to remind one of the sound of one’s own voice.

We journal to avoid forgetting, yes, but also to hear ourselves talk—each of us to document that she or he exists.

Hart Crane wrote “The Bridge” in the 1930s to respond to T.S. Eliot, yes; as ode to Brooklyn Bridge, yes; but also to remember himself, to remember the Cuyahoga River, to remember Cleveland.

I suspect the Charlatan writers write these freewheeling history-on-a-holiday pieces to remind us and themselves who we are by remembering where we have been.

And I write these Substack pieces for the same reason, which is closely related to the reason I might post a pic from my walk, i.e., to remember where I am in all this noise.

But if one energy-intensive task related to all this democratization via having one’s say entails organizing and amplifying via technological assistance and platform—Facebook, Substack, OpenAI—the unifying features of these organizing and amplifying technologies are economic, energy-hungry, and oligarchic—with Sam Altmans issuing the warnings about Sam Altmans; and with supposed statesmen tweeting their distaste for Rob Reiner and their apparent passion for misery.

That Annie Wilkes, obvious TDS!

Works Cited

Charlatan Magazine. “Make Sense of the Week’s News. Charlatan Reviews the Worldview.” Charlatan Magazine, Charlatan, 2025, https://www.charlatanmagazine.com/Press/index.html. Accessed 21 Dec. 2025.

Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. Centennial ed., edited by Marc Simon, introduction by Harold Bloom, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2001.

What Sam Altman Doesn’t Want You To Know. YouTube, uploaded [if known: date of upload],

. Accessed 20 Dec. 2025.

[1] And I am reminded of as much mostly because my friend Josh Fornelli, who shores his fragments with greater discipline than Eliot, The Charlatan, or I do, recently posted “What Sam Altman Doesn’t Want You To Know.”

by Matt Wanat

You say, “Coot, coot, coot,” one more time, this cowboy’ll kick your ass.

James Best was most famous for The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985), the successful television series that became a franchise of reunions, music, films, spin-offs, toys, lunch boxes, and enough other pop cultural ephemera to keep collectors, critics, and industry opportunists busy for decades.

With 188 IMDB acting credits, Best was also a productive actor in many feature films and television series, including The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), The Fugitive (1963-1967), Alfred Hitchcock Presents / The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1955-1965), The Rifleman (1958-1963), The Lineup (1954-1960), The Lone Ranger (1949-1957), Have Gun – Will Travel (1957-1963), and many others.

Best was sometimes uncredited, as in his role as “Kid at party who gets slapped” in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler Jr., 1957); and for Gator (Burt Reynolds, 1976) the actor is listed “unconfirmed”; but James Best was also an accomplished character actor in films by now-canonical big-budget and low-budget directors including Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, Arthur Penn, Charles Marquis Warren, and John Flynn.

What follows are, for my money, ten of James Best’s best.

* * * * *

Rolling Thunder (John Flynn, 1977)

Rolling Thunder grows in my estimation with each re-viewing. While I agree with Molly Haskell that the “groupie” is underdeveloped, I do not think Linda Haynes’s role and performance are anywhere near thankless. And William Devane’s character is well-drawn as one of a long line of Paul Schrader’s damaged-cum-violent men stoically awaiting his Schraderian domestic “mission.”

Rolling Thunder captures a logic of post-Vietnam War America that is a shared logic (beyond the experiences of veterans) of a common, malaise-fogged seventies masculinity. This logic amounted to an ideology on which men of late-Boomer through early X-er birthyears were brought up through the basic training of postwar male cinematic genre cinema. Nevertheless, in its purest expressions, the logic made good art, and Rolling Thunder is good art of the sort I am describing.

The relationship between the stoically cuckolded P.O.W. Major Rane (William Devane) and wife-stealer Deputy Cliff (Lawrason Driscoll) is well-foiled by Rane’s relationship with Master Sergeant Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones), who laconically joins Rane’s killing spree to avenge the deaths of Rane’s wife Janet (Lisa Blake Richards) and son Mark (Jordan Gerler). If the deaths of Rane’s family and its aftermath seem understated, exacerbating the women’s underdevelopment noted by Haskell, the tired evil of the villainous Texan (James Best) and his goons is perfectly in keeping with Rolling Thunder’s post-Vietnam exhaustion.

Rane, who has had a Caddy, 2,555 silver dollars, and “Texas Belle” Linda (Linda Haynes) thrown at him by a welcome-home parade committee, seems as drained by these “rewards” of honorable service as he is by his son’s not remembering him or by his wife’s having moved on to another man. Given the general mood, it seems somehow appropriate that the silver dollars from the welcome-home spectacle would draw riffraff like The Texan and his gang.

Rolling Thunder is an exceedingly depressing film, more depressing than Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), writer-and-not-yet-director Paul Schrader’s obvious companion script to Rolling Thunder, the latter of which would eventually be directed by John Flynn with a combination of tired inevitability and obligatory retributive resolve appropriate to the script’s themes.

James Best is sinister and pukey as The Texan; Tommy Lee Jones as sidekick for the film’s violent resolution borders on a kind of Vietnamese prison-induced autism; and Devane comes off, as usual, like he might be Jack Nicholson’s low-key and, consequently, criminally underrated cousin.

But the real silver-dollar collection of scenes in Rolling Thunder—for writing, for acting, and for direction—are those in the toolshed where Rane, still recovering from the P.O.W. experience, seems to find comfort puttering around guns and other “tools” while intermittently sleeping and doing convict calisthenics.

“The war had turned him into a machine for murder,” announces a poster for the film: “He had nothing to live for…except revenge.”

If only things in this movie were so optimistic!

* * * * *

Verboten! (Samuel Fuller, 1959)

“We will show you the defendants’ own film. You will see their own conduct…”

Verboten! opens on action, as a small group of American GIs charge a sniper in a scene as visually interesting as is the similar, more famous sniper scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) of twenty-eight years later.

Director Samuel Fuller and director of photography Joseph Biroc’s mise-en-scène is replete with visual indices of Nazism—signage, graffiti—scattered amid a spectacularly bombed-out urban landscape.

Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5” plays throughout the skirmish, recording Fuller’s now well-known affection for the composer, but also establishing one of the film’s themes, i.e., the fate of arts, culture, symbols, family, nations, and humanity across enemy lines in times of incomprehensible violence.

“Believe or not,” says Sgt. David Brent (James Best) to Helga Schiller (Susan Cummings), the German woman (“German,” she insists, not “Nazi”) who hides him from SS troops, “the 45^th Division used to wear the Swastika right here,” tapping his arm.

Like a terrifying twist on bedroom farce, Helga juggles hiding David from the SS, keeping her mother from celebrating the anticipated arrival of the Americans, manipulating an SS soldier, and awaiting the Americans herself. But Helga’s young brother Franz (Harold Daye) is clearly taken with his Hitler-Youth indoctrination, and once the Americans have occupied Germany and David, now a civilian and wanting to marry Helga, has set up in Helga’s town during the de-Nazification, Helga’s old friend Bruno Eckart (Tom Pittman) returns, and Helga’s loyalties become complicated.

As the movie’s plot and postwar German history march onward towards the Nuremberg Trials, the Werwolf (i.e., postwar Nazi guerillas) fall under the local leadership of Bruno, who has been recruited as a mine sapper for the American occupiers, and Helga’s brother Franz joins the Werwolf’s ranks.

Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” plays over a montage of covert Werwolf operations, which include interruption of relief lines to the Germans, and this sequence is followed by a food riot used by the un-de-Nazified to recruit.

Verboten! is unapologetically didactic, with the word “verboten” peppered throughout the script and hanging on the walls in one key scene after another.

The film’s didacticism includes a conversation about the Hitler Youth that comes straight out of a 1950s delinquency movie. As Captain Harvey (Paul Dubov) explains it, “In my country they are called ‘juvenile delinquents,’ the same disease all over the world. Without families, or from broken ones, they travel in wolf packs, operate like gangs. Individually, they’re all chicken inside, frightened little cowards who attack at night, but get one of them alone…they run like a rat.”

After David gets involved fighting German agitators in the food riot, he is fired from his civilian position and told by Bruno that Helga is simply using him; and as Helga attempts to gently disillusion David of his naïve loyalty toward her and there soon-to-be-born child, David angrily disavows Helga but insists that, once their child is born, the child will be raised in America away from the Nazi religion of hatred.

Melodrama of distrust, mixed loyalties, split families, ideological indoctrination, youth gang activity, and Germans being made to suffer by zealous un-de-Nazified Germans alternates with stock footage culminating in the trials at Nuremberg, the latter of which are focalized through young Franz’s coming to terms with the Shoah.

Verboten! is often viewed as one of Fuller’s lesser films. I think it is a remarkable war movie and a remarkable melodrama. The choice to end the film with documentary footage intertwined with young Franz’s traumatized response to the genocide, the entire sequence narrated by Fuller himself, is simply explosive.

And then things get really weird, crosscutting between what initially looks to be a tacked-on Hollywood ending and a textbook scene of Fullerian violence, shot, of course, mostly in longer take and long shots.

This war movie is a keeper! It is nice to be allowed to watch it.

* * * * *

Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959)

Only outdone by the character-actor riffraff of Sam Peckinpah, the character-actor riffraff of Budd Boettcher always bring me joy.

Ride Lonesome is an exemplary Western.

And the first five minutes of the film, wherein bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott) apprehends back-shooter Billy John (James Best),

is about as good as the first five minutes of a Western gets.

With a taut Burt Kennedy script, Boetticher’s film quickly introduces sketchy criminal types Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn), along with Mrs. Carrie Lane (Karen Steele), at a swing station surrounded by hostile Mescalero Apache.

Turns out Mrs. Lane has been left alone by her feckless husband, and Boone and Whit aim to steal Billy John from Brigade in order to earn “amnesty,” a word the two outlaws have just recently learned.

Like The Tall T (Budd Boetticher, 1957)—adapted from “The Captives” (Elmore Leonard, 1955), but written for screen by Burt Kennedy—Ride Lonesome works through a variation, not strictly revisionist, but complex, of captivity narrative.

A Mescalero raid turns into a conventional siege scene, complete with obligatory ducks-in-a-barrel treatment of Indian attackers; but the action of Ride Lonesome is lean and economical,

and the dialogue is equally precise: with James Best’s lines delivered as though they were written specifically for his voice; with Pernell Roberts’s lines calculating, his character always assessing the situation; and with James Coburn’s lines dopey, ignorant, venial but endearing.

Like both The Tall T and Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956), Ride Lonesome sets up a hard-edged but honest comparative menu of men surrounding the film’s female lead; and like Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953), Ride Lonesome extracts moral thematic suspense from the woman’s trying to process the hero’s bounty hunting.

It is not difficult to see how Boetticher’s attitude about actresses landed him an unflattering spot in Laura Mulvey’s classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975): “What counts,” Boetticher now-famously claimed, “is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents.”

And Ride on Lonesome is full of lonesome men, and one lonesome woman, each of the characters’ needs outlined in concisely but well-drawn psychological personal histories: Mrs. Lane wonders at the men’s fighting over a bounty, in a way that precursors Marilyn Monroe’s later turn in The Misfits (John Huston, 1961); Brigade’s morality remains ambiguous for much of the film; while Boone’s and Whit’s pasts as bad men are tempered by their future aspirations; and Billy, a murderer, is played by James Best as giddily dangerous but also as young, not necessarily worthy of any forgiveness, but also not satisfactorily villainous to be fully generically worthy of Brigade’s, Boone’s, or even Whit’s manly vigor.

The real villain of Ride Lonesome—Lee Van Cleef’s Frank, the brother of the captive Billy—becomes clearer nearer the end of the film over the course of twenty increasingly brutal minutes of mysterious motivations and surprising developments.

“Gonna be a lot of killin’ once Frank gets here,” James Best’s Billy says, trying to talk the ignorant Whit out of his gun. And the killing in Ride Lonesome is striking, or at least strikingly stylized, symbolized by the hanging tree that has become the film’s most famous image, sketched in flame, the image from the film that turns up in significant secondary sources like The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Western (Phil Hardy, 1995) and Horizons West (Jim Kitses, 1969).

Yet much of the best of Ride Lonesome occurs neither in action nor in stylized image but rather in conversation; and a surprising number of the film’s most interesting and revealing conversations occur at night.

Ride Lonesome is one of those 73-minute genre films that make 73-minute genre films damn near my favorite kinds of movies; and this movie, full of excellent genre-film actors, contains one of James Best’s best big-screen performances.

* * * * *

Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Drawn to a hard aggregate of the generic and geologic, Anthony Mann’s five Westerns with James Stewart—Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), and The Man from Laramie (1955)—are among the leanest, most psychologically rough-hewn in the genre.

In Winchester ’73, our current subject, James Best, receives bottom billing, playing a young cavalryman killed in a raid by Young Bull (Rock Hudson) …

… while a Sergeant (Jay C. Flippen) and another young soldier (Tony Curtis) pause briefly, then continue to fight.

Surrounded by stars, future stars, and excellent character actors, Best is one of among many greats in a film about the obsessive search of crack shot Lin McAdam (Stewart) for his parricidal brother Matthew, alias Dutch Henry Brown, McAdam (Stephen McNally).

The “Adam” of surname McAdam makes clearer still the already obvious Cain and Abel plot; and coming before both The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) and the Boetticher / Scott Westerns, Winchester ’73 is first and foremost an apparently influential journey-and-revenge film of an archetypically pure sort, with Millard Mitchell as sidekick High-Spade riding alongside Stewart’s protagonist towards a retributive resolution as structuralist and stylized, in its own way, as would be many a denouement in the later Italian Westerns of Sergios Leone and Corbucci.

What is equally striking about Winchester ’73 are the shear number of generic subplots in episodic digressions which writers Borden Chase and Robert L. Richards and director Anthony Mann manage to smuggle into the otherwise single-mindedly purposeful 92-minute runtime, leading one to wonder why the hell new millennium movies must be so tiresomely long.

These episodic digressions are given common thread by the movie’s titular special Winchester rifle, a “one in a thousand” prize Lin wins by beating brother “Dutch” Matthew during a shooting contest in Dodge refereed by Wyatt Earp (Will Geer).

Naturally, crooked Dutch jumps Lin and steals the rifle, beginning a plot-unifying series of ballistic changings-of-hands that establish the lever-action McGuffin as both an Excalibur-like test of moral and heroic mettle and a semiotic index to this specific Western’s negotiation of common antimonies of wilderness and home, honor and savagery, and virtuous versus feckless or toxic masculinity.

