Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser (1988)

Thelonious Monk, 1947

This 90-minute documentary about jazz great Thelonious Monk began as a one-hour film for German television in the 1960s by filmmakers Christian and Michael Blackwood who followed Monk on and offstage for six months around New York, Atlanta, and Europe.

Their footage waited 20 years before finding producers, including Clint Eastwood, with budget to expand the film to feature-length. It was released in 1988, after Monk’s death in 1982.

Shooting in black and white, the Blackwoods capture the look and feel of cinema vérité- style documentary, being developed and refined at the time by the likes of Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, 1966).

Illuminating are the close-ups of Monk’s hands on the keyboard as he plays and the physicality of his performance, revealing a creative vehemence that seems at times at risk of reducing his Steinway to splinters.

We also see him as a composer conveying to his sometimes bewildered band the intricacies of a complex chord progression, while reluctant to give them specific answers to their questions. At moments, in his seemingly playful erratic behavior we see early signs of what may have become the mental illness that brought his career to an end. Watching the film is like opening a time capsule of the bebop era, and the music is wonderful.

Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser is currently available for viewing on YouTube.

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Further reading/viewing:

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Image credits:

Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man

Day of the Outlaw (1959)

This gem of western noir stars Robert Ryan in another of his hard-bitten and slightly psychotic roles. Shot in black and white, the story is set in a small mountain town knee-deep in Wyoming winter snow. The location photography gives the film a gritty realism. So does the adult material. This is not a western for kids.

Plot. The first 20 minutes introduce us to the town’s residents, and tensions are running high. Cattleman Ryan is enraged by the encroachment of ranchers fencing off the open range. He says he intimidated and killed Indians and outlaws 20 years ago to defend himself. He’s ready to do it again.

His chief adversary is a determined settler, Crane, whose wife (Tina Louise) has some history with Ryan. To avoid a confrontation, she tries to fan a little spark of sympathy in Ryan and maybe a bit of the old romance, but he’ll have none of it. “You don’t have much mercy,” she says. “You won’t find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming,” he replies.

Just as a shootout is about to settle matters, a gang of surly outlaws arrives led by former Army captain Burl Ives. They have come into possession of a fortune in stolen gold, and the cavalry is in hot pursuit. Ives has taken a slug in his chest and needs a doctor. Under his orders the town’s residents are taken hostage, the local veterinarian removes the slug, and the weather worsens.

Tensions are now over the top. Only Ives is able to restrain the most libidinous and murderous of the men in his gang, and we learn that his time is running out. From what the vet tells Ryan, Ives is apparently dying from internal bleeding, while morphine keeps him miraculously ambulatory.

Burl Ives in his other career as a folksinger

After the gang persuades Ives that a dance with the handful of women in the camp would make the men less irritable, Ryan makes a move to get the whole slimy bunch out of town. And slimy they are, except for the clean-cut David Nelson (son of Ozzie and Harriet), who has somehow got mixed up with this bunch. Tender shoots of young love even begin to spring up between him and the storekeeper’s daughter.

Ryan reminds Ives that the cavalry will be there as soon as the weather improves. To avoid a “Mormon massacre,” he says he can lead the whole gang over a mountain pass that will take them to Cheyenne. And off they go, the horses knee deep and then belly deep in snow.

When one horse is injured and has to be shot, Nelson is ordered to give up his mount to the rider who is now afoot and to walk back to town. Then Ives dies, as predicted. And thus begins a slow process of attrition in which the remaining gang members begin to fight over the gold and do each other in.

Themes. This grim western set in the snow and wintry weather recalls the crime film On Dangerous Ground (1952), shot in the snowy mountains of Colorado and also starring Robert Ryan. The film’s leering villains are not just outlaws but certified sociopaths. As they manhandle the women in the dance scenes, you can feel your skin crawl.

Meanwhile, the film backs away from what a modern western would happily relish, the opportunity for blood and gore. The scene in which the vet removes the slug from Ives’ chest even cries out for it. Ives and the doctor both break into a sweat, but that’s about the extent of the trauma. It’s a surprise to see Ives walking around afterward hardly worse for wear.

David Nelson (left) with the rest of the family, 1960

A fistfight between Ryan and three of the gang members cuts back and forth between close shots and shots from the distance, where we see the fighters and a scattered collection of observers. The effect is oddly abstract. Instead of the usual scene in which an excited crowd gathers around to cheer, the onlookers watch without moving and without a word. It’s a strange effect.

The weather deserves a mention. Often the clouds descend and the snow flies, which suits the desperate mood of the film. A brief moment of farce intrudes as a man falls asleep with his boots against a stove, and they begin to smolder. Instead of garnering a laugh, however, the point seems to be that no one else in the room either notices or cares.