Inauguratory in the film’s episodic series of subplots is an incident at the civilizationally interstitial Riker’s Inn, an adobe in the desert where Dutch and his crew attempt to buy rifles and ammunition from Indian trader Lamont (John McIntyre) in one of that great character actor’s best performances.

Accused of racial impurity by the backshooting villains, Lamont proclaims his whiteness…

…and then rubs Dutch’s nose in the necessity of the white villains’ buying from an Indian trader…

…whom Dutch sees as contributing to the death of white families post-Little Bighorn.

Lamont, who clearly does not give a damn to whom he sells firearms, but also lacks the hypocrisy and thoroughgoing villainy of “Dutch Henry,” confirms that the Indians want repeating rifles to repeat their recent victory over Custer…

…but also proceeds to hustle Dutch in a poker game by convincing the villain that he, Lamont, is lousy at cards.

In the process of losing his ass at cards (and of losing the stolen “one in a thousand” Winchester ’73), Dutch draws a version of Wild Bill’s “Dead Man’s Hand,” also, like The Battle of Little Bighorn, newly famous in 1876.

While one might presume here the film is rating the Indians and Lamont lower than it rates Dutch’s outlaw gang, the scene plays more like a sketchy-but-wise pragmatist (the Indian trader) against a treacherous fool of a badman (Dutch). The scene, with trickster intelligence, demonstrates Dutch’s unsuitability for ownership of the special Winchester, a prized weapon he has stolen sans ammunition, putting him at the mercy of the Indian trader.

Earlier in the film, an Indian has sold a necklace of rings for a dollar so that Lin and Dutch can use the rings of the Indian’s necklace as part of their shooting contest. The sale is presented as a moment of comic relief, but seems less to be a joke on the valuelessness of the Indian’s jewelry than a humorous testament to the practicality of the Indian character, who recognizes an opportunity for U.S. currency.

Later, Young Bull’s bargaining with Lamont tells the other side of the Indian wars story in which Dutch had earlier tried to rub the Indian trader’s nose, as Young Bull lists ways in which white men are con artists, thieves, and murderers.

Recognizing first the value of lever-action rifles, Young Bull then recognizes the value of the “one in a thousand” Winchester Lamont has previously won at poker from the foolish outlaw Dutch.

And Young Bull values the rifle not as a mystical object but as a well-made industrial tool Young Bull can use to resist the colonists.

That Young Bull dies with the weapon while attacking the aforementioned cavalry squad, in which James Best’s young soldier is also killed, demonstrates the film narrative’s logical movement of the McGuffin back to “rightful” owner Lin, through a labyrinth of inadequate keepers of the gun—from Dutch to trader Lamont via poker; from Lamont to Young Bull via the Indian’s murder of the trader; from Young Bull, via death, to a cowardly husband (Charles Drake) of admirably Dallas-like dance hall girl and eventual Lin love interest Lola (Shelley Winters); from the coward to Dutch’s partner-in-crime Waco Johnny Dean (played with typically sinister panache by Dan Duryea) via theft; from Waco Johnny back to Dutch Henry via pecking order; and eventually from Dutch Henry back to Lin through the film’s final violent altercation.

As latter-day Excalibur and “one in a thousand” perfectly made industrial product, the titular Winchester is a paradoxical work of art in an age of presumably progressive mechanical reproduction; and though the movie has Young Bull kill the Indian trader for the weapon before dying with it himself, aligning the Indian warrior with some version of the backshooting treachery of Lin’s brother Dutch, in the grand scheme of the weapon’s journey, Young Bull is probably as close to Lin’s honorable merit as he is to the villainy of Waco Johnny and Dutch.[1] This is especially true when one considers the value the film places on practical skill and the general efficacy of the plot’s more admirable characters.

Chief among the most honorable allies for Lin is Lola, whom Shelley Winters plays as a plainly common-sensical frontier heroine.

Not only preserving hearth and home through standing up to Waco Johnny when her feckless fiancé fails to…

…but also, paradoxically, preserving hearth and home through a temporary stint as a dance hall girl, Lola is, other than High-Spade, the film’s clearest match for Lin and the obvious eventual bringer “home” of the wilderness hero.

Intelligent and courageous, Lola is linked to Lin in moments of moral and practical character and telling mise-en-scène, as in the following three-shot, which metaphorically cuckolds Lola’s fiancé by relegating the fiancé to the background, behind the real romance:

Winchester ’73 is no revisionist Western—the film’s themes are conventional; indeed, the film’s main premise is archetypal—but Anthony Mann’s first Western with James Stewart is a remarkable example of the artistic potentialities of the genre film. Focused and purposeful, Mann’s movie uses the brother-versus-brother revenge plot at its center to anchor an series of ancillary but generically well-realized subplots, all held together by a single meaningful object, a firearm no less.

Part of the film’s premise, including the deliberate use of ricochets in the film’s climactic shootout, ought not to work as well as it does. But it does work.

At his best, Anthony Mann was a master of guns, stony landscapes, and generic character types that could be and were psychologically compelling and otherwise effectively acted. In this film, character actor James Best was surrounded by good, effective company. And Winchester ’73 is a good, effective Western.

* * * * *

Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)

One of the least subtle in a directorial oeuvre known for its tabloid headline qualities, Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) is easily read as a heavy-handed allegory about American madness.

Hari Rhodes plays a Black man traumatized by Southern racism to the point of believing he has invented the Ku Klux Klan.

Larry Tucker plays a man who thinks he is Pagliacci.

Gene Evans plays a scientist responsible for atomic weapons who has reverted to the mind of a six-year-old.

And James Best plays a white Southerner raised on bigotry who, during the Korean War, has been brainwashed into becoming a Communist, and now believes he is Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart.

And, of course, there is a ward full of nymphomaniacs.

Perhaps the reason Scorsese and others are drawn to the more obvious allegorical implications of Fuller’s movie is that the film’s degree of absurdity—full of details about history and psychology and then-current events, but all of it viscerally exaggerated—works as expressionism more than as realism.

Surely Fuller wants the audience to see segregationist and Cold War America as a kind of lunatic asylum, but Shock Corridor’s story is not so much America at allegorical arm’s length as the film is itself a self-reflexive headline about investigative reporter Johnny (Peter Breck) who, in attempting to find a murderer of a patient inside a mental institution, seeks his own headlines. Johnny does so with the help psychiatric experts-cum-acting coaches—one of European descent, one of Japanese descent— who “were in psychological warfare together back in World War II.”

In other words, the world of Shock Corridor operates on a slippery continuum of domestic and geopolitical crises, psychology, investigative reporting, Fuller’s brand of storytelling, and performance—the latter represented both by Johnny’s pretending to be a mentally ill incest-obsessed brother and by Johnny’s girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers), herself an exotic dancer, pretending to be the sister to validate the scheme.

Naturally, Cathy is reluctant to help Johnny with this obviously dangerous plan of pretending to be crazy to get committed. Perhaps largely because she works in an exploitative performative profession to build a nest egg for herself and Johnny and, therefore, knows the slippery slope of erotic make-believe, Cathy seems the only character in the film willing to admit the danger of Johnny’s playing “Moses leading [his] lunatics to a Pulitzer Prize.”

Sometimes hyperactively dense with detail and allusion, Fuller’s script’s occasional derailments somehow only work to reinforce the slipperiness of performance, reporting, reality, and sanity. For example, Cathy’s line “Hamlet was made for Freud, not you,” could be read as “Hamlet was made for Freud, [but you were not]” or as “Hamlet was made for Freud[; he and/or the tragedy were not made for] you,” and the line works equally well either way as mashup of incest, tragedy, playacting, and mental state.

James Best’s Stuart—a “Farm boy from the Bible belt” damaged by bigotry before joining the cult of Communism only to hide from a “dishonorable discharge” by playing Confederate officer—understands mental-performative mashup, as does the nuclear scientist who pretends to be a child and the African American who pretends to be a white supremacist.

Ultimately, Johnny begins losing track of the difference between the performance and the reality, pushing Cathy away as though he is convinced she really is his sister; and, in an occupational stroke of impotence mirroring the crumbling of his relationship, he loses his ability to talk, becoming “An insane mute” who “will win the Pulitzer Prize.”

Because Shock Corridor is often as irritating as it might be to be in an actual asylum, this movie is not for everyone. But as a movie about extremes—political extremes, psychological extremes, storytelling extremes, extremes of ambition—Shock Corridor is some version of form matching its content insofar as Shock Corridor amounts to an extreme version of Fuller’s reporting style and the potential consequences thereof.

An epigraph and postscript from Euripides reads

“Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad.”

But that epigraph might as well note also that

“Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes a storyteller.”

* * * * *

Savages (Lee H. Katzin, 1974)

—“…experimenting with the vultures.”

“The higher you get, the less you’re forgiven,” says Horton Madec (Andy Griffith), a rich Los Angeles lawyer terrorizing eccentric, nature-loving guide Ben Campbell (Sam Bottoms) during a bighorn sheep-hunting excursion in the desert.

Bottoms delivers his lines like he is Anthony Jeselnik telling a joke, but otherwise the actor has the same boyish charm fans will remember from his role as Lance Johnson in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979).

Savages is paced like late Gunsmoke (1955-1975), and its score by The Orphanage sounds a bit like something from an episode of Kung Fu (1972-1975), none of which are necessarily bad characteristics, but they are conventions of seventies action-drama television. Nonetheless, I include a made-for-TV movie, despite my otherwise excluding James Best’s television work from the list, because this desert survival thriller remains superior to a couple of the feature films on my list.

Because this movie’s suspense relies heavily upon a surprising progression of events, I will spare my reader the details, except for to say that the film, in addition to being effectively suspenseful television, runs on three impeccable narrative elements:

first, both the editing and the sound editing become interesting at key points in the film’s suspense;

second, as anyone who has traveled beyond the town limits of Mayberry or Ben Matlock’s version of the South knows, Andy Griffith has an uncanny ability to play sinister; and

third, Savages sustains an engaging motif wherein protagonist Ben is guided by the mentorship of a dead desert coot (a prospector named Winnie Haas) rather than by the advice of a rich shithead.

Though the movie surely hates lawyers as much Harry Callahan does, Savages is also 1970s insofar as it has a healthy contempt for rich shitheads.

And based on this film and A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957), it becomes clear that Andy Griffith knew immoral and/or wealthy politician types the same way that Robert Ryan knew racists.

A dim memory of watching this movie on late-night television when I was a kid, the kind of memory where one is not sure if the movie really happened or if it was a half-forgotten dream, puts this movie on a short list for me alongside Edge of Eternity (Don Siegel, 1959), Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971), The Car (Elliot Silverstein, 1977), and Island (Michael Ritchie, 1980), four other crime films and/or thrillers first seen, then for years only half-remembered, all four of which thrilled or chilled me when I was under the age of ten.

That four of these five movies (Savages, Edge of Eternity, Duel, and The Car) take place in the desert; that the fifth (Island) involves an estranged father-son relationship; and that three (Savages, Duel, and The Car) involve implacable villains—each of these features of this private subgenre reveals something about the structure and ecology of my unconscious.

Though I have near-perfect recollections of going to theaters to see Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977, and especially August 1979), The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980), and even Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1981), all movies I saw by age eight, my recollections of Savages, Edge of Eternity, Duel, The Car, and Island, all seen on television after their initial airing or theatrical release dates, are spotty and marked by unaccountable anxiety and occasional inexplicable terror.

Though I will preface by saying I find many of the claims of psychoanalysis to be pseudoscientific, I am convinced there is something for the analyst in these dimly understood recollections of my early childhood dream-state / filmic experience.

“[But] the law teaches you to outthink the other man,” says Griffith’s villain, a morally crippled blowhard and master of Sophistry.

But like a good latter-day transcendentalist telling an aspiring hedge-fund mentor to simply fuck off, Savages’s Ben (Bottoms) finds his own proto-Ben Kenobi not in evil bizarro Andy Taylor, but in a crazy prospector fond of burying himself in the desert like a lizard.

There is nothing quite the same kind of good as good TV.

* * * * *

Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)

To whatever degree Forbidden Planet plays like an episode of Star Trek, one might expect James Best, billed as in Winchester ’73 near the bottom of the cast, to be one of the redshirts killed by the titular planet’s mysterious force. Best dies so well in the Anthony Mann Western that I am tempted to say Fred M. Wilcox and MGM missed an opportunity with this science fiction classic, where Best does not die but rather turns up grinning at Robby the “Caliban” Robot (voiced by Marvin Miller) when the machine expresses its pleasure with its new assignment aboard an earthbound ship.

A highly ranked science fiction film, Forbidden Planet is also widely recognized as a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610); and though, like most of the loosest Shakespeare adaptations, the film has next to nothing to add to Shakespeare’s masterful uses of language, Forbidden Planet is partly about masterful uses of language insofar as the movie precognitively intercedes in C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” (1959), in which Snow notes STEM and the humanities’ increasing mutual alienation from one another, with the film speaking for the place of philology in techno-futurism.

Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), the movie’s Prospero and a philologist no less, spends decades learning to read (or to partly read) the vastly superior Altair IV technology of the Krell, an also vastly superior, but now 200,000-years extinct, alien race.

While Morbius scores one for philology over and above the finest earth’s STEM has to offer, his own hubristic myopia must eventually be explained by the more Kirk-like Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen), the latter of whom falls in love with the movie’s Miranda, i.e., Morbius’s daughter Altaira “Alta” Morbius (Anne Francis).

Like Shakespeare’s Miranda, who is so closely tied to her island home that a postcolonial reading can connect the true love of her to some ideologized sense of rightful colonizer (I once had a brilliant high school senior from rural North Dakota make exactly that textual argument about Shakespeare’s play in an excellent college freshman essay), Altaira “Alta” Morbius of Alair IV communicates with her special world’s fauna and exists in a sort of Edenic innocence awaiting the worthy Commander Adams, or so the plot reasons.

Stated another way, the philologist patriarch Morbius partially masters advanced alien technology but fails to master his own subconscious desire to hold his daughter permanently captive, while Commander Adams, a man of less intellect but greater common sense than the patriarch, is ultimately better suited as master of the planetary house.

Like many mad scientist plots, Forbidden Planet is about the unconquerability of the Id, and like many fifties psychosexual dramas, Forbidden Planet’s familial crisis is thoroughly Freudian.