As matters worsen, Ryan has some sort of change of heart and gambles with his life as he lures Ives and the gang out of town with the false promise that he knows a way through the mountains. It is an act of mercy, which he’s said there’s little of in Wyoming. The apparently selfless act seems meant in a way to redeem him, but Ryan’s not that easily redeemable.

And it does not lead to a conventional ending, where he is reconciled with his former sweetheart Tina Louise. Instead, what we get in the final scene is Nelson asking him for a job. And after a moment’s thought Ryan says, “OK, you won’t need this,” and takes away the young man’s gun. There’s a similar resolution at the end of Shane (1952), when Chris (Ben Johnson) a former adversary, asks Starrett (Van Heflin) for a job as a hand.

Mount Bachelor, Oregon

Production notes. The film was actually shot in the mountains of central of Oregon, near what was then known as Bachelor Butte. At the time, the area was in the beginning stages of what was to become a major ski resort and renamed Mount Bachelor.

The film was directed by Hungarian-born director Andre de Toth, who’s also remembered for the Gary Cooper western, Springfield Rifle (1952). The film was adapted from a novel by Lee E. Wells by screenwriter Philip Yordan, whose credits include The Man From Laramie (1955) and The Bravados (1958).

Noir fans need to give this one a viewing. It’s up there among the best. Day of the Outlaw is currently available at netflix and amazon. Tuesday’s Overlooked Films is the much-appreciated effort of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 27

Bonhoeffer – Agent of Grace (2000)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) is one of those rare people for me. His life and early death have been a subject of interest for most of the decades of my life. As I have changed over the years, his story seems always to be there as a touchstone.

Religion and religious people generally get my back up. I have come to see “true believers” as major obstacles to human progress, doing more harm than good. Yet this German theologian, who resisted the Nazi government, has always commanded my respect.

I spent months with his book Letters and Papers From Prison, immersing myself in the last two years of his life. I tried writing it as a play, about a man whose faith is put to the test as he takes a stand against the Gestapo. His was a struggle that took immense courage, and he did not win. In the final days of the War, he was executed for treason.

So he’s a puzzle. Remembered as a deeply decent and caring man, he was neither pious nor puritanical. He loved life and literature, traveled, played the piano, wrote poetry. A gifted scholar, he also had a faith that did not ignore the realities of a world overcome by an evil beyond imagination. From his letters, we know that he had many doubts, and yet they only seemed to strengthen him.

Bonhoeffer had already published an important book, The Cost of Discipleship. In it he argued against spiritual beliefs that require little effort to uphold and knuckle under easily to any kind of adverse pressure. The German Lutheran Church had done just that in allowing itself to become a state church under Hitler.

Demanding as the cost of discipleship might be, the paradox of the man was that his religious faith supported his humanism. The silence of God during the Nazi nightmare didn’t cause him to despair. He came to believe in a God who, despite all evidence to the contrary, had not lost faith in mankind. Religious extremists today could take a lesson from that.

The film. From having written a play that tried to remain truthful to the man, I know his story is hard to dramatize. The screenwriters have chosen to focus on the cat-and-mouse game between Bonhoeffer and his prison interrogator, Roeder. For a subplot, they include the young Maria von Wedemeyer, who fell in love with Dietrich and was permitted prison visits as his fiancée.

Much of the real story has been excluded for the sake of the film’s 90-minute running time. A major omission is Bonhoeffer’s long friendship with Eberhard Bethge, a fellow seminarian. The most revealing and heartfelt of Bonhoeffer’s letters smuggled from prison were to this dear friend, whose absence was like the loss of a brother.

The film, in fact, seems edited down from a much longer version. We get glimpses of several named characters, like Bethge, whose identity would be understood only by someone familiar with the details of Bonhoeffer’s family and acquaintances. Still, much of interest is included, like the system of smuggling coded messages to Bonhoeffer by marking the text of books.

Though made little of, there is also the opportunity of escape arranged for Bonhoeffer. Dressed in a plumber’s outfit, he was to be swept away by night in a waiting car. But knowing an escape would jeopardize other prisoners, some of whom were members of his family, he decides at the last moment not to go. It was a futile choice, as those he meant to save were also eventually executed.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This is a film worth seeing for the simple reason that no two people are likely to take away the same view of it. Like many stories of its kind, it’s a hard one to dismiss. 

We know that Bonhoeffer during his time in prison was working on a new book of theology. It seems likely to have been his attempt to come to terms with the horror he’d been witness to. Today, it would surely offer an understanding of what gives every appearance of being a godless world. That manuscript was, of course, lost to us as well. 

Bonhoeffer – Agent of Grace is an English-language film with a German cast. It is available at netflix and from amazon. Overlooked Movies is a much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credit: beliefnet.com

Coming up: Buck