And while none of these themes or motifs are especially original or complicated, Forbidden Planet executes them well and looks, frankly, fantastic in ways that not only predict elements of multiple important science fiction films to follow—think Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Star Trek, Star Wars; but think also Vernean elements of several Sean Connery or Roger Moore James Bond movies—but also basically surpasses most CGI sci-fi of the past three decades by simply looking beautiful and/or cool instead of looking digital or hyperreal.

Forbidden Planet is an influential and enjoyable science fiction classic.

But I would still like it better if James Best would have gotten to die with the redshirts. He just dies so well in Winchester ’73!

* * * * *

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953).

As is the case in Forbidden Planet, our subject James Best does very little in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, where Best plays a radar technician at the beginning of the film.

More interesting than the James Best sighting is the Lee Van Cleef sighting at film’s end. Van Cleef plays a crack sniper whose job it is to launch a radioactive grenade into the titular beast’s open wound in order to destroy the beast—a fictional Rhedosaurus released from ice by nuclear testing—without further spreading any more of the anachronistic dinosaur’s deadly bloodborne pathogens to the human population of New York City.

Insofar as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms culminates with the collaboration of Van Cleef’s working class American sniper with the film’s scientist protagonist Professor Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian), The Beast anticipates later Mike Rowean-meets-scientist antimonic reconciliations like Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), and one might benefit from seeing The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a movie generally considered atomic-bomb allegory, as a kind of mashup of proto-Michael Bay politics with Ishirō Honda’s superior Godzilla (1954). Whereas the post-Hiroshima Japanese film quite poignantly features scientists heroically addressing a problem created by science, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has a scientist kicking giant lizard ass with a soldier…

…killing the beast from a roller coaster…

…at the top of the first hill no less…

…while the heroic duo wear HAZMAT suits.

Though there is a playful absurdity of science-and-soldier jumping on the rollercoaster like it is Klan day at Coney Island,

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms seems to address the atomic crisis by mostly doubling down on the idea that Oppenheimerian science is just another useful wing of Marie Skłodowska-Curie science. In this respect The Beast, like The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951), seems, via militarization of its science, significantly less humane than the original Godzilla film is, not surprising, perhaps, coming from the country that used “the bomb” rather than from the country that had “the bomb” used on it.

But The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is actually a film in three discrete acts, and the act I have been describing involves pleasurable giant lizard ass kicking, mostly by virtue of Ray Harryhausen’s excellent effects work.

The middle act of The Beast, in which science skeptically doubts science, would work better if it did not have the otherwise rational witness to the titular beast’s hibernatory miracle come so Fox Mulderlike at his fellow scientists and military friends. Fortunately instead of getting a Dana Scully skeptic, The Beast’s Professor Nesbitt encounters equally beautiful paleontologist assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond), who helps him win over a paleontology professor (Cecil Kellaway), the latter of whom then dies, giddy-with-science, in an undersea Hudson River Canyon diving bell.

If I am having a little too much fun describing The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, I should add that the movie is delightfully entertaining, and my favorite of its three acts is the first, in which an arctic / nuclear science expedition unleashes the titular menace from the ice, building on Nyby’s The Thing,

anticipating John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982),

and perhaps also anticipating the first twenty minutes of The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980),

all while generally looking like a cool Flash Gordon comic strip

by Alex Raymond circa 1940.

Unsurprisingly, one of the skeptics in the film dismisses a dinosaur sighting by relegating news thereof to “...where it belongs, on the comics page.”

Keep looking, Hoth Han Solo!

* * * * *

Hooper (Hal Needham, 1974)

“It has a nice grayness, like La Strada.”

Hooper ends with a stunt that makes very little sense:

Presumably this…

… and this…

…and this…

…and this…

…and this…

…and this…

…and this…

… and this…

…all need to happen in one take, an extreme long shot photographed from a helicopter.

Of course, what in fact happens is an extraordinary series of car-, building-, and explosion stunts from multiple angles, intercut with Burt Reynolds and Jan-Michael Vincent in the lead car looking sharp.

Hooper is what it is, i.e., a lightly dramatized but otherwise badass stunt movie. That the movie never fully cares about the objections of Gwen (Sally Field) to Hooper’s performing one last (and his most dangerous) stunt is perhaps neither here nor there. Reynolds, Field, and Vincent are all good in the movie, as are Brian Keith, Terry Bradshaw, and stuntman tough-guy actor Robert Tessier.

If Hooper is a more compelling hang-out movie than is The Cannonball Run (Hal Needham, 1981), it is mainly by virtue of Hooper’s keeping some of its heart intradiegetic, opposite the later Needham car movie, which is just a bunch of cool actors farting around.

Even if Hooper fails to take its own dramatic ideas seriously (underdeveloped ideas which include mentor-protégé responsibilities, industry drug use, male arrested development, body abuse, and aging), Hooper has heart, mostly because of the personae and performances of its stars.

And the heart of the heart of Hooper’s cast is James Best as the dumbass titular hero’s buddy and right-hand man. In fact, whatever else is unapologetically unserious about the film’s character development, Hooper’s shortcomings would be shorter than its short jokes about Alfie Wise were it not for James Best as the actual heart of the movie.

I would say that the stuntman hero Hooper loves James Best’s character better than he loves Sally Field’s, but the movie does not really bother to establish that amorous pecking order either. Suffice it to say, then, that, along with Brian Keith, both Best and Field bring a lot of warmth to their onscreen work, and other than the excellent stunt work, the element of Hooper that works best is the warmth of these actors.

* * * * *

The Killer Shrews (Ray Kellogg, 1959)

Ken Curtis, of Gun Smoke Festus fame, co-produced The Killer Shrews on an eleven-day shoot for $123,000. The film made a million.

B-movie link between H.G. Wellsian roots and later, better low-budget siege plots by George Romero (not to mention later enormously successful Crichton premises), The Killer Shrews is mostly (or, rather, the shrews themselves are mostly) a bunch of ridiculously costumed coon dogs and sinister toothy puppets.

Curtis plays a drunk fiancé cuckhold adversary for James Best, the hero and cuckolder; mad scientists concoct bullshit Malthusian schemes; the people of color, played by Henry Dupree and Alfred DeSoto, obligatorily die first; and the movie is generally absurd, though also generally a lot of fun, with an ingenious proto-A-Team ending.

I cannot recall the jokes in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riff on this movie, but the movie itself has the typical cues everywhere perfectly suited to that parody series. In fact, if Emerson was partly correct that the first landscape painter, the one who teaches all the other landscape painters how to paint landscapes, is the landscape itself, it might be similarly claimed that The Killer Shrews is as much the foundation as the target of later parody, with its low-budget beats—i.e, those momentary silences, after barely motivated events of plot and characterization, so perfectly suited to smart-ass audience commentary—as much training as they have been forever altered by Mystery Science-style parody.

Dumber than I risk overselling them, these movies are nonetheless comparatively smarter than many a mean-spirited critique. Does that mean this one needs seeing? Well, it does by me, because I am making a “Best of James Best” list.

Somebody’s got to keep an eye on these things.

* * * * *

The Naked and the Dead (Raoul Walsh, 1958) is a film the quality of which remains to be seen, by me at least. My affection for Raoul Walsh, along with my respect for Mailer’s war novel, has me hopeful; the film’s long being unavailable streaming, along with my not breaking down and buying the DVD, accounts for my not having seen it.

Meanwhile, The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk, 1954) probably has more cause to be on the above list than Shrews does, but it has been three decades since I have seen The Caines Mutiny, and a James Best list without some Killer Shrews just—imagine me saying this in my best James Best voice—“Doesn’t seem right.”

Other interesting James Best films include Seven Angry Men (Charles Marquis Warren, 1955), They Rode West (Phil Karlson, 1954), The Left Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958), and Apache Drums (Hugo Fregonese/Val Lewton, 1951).

Nor is it my intention to completely dismiss Best’s television series work, which is substantial and, in some cases, as good or better than his work on the big screen.

It is my intention, however, to give this great character actor, one who sometimes goes uncredited, the credit he deserves for effective filmic performances.

I like “working actors”—admittedly, at times, I like them to the point of hyperbole—and James Best remains one of the best examples of an actor who turns up in a versatile group of B- and genre movies and television, always to my general satisfaction.

That James Best worked with Samuel Fuller, Budd Boetticher, and Anthony Mann, some of my favorite directors, in some of their most interesting films—in moments, in some of their most peculiar films—well, that just about cinches it.

[1] The casting of Rock Hudson as Young Bull is typical Hollywood absurdity, and Winchester ‘73’s Indian subplot is mostly conventional, not heavily “pro-Indian” when compared with much of the pro-Indian genre cycle in the 1950s. An Anthony Mann Western of the same year, Devil’s Doorway, is one of the most interesting of the pro-Indian cycle. Winchester ’73, less so. But within the generic logic of Winchester ’73, the treachery of Young Bull and Lamont is pragmatic, relative to that of Dutch Henry, an archetypally evil character.

By Matt Wanat

My buddy Josh Fornelli, who keeps track of current events in an ethically grounded and reasonable way I admire, recently posted an article defending empathy in the wake of some discourse, real but I am not sure how widespread, which has characterized empathy as unnecessary, dangerous, and/or not Christian.

(Pictured here via iPhone are a couple of people and a dog, probably homeless, photographed from the interior of an Ohio rustbelt town Starbucks, patio chairs in foreground, local grocery chain store location in background.)

The following is not a Dickensian holiday editorial about homelessness; rather, I write here about environmental awareness, something these folks and their dog probably “possess” more of than most people do—which is not to say, “Hurray for homelessness!” but rather just to begin to document a slice of my environment circa December 7, 2025.

Let us begin with the date. Eighty-four years ago today, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. This date eighty-four years ago means nothing to my essay except for insofar as “84” is a meaningful number these days. In fact, I thought of 1984 (George Orwell, 1949) and Vineland (Thomas Pynchon, 1990) and “Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?” (Thomas Pynchon, 1984) when I read Josh Fornelli’s post defending “empathy,” for the obvious reason that having to defend empathy indicates one of two possibilities:

(1) our constant-crisis discourse is shrilly decrying the end of a fundamental human virtue which is, in fact, not really at risk in any serious way;

(2) somebody is undermining “empathy” at a Baptist college and whatnot, i.e., somebody is selling Satanism as a form of Christianity, a textbook Orwellian move: up is down, hammers are bananas, day is night, “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”

1984 was published seventy-six years ago. Because the year 2026 will be the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the culture wars are firing up around the Founders and 1776, complete with, ten years in the making, The American Revolution (Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt, 2025) and, ten weeks in the making, Ohio House Bill 486: The Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act, the latter of which contains sections like the following—

Sec. 3320.11. When providing instruction on the topic of American history, an instructor at a state institution of higher education may provide instruction on the positive impacts of religion on American history, which may include the following historical accounts:

(A) The authentic history of the pilgrims, including the following: (1) The organization of the pilgrims as a church; (2) The history of the portrait of the pilgrims displayed in the United States capitol rotunda, which depicts prayer, an open bible, and the inscription “God with Us” on the sail; (3) The religious implications of the Mayflower Compact, which was modeled on a church covenant; (4) The treaty with the Native Americans signed and upheld by the pilgrims; (5) The first Thanksgiving that was observed as an act of gratitude towards God….

—making it law that “education may provide” something that, to my knowledge as an educator, educators are already legally permitted to “provide.” Legislation about nonexistent problems is pretty common these days in the State of Ohio.

One more “Errand into the Wilderness.”

I am not sure what Roberto Bolaño’s Auxilio Lacouture in Amulet (1999) predicts will happen in the ever-more-important literary world of 2026, but I do know that “Virginia Woolf shall be reincarnated as an Argentinian fiction writer in the year 2076” (Bolaño 159), the 300^th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, not to be confused with Article 145 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which criminalized social protest and, ironically, allowed the Mexican PRI to murder and incarcerate Mexican citizens, who were protesting Article 145, in the Fall of 1968, then to sweep the blood from the streets before the 1968 Olympics.

You see where I am going with this?

Probably not.

Your environment is different from mine.

If only there were a “human virtue” that would help us understand one another’s separate senses of our separate and combined places in the world and in world history.

My environment Sunday, December 7, 2025, is full of meaningful (or perhaps meaningless) dates:

July 2, 1776

July 4, 1776

February 5, 1917

December 7, 1941

December 8, 1941

1949

September, 1968

October 2, 1968

September 11, 1973

1999

December 7, 2025

July 4, 2026

2076

“Gee, ain’t it funny how time slips away…”

In some ways, none of these dates matters at all to my current environment. I am drinking coffee, hoping for some Willie Nelson in the coffee-shop Christmas mix, and trying to avoid grading.

But this morning, I listened to a psychoanalytic Rendering Unconscious podcast (RU116), featuring Ohio State University Emeritus Professor Walter A. Davis.

Davis is the author of

Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud (1989)

Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience (1994)

Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (2001)

An Evening with JonBenét Ramsey: A Play and Two Essays (2003)

Art and Politics: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, Theatre (2006)

Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (2006)

In the Swedish podcast Davis tells psychoanalyst Vanessa Sinclair that the then-U.S.-President wanted to shit on people and the environment for psychoanalytic reasons.

(Davis’s point is not necessarily Jungian; these books in the picture are just part of my bedside environment.)

Mac Davis (by which I mean Walter A. Davis, not the singer) used to wear a karate gi to teach his classes, in which I am disappointed to say I never studied, though in the late nineties, over Styrofoam cups of coffee, I once described to him the existentialism of Ride in the Whirlwind (Monte Hellman, 1966), a comment to which Mac Davis replied, “That sounds terrible,” proving that, like Auxilio Lacouture of Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet (1999), I must have been alive (and, in my case, in Columbus, Ohio) at some point in the late 1990s and that Walter A. Davis—described as part of the “The Chicago School” by David H. Richter, though by the time of Richter’s publication, Davis had said goodbye to all that—had dismissed a Monte Hellman Western sight unseen while he and I drank coffee from Styrofoam cups that are probably still in a landfill somewhere.

(Entropy Selfie)

Anyway, the Sinclair (by whom I mean Vanessa Sinclair, not the Sinclair broadcast group) podcast featuring Davis has a bunch of apocalyptic not-so-free association, with, on one hand, all the sophistication of a Roger Waters album—and Davis uses the word “museum” in a way that reminds me of fiction and an essay I keep re-reading by William H. Gass—but the environmental statistics cited by Davis as part of the actor/playwright/writer/critic’s psychoanalytic reading of the then-President’s desire to shit on everybody are all basically valid, apocalyptically serious, and now mostly part of the noise of our collectively not giving a damn about the end of the world to which we are contributing, with or without psychoanalysis.

(I hope Slavoj Žižek’s face gets some press soon. Nobody’s ever heard of that guy!)

(Entropy Selfie)

The other thing that is turning up a lot in my current environment is Scott Galloway, who good-pennied a few days ago in my feed saying something I was (serendipitously?) thinking about after a conversation with my son, a conversation that occurred in the woods in rural Ohio. See the clip here and join the algorithm.

(Sidenote to young straight men: Today in the coffee shop I have seen a dozen pairs or trios of young women studying and/or bullshitting together over coffees, but I have not seen any young men at all. I realize Starbucks is for girls; I also realize that your high school Dollars and Sense teacher assigned a clickbait textbook that told you the only reason you cannot be a tax-free billionaire like Hugo Drax or Elon Musk is that you buy $6 coffees; and I also realize that some of you are busy at your “dirty jobs” and I agree with Mike Rowe that some cocktail of vocational education and physical labor is valuable, though I still await his episode about how sex work is a “dirty job” that gets to serve billionaires (born multimillionaires) who have spent decades snorting coke off underage teens’ thighs before holding Bibles upside down to steal tax dollars from the middle class. But, man, an enterprising young straight man could get laid by, oh, I don’t know, actually talking nicely with a girl at Starbucks and seeing what she has to say about anything, then maybe dating for a while, talking about stuff, making out a bit, etc. Just a thought that Scott Galloway [see point above about my “feed”] seems to share. And I mean this kindly. I really do. I want you to succeed at mating and reading and working and getting a fair wage and a family, should you want one, and a future.)

I’ll get sick of Scott Galloway in my “feed” soon enough, not because he is wrong (he is right about some stuff), but rather because what is the point of sticking around with an “influencer” anyway? Just say “Good one” and move on!

The word “feed” is interesting. My friend David Vonderhaar recently posted this juxtaposition of pics:

In response, I ended up writing the following:

Yesterday, I was doing electrical work in the house--today, too, because kill me already--and I decided to run through the problem I was seeing in the circuit, which was two separate problems, or so I suspected, by conversing with ChatGPT. I’m not sure the chatbot would have not given thoughts that could have electrocuted me had I not already known what I was doing, but I will say that I thought of doing screenshots of the conversation to show how they helped me organize my thoughts. I was basically using the technology to outline, and none of what I did with it was anything I couldn’t have done on my own with a lot of searching through the internet and outlining on a tablet, but using ChatGPT was significantly faster than that.

I say this not as a counterargument but rather as some evidence for further conversation. The problems with the gee-whiz Gates attitudes remain the same, including a complete lack of acknowledgement of hegemony vis-a-vis techno-economic empire, which still basically governs the global discourse, only in a more geographically fluctuant and generally less Repressive State Apparatus-reliant way than it might have sixty years ago.

In the case of my example above, the issue is probably high-entropy versus low-entropy work, i.e., I did more quickly and with a much larger carbon footprint what I might have been able to do anyway, though without the internet I might have had to call one of the sexto-, septua- or octogenarians I still know for “local knowledge.”

What Gates seems to be saying above is that these technologies could transnationally democratize access to helpful information (most media technologies already do so) while hegemonizing and extraction colonizing subalterns (most media technologies already do this as well). Gates seems to be rah-rah-rah for both possibilities, waving his rhetorical poms poms as usual.

In other words, I concur with Gates that the technologies have DIY uses (perhaps even pedagogical, though they are in other ways counter-pedagogical), but there is exactly one wise man in your two screenshots above.

Which brings me to the point:

I have hundreds of pages of student papers to grade, grading on which I have fallen behind because I have been working, oh, maybe about fifty- or sixty-hour work weeks teaching about 120 students in five separate college classes (four preps) with a total of 800-1000 pages of student writing for the semester while doing unpaid time-consuming (ostensibly unwanted by the university administration, clearly unwanted by state lawmakers) faculty governance work and while trying to keep students from letting big tech’s newfangled player piano (more Gaddis than Gass) write all their work for them, all for an under six-digit annual salary; and in the midst of all this, a hot/ground reverse or loose neutral fault has developed upstream from my microwave oven, and I don’t want to go home and continue fixing the problem.

Nor do I know how to fix climate change until the global house burns down.

“It already is burning down!” you say?

Whimper and bang.

Works Cited

Except for four (Virginia Woolf, Sarah Botstein, Vanessa Sinclair, the homeless woman), every single influencer (I count thirty-four men; I’m not sure about the dog) referenced in the article above is a guy (all but two white), in other words, dismissible, “woke.”

Miller, Perry. “Errand into the Wilderness.” Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard UP, 1956.

Richter, David H., editor. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.

“RU116: DR WALTER A DAVIS, APOCALYPTIC THEATER, CAPITALISM, AMERICAN FASCISM – RENDERING UNCONSCIOUS.” YouTube, uploaded by Trapart Film, 28 Oct. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLGsMIX55TE

A frequent complaint about Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that the movie is insufficiently funny. I concur and would add that I do not find myself sufficiently invested in the fate of the marriage between Ann (Carole Lombard) and David (Robert Montgomery) after David tells his wife that, “hypothetically,” he would not marry her again, then tries to tease her with a scheme to secretly make her his “mistress” after he finds out that their three-year marriage has been rendered not legally binding by a state-border technicality.

A movie with some witty lines—”Your forehead slants back too much,” Ann tells estranged husband David; “Something in ladies’ lingerie,” David says while stalking his wife at a clothing store where she works after finding out her marriage contract is nonbinding—Mr. and Mrs. Smith nonetheless could use a lot more laughs. As my friend Anthony Strand has pointed out to me, Hitchcock’s ability to summon laughs in many of his thrillers reinforces a problem with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, rendering the director’s screwball comedy a let-down. Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is significantly less funny than Hitchcock’s thriller Strangers on a Train (1951). More importantly, Hitchcock’s screwball comedy being followed, posthumously for Lombard, by Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant black comedy To Be or Not to Be (1942) re-emphasizes some of what is missing from the Hitchcock film.

All of this is to say that, though Mr. and Mrs. Smith is well-photographed, well-edited, and well-acted, with an effective enough screwball premise, I cannot pretend the movie falls anywhere outside of the bottom ten percent in my ranking of Hitchcock’s movies, and this lower ranking mostly because the movie plays a lively and cheerful comedy score over a comedy with too few jokes.

I can, however, say that the discomfort I feel watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith intrigues me precisely because comedic shortcomings have the film offering so little relief from the plot’s discomfiting observations about the oft-acknowledged-but-nonetheless-staggering incompatibilities between men and women. Likewise, the film offers little comic reprieve from its admittedly secondary observations about systemically discriminatory gendered contexts underwriting heteronormative social conventions around “love.”

As a genre, screwball comedy is no stranger to uncomfortable or even subversive observations about marriage. Moreover, although many screwball comedies allow the audience to stand by varying degrees outside of the genre’s amorous conflicts looking in, there is no doubt a generic subcategory that asks us to experience our fair share of the discomfort of conflict, a phenomenon surely at work in Katharine Hepburn’s comedies of the 1940s, including The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor , 1941), Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), and Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949).

Written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, the latter film continues, and doubles-down on, battle-of-the-sexes themes from Woman of the Year, themes that continue even further through Cukor’s Pat and Mike (1952). These battles in Adam’s Rib, between Hepburn and co-star Spencer Tracy, quickly become uncomfortable to watch. In fact, the scene in Adam’s Rib where a scorned wife (Judy Holiday) shoots at her cheating husband (Tom Ewell) and at the “other woman” (Jean Hagen) could, if played seriously, be right out of late-1940s film noir.

But Adam’s Rib has plenty of laughs, not to mention that Tom Ewell specialized in playing husbands who want killing; and, comparatively, it is partly due to Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s dearth of laughter that one feels watching the Hitchcock film not like a person watching a couples fight so much as like a person in a couples fight.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith concludes with a joke about Ann—discouraged by the feckless courtship of David’s colleague, the ironically named Jefferson Custer (Gene Raymond)—choosing to be dominated by David at a Lake Placid ski cabin.

But aside from David’s law-office co-workers knowing David and Ann’s quarrels often end in lockdowns at home and missed work, there is not a tremendous amount of evidence in the film to allow the audience to enjoy any Kate-and-Petruchio mutual aggressiveness of the characters.

And the misery of Ann’s experience with suitor Jeff stuck atop a ride at the World’s Fair, though well-filmed, feels less like a touché back at Ann following David’s suffering—for the movie never really pretends Ann merits suffering like David might—than it feels fatalistic, a cold and lonely hopelessness of two plainly incompatible people plucked from the crowd and stuck hanging in the air.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith was Carole Lombard’s penultimate film, and the final film released before her death in a plane crash at age 33; the actress had been hurrying home for a war bond rally and her plane crashed partly because navigational lighting was limited to avoid drawing Japanese attack; and at the time of her death Lombard was at some height of her acting talents. Lombard was also mindbogglingly good-looking, making it hard, even after Ann’s petulance in the film’s opening scene, to abide by the foolishness of Robert Montgomery’s David telling her his regrets about marriage.

But whatever the flaws in Hitchcock’s film for lack of memorable jokes, it is hard not to credit the film’s attention to a certain troubling truth about its female and male protagonists. Indeed, David tells Ann he would not marry her again precisely because he is being honest, and David’s following that quarrel with a plan to date and bed Ann without her knowing they are legally unwed illustrates the reason why David might honestly regret marriage. It is not that David has fallen out of love with or attraction to Ann; it is that he would like to have his wife as a mistress.

Surely such a marriage premise is not beyond the reach of comedy—notably, Lombard’s next and final film was a very funny comedy about the Nazi occupation of Poland—but Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s candor about David’s desire is unsettling, the stuff as much of 1890s Naturalism or of Richard Thompson songs as it is the stuff of screwball comedy:

She said, my John, I’ll be your pillow.
I’ll be your lover, mother, whore, and wife.
And he knew that he [had] loved and never seen her
When the light fell from the shiver in her eyes.

—Richard Thompson, “Devonside” (1983)

What makes so unsettling David’s desire to turn his wife into his mistress is less that this is an unusual male desire—it is not unusual—than that the film tiptoes around the systemic reasons why Ann might not appreciate such role-playing-as-legal-reality.

In a Substack on Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue (1928), a minor film in the director’s oeuvre, but a film I find more fully realized than Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I draw attention to the resemblance between Hitchcock’s silent divorce drama and the Edith Wharton novella “Souls Belated” (1899). A lesser film than Easy Virtue and a significantly lesser work than the Wharton story, Mr. and Mrs. Smith nevertheless explores a question at the heart of the relationship between divorcée Lydia and her lover Gannett in “Souls Belated” insofar as Lydia and Gannett, once freed from the “vulgar fraud” of marriage-as-social-placation, find themselves unable to fully escape the social imperative of matrimony, but in a way that disproportionately disadvantages Lydia, the woman.[1]

“We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage,” Lydia tells Gannett, then adds, “we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually — oh, very gradually — into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated?” Yet when the difficulties of the social situation of being an unmarried upscale couple lead Lydia to consider leaving him, Lydia’s lover Gannett rubs her nose in the social and economic disenfranchisement facing an unmarried woman:

“If I were your wife you’d have to go on pretending. You’d have to pretend that I’d never been—anything else. And your friends would have to pretend that they believed what you pretended.”

Gannett pulled off the sofa-tassel and flung it away.

“You’re impossible,” he groaned.

“It’s not I—it’s our being together that’s impossible. I only want you to see that marriage won’t help it.”

“What will help it then?”

“My leaving you.”

“Your leaving me?” He sat motionless, staring at the tassel which lay at the other end of the room. At length some impulse of retaliation for the pain she was inflicting made him say deliberately:

“And where would you go if you left me?”

“Oh!” she cried.”

“Lydia—Lydia—you know I didn’t mean it; I couldn’t mean it! But you’ve driven me out of my senses.”

Perhaps even despite his general agreement with Lydia’s rebellion against social imperatives, Gannett throws at her the low-hanging fruit of systemic sexism—“deliberately” and in “retaliation for the pain she” inflicts by suggesting they break up.

No such level of sophistication gets articulated by Mr. or Mrs. Smith in Hitchcock’s film, but the systemic sexism facing Ann is the same, or at least some variant two-scores on, as the systemic sexism of which Gannett reminds Lydia in Wharton’s novella. Moreover, by all appearances David Smith, unlike Wharton’s Gannett, is in his “senses” and could and does “mean it” when he attempts to liberate himself from marriage for a tryst with his own common-lawful (if not legally married) wife, all while leaving Ann not an amorous co-conspirator against the emotional limits of monogamy but rather the butt of a practical joke.

Fittingly, Ann rebels by dating, first, an older and affluent man (Charles Halton) and, then, David’s law partner Jeff—both of whom demonstrate that Ann’s more immediate need, should her marriage to David be null, is not for a man with whom to screw but rather for financial security and legal advice.

News of their marriage’s illegality, which is for David a chance to role-play an affair with his own wife, becomes for Ann a moment of serious economic and legal vulnerability.

To reinforce the point of Ann’s vulnerability, Norman Krasna’s script has Ann being fired from her department store job once she is revealed to be married:

“As an aid to the unemployment crisis,” the store does not hire married women.

Therefore, the aforementioned “Something in ladies’ lingerie” joke, which for David might mean fantasizing about Ann’s wearing lingerie, for Ann becomes systemic impossibility insofar as, by store policy, only unmarried women may work in lingerie.

David, of course, fails to see the vulnerability of Ann’s being un-legally married, but Ann’s mother (Esther Dale) sees her daughter’s vulnerability, and Krasna’s script hints at Ann’s potential regression to childlike helplessness with lines like “drink out the bottle” and “great kid” being applied to Ann post-discovery of the legal loophole. In fact, when a servant who says she was “midwife” to Ann’s birth refuses David entrance to see Ann, the servant reinforces both that the women see Ann’s vulnerability while David does not and that the motif of Ann’s becoming childlike comes directly from the undoing of her marriage.

David suffers a regression too—for example, by finding bachelorhood with friend Chuck (Jack Carson) at the club to be underwhelming and by finding the dating pool to be unpleasant…

“Not there, Davey.”

“Over here, Davey.”

…unpleasant enough to encourage David to give himself a nosebleed, leading to further embarrassment.

And David’s bachelorhood leaves him mostly just jealous, digressing the film’s plot into a subgeneric shift from David as lawyer-husband to David as detective—a temporary shift of legal-system echelon which gives a conscripted cab driver his own taste of masculine freedom: