Anytime Movies #3: Once Upon a Time in the West

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,* when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

Landscapes.

That’s what’s featured in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Whether it’s the vast, aboriginal spaces of Monument Valley—an affectionate genuflection to the films of John Ford—or the intricately chiseled planes of the faces of Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda—you spend a lot of time looking at both in Once….—as well as deep close-ups of the faces of Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale. There is one shot where Bronson ever so slowly relaxes a smile out of existence. Bronson does it so subtly you don’t know what’s happening until it’s happened. It’s one of the things I look forward to in the Dance of Death of Once Upon a Time in the West. Here are some others:


1. “Looks Like We’re Shy One Horse…” The first twelve minutes. A dilapidated train station in the middle of nowhere. Three long-coated bad-men wait for a train. They while away the time, each in their own unique fashion. Driven mostly by sound and filmed in extreme close-ups, the sequence, accompanied by the homely squeak of a windmill—one of the out-sized sound effects typical of Leone’s westerns—and the jokey placement of the credits, rolls on and on until a confrontation ends explosively. It’s an opening of great economy and intricate film-making. Few words are spoken throughout. I’ve shown students this sequence to show just how much presence and atmosphere simple sound effects can bring to a scene. It’s just the opening gambit in a plot by two men who are playing against each other. It will take the entire movie to explain why.

2. “You Don’t Know How To Play” The gist of Once Upon a Time in the West is a chess game with lives and futures as the playing pieces. As scripted by Sergio Leone and his co-scenarists--the soon to be master of Italian horror films Dario Argento and the young Bernardo Bertolucci--the movie is a series of moves and counter-moves by the antagonists, each one trying to tame the frontier in their own way, and taking their own sweet time about it. Each has to make the pieces fall their way. For the first-time viewer it can be maddening following the strategems of the four participants in the story, but by the end the motivations and loyalties—or lack of them—become clear.
3. “People Scare Easier When They’re Dyin’” The villain of the piece is the meanest, rottenest most conniving scumbag to ever walk a dusty street and spit on it. “Frank” is a sadist who smiles when he kills and for the first time in his life he has a patron with a vision—one big enough for Frank to start to see how there might be such a thing as a future, and that one man can own it. He just can’t understand why people are getting in his way.

4. “Instead of Talking, He Plays. And When He Better Play, He Talks.” The composer and the director did it backwards. Ennio Morricone wrote the music for the film first and Leone built his sequences around the music, playing it on-set to establish mood. There are two spectacular pay-offs--one in the previously mentioned Monument Valley sequence. But the other is at a train station where Claudia Cardinale, has just arrived from New Orleans to find no one to meet her. After a long wait (which is actually mercifully short for a Leone western) she decides to hire passage. Sounds disappear as she is seen through a station window talking to an official, and then the camera HEAVES up and over the roof, and in a burst of music reveals a burgeoning western town full of life and activity. It’s as if all of America is presented in that one astounding crane shot. My wife audibly gasped when she saw the shot in some movie clip program on TV, so stunning is the effect. And more than a little of the power of that shot is due to Morricone’s music and the angelic voice of Edda Dell’Orso, wordlessly cooing an ode to the country and to the protagonist around whom the movie and the future hinges.

5. “Ma’am, It Seems To Me You Ain’t Caught The Idea” For the first time in a Leone western, a woman is the hero, but like her predecessor—"The Man with No Name"—she is flawed and has some learning to do, and it’s up to Leone’s trio of men – another man with no name (going under the aliases of dead men), a wolf-like vagabond-thief, and the villain, Frank—to push, prod, blackmail, challenge and coerce her into a new role. It’s a role each man knows they’ll have no part of, and that, for a time, she is reluctant to fulfill. In the last shot of the film, she is seen bringing water to the railroad work-crew who will be bringing people and prosperity to what will be her town. It may seem a servile role, but as we pull away and follow the disappearing tracks to the frontier, leaving her to her future, she begins to bark orders, to direct and take charge. Her station will become a cornerstone of the push west. “This movie drips with testosterone,” a colleague once told me after a screening. Yes, but Leone includes a healthy shot of estrogen as, for the first time, he is dealing with a story that not only leaves the past behind, but also looks forward to the future.

After his spectacular success with the "Dollars" trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, Leone was given a lot of money, quite a bit of it from Paramount Pictures, to not make his next planned film (based on the novel, "The Hoods" which would eventually become his last film Once Upon a Time in America) but make his next production a western. When he delivered this slow-moving epic on a small scale writ large, the full length film (2 hours, 46 minutes) became a hit in Europe, but Paramount cut what it considered "extraneous" material—a full 25 minutes of it—for its American release.* The film was a bomb in the States. It was released, after all, in 1968, the year of Bullitt, Rosemary's Baby, and 2001: a Space Odyssey. Cinema, and its audience, was changing. The next year Easy Rider would be a huge hit. Once Upon a Time in the West might have seemed a little archaic to the youth audience. Eastwood, a popular star outside of the Leone films by then, wasn't in it. Bronson—popular in Europe, but a supporting actor in America—was. Fonda, Cardinale, and Robards, perfectly cast though they are, did not bring in droves of film-goers.

But, despite its reputation from the box-office performance upon its release in America, the film has developed a cult following here—more than that, it is acknowledged as a masterpiece of film-making, one of the great films of the 20th Century, maybe a little behind-the-times for the box-office, but certainly ahead of its time for the influence it has had on subsequent film-makers.

For me, it is simply beautiful, dusty and hard-scrabble though it is. Some of the images, some of the sequences, run through my head daily, and Morricone's music "ear-worms" into my head once a week. It is still, despite the acolyte-directors who "one-off" the style and sometimes the film, wholly original, while acknowledging its debt to films of the past, presenting them in its own unique way. You'll never see a wide-screen film filled so interestingly as Once Upon a Time in the West. Filled and brimming. Rustic and operatic, Once Upon a Time in the West is a fairy-tale of Myth and History—film history—while making its own.

Claudia Cardinale: The West wrapped around her little finger.

Anytime Movies:

Once Upon a Time in the West

-Only Angels Have Wings
The Searchers

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

** There had been a precedent: United Artists cut 16 minutes from the nearly 3 hour The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. And Paramount made a worse decision when it eventually released Leone's Once Upon a Time in America: restructuring the director's intricate flashback structure into a chronological narrative, which robbed the movie of its melancholy tone, and removed any mystery the film contained. Curiously, the longer film is fascinating throughout, but Paramount's re-edit seemed interminable. It just shows the differences between a genuine film-maker and studio hacks.

Julia (1977)

Julia (Fred Zinnemann, 1977) I won't get into the actual veracity of the story behind Julia (other than this article isn't tagged with "Based on a True Story" (not that any movie that claims that distinction is probably being very truthful). But, the movie (and Hellman in her book, "Pentimento") hedges its bets by opening with an atmospheric shot of Lillian Hellman (and, according to entertainment myth, it actually IS Lillian Hellman in that boat) and Jane Fonda's voice-over narration:

“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. I'm old now and I want to remember what was there for me once and what is there for me now." 

Cut to memory of days gone by: Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) is writing...or trying to, anyway. It's a struggle.  She chain-smokes, stabs at the typewriter in frustration, and, even goes so far as to throw the damned contraption out the window. All of this is not lost on her lover, Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards), himself a writer (currently living on royalties) who goes about his day keeping up their New York coast beach-house and observing the recalcitrant chaos which is "Lilly" composing. "You know you don't have to do this," he rather sarcastically counsels. "It's not like you've written anything before. No one'll miss you. It's a perfect time to change jobs." 

He suggests that if she's blocked, she should do something else, another job, a vacation, go to Paris, see her friend Julia. "Just don't go crying about it!" he scolds. "If you're gonna cry about it, go stand on a rock!" But, she doesn't leave, just retreats to her memory. Her childhood friend Julia (Lisa Pelikan as a child, Vanessa Redgrave grown up)she remembers with absolute clarity, how she was a restless spirit, raised by her entitled grandparents (who tell her when she sees some injustice "don't look at it") and finally escapes when she is accepted at Oxford to study medicine and does graduate studies at the University of Vienna. She decides to go to Paris, re-purposes herself to write her play...and to see Julia. After many missed phone-calls, she gets a mysterious phone-call that Julia is in hospital, injured from an attack from fascist demonstrators on campus.

Once in Vienna, she find her friend badly beaten, unable to talk, and she is told that she has a reservation for her stay at the Hotel Imperial, provided by an "Herr von Fritsch" who is not staying at the hotel and cannot be reached. Julia disappears from the hospital and her records expunged, leaving Lilly confused, searching, frustrated, and unable to finish her play. She returns home and resumes writing.

But, the memory of the events in Vienna haunts her. She finishes her play, but finds Hammett in the morning, reading it, and more than critical. "You want to be a serious writer," he says. "I don't know what happened, but you better tear that up." A long torturous second draft produces "The Children's Hour," high praise from "Dash" and interest from Broadway, where she becomes the toast of the town. But, there is no word from Julia, although Lilly writes her regularly.

On a goodwill trip to Russia (along with Hal Holbrook's Alan Campbell and Rosemary Murphy's Dorothy Parker), Hellman is contacted in Vienna by a "Mr. Johann" (Maximillian Schell), who carries a message and a request from Julia—come see her in Berlin on the way to Moscow, in that way, with her help, anti-Nazi organizations can smuggle in $50,000 of Julia's money to bribe the release of some fellow dissidents. The mission is, of course, not a little dangerous; she will be detouring, travelling to Nazi Germany and Lillian Hellman is Jewish. Although she is warned that, as in childhood, she is "afraid of being afraid," she is cautioned by Julia's message not to be a hero, if she thinks she cannot do it.

Of course, she does it, although it attracts the curiosity of Campbell and Parker, and Hellman boards a train for a tense journey to Berlin, where, unbeknownst to her, she is being kept under watch by the Nazi's and under wing by the sympathizers, who anonymously supervise her every nervous move for a rendezvous she can't begin to imagine.  

The film won the BAFTA that year for Best Picture. It also won three Academy Awards: Vanessa Redgrave's supporting performance as Julia (frankly, every time Redgrave acts she should win an Oscar); Jason Robards won for Best Supporting Actor for his wry romanticized portrayal of Hammett (Schell was nominated as well) and Alvin Sargent's spare, episodic screenplay that, although it never stays in one place for very long, is nonetheless amazingly rich in detail. I also think this is probably Jane Fonda's most relaxed, most versatile and least mannered performance of her entire career—she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but lost to Diane Keaton's Annie Hall. Her portrayal is "scrappy" (as described in the screenplay) but also vulnerable, tremulous, but never weak, and Fonda takes major advantages of those moments for subtle drama and opportunities for comedy.

Fred Zinnemann was 70 when he made Julia and was approaching his fourth decade making movies (this would be his second to last film). His direction is meticulous, but like much of the director's work over the years, not so much as to be stodgy—he frequently punctuates the steadiness of the compositions with ones that are "catch-as-catch-can" to bring life to the story-telling. He is aided by editor Walter Murch—doing his first editing work outside the USC Mafia film-making tent—who is positively brutal in his cutting, but creates a dramatic tension through it that might not be there if he weren't so fastidious. George Delerue's score is uncharacteristically unromantic, relying more of the tension he employed in his work for The Day of the Dolphin. If there is any weakness to the film, it's in Douglas Slocombe's too-veiled photography, which looks like a bad imitation of Geoffrey Unsworth's fine-grained work. It may be a film of memory, but, if so, it's awfully fuzzy.

The film has been criticized for its emphasis less on Julia, but on Hellman's story, which seems odd. It is Hellman's story, and if hers is less dynamic, more flighty, and a bit specious in her pursuit of fame and fortune (and acceptance), then so be it. That's what her story was. "Julia" (if she existed) was out of sight, a creature of moments and not continuity, and ultimately, a mystery as unknowable as one of Hammett's femme fatale's. And she was a reflection of what Hellman wanted to be—worldly, passionate, committed, and independently wealthy. In some form, Julia existed, if only in a case of need.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen Julia, but I saw it a lot. It was the favorite film of a gal I was going out with at the time, and it was the "go-to" movie on date night. But, personal history aside, the film still resonates for its unresolved story, the questions, the regrets, the "what-could-have-been's" at its end and the sense of unreality that the world was drenched in during the 40's before, in our fear, paranoia, and triumphalism, we produced our "Scoundrel Time" in the 1950's. It's a deftly handled film of flawed individuals trying to do the right thing and falling short.

Lilly and Dash (left)

Lillian Hellman in 1939 (right)

Julia was also the film debut of an actress with the unlikely name of Meryl Streep
(wonder whatever happened to her?)

A Big Hand for the Little Lady

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Fielder Cook,1966) This entertaining little gambling drama came out of a television presentation—its director, Fielder Cook, was one of the pioneer directors of live television, and one of the few to stick to the medium, only occasionally making a film for the movie studios, finding them more restricting. The source was a drama for "The Dupont Show of the Week" entitled "Big Deal in Laredo" and starring Walter Matthau, Teresa Wright and Zachary Scott. It was written by Sidney Carroll who wrote the screenplay for The Hustler, and knew a thing or two about the mind-games while playing games.

It is the day of the "big" poker game in Laredo, Texas. The richest men in the state all gather on this particular day for a high-stakes game that is legendary throughout the state, having taken place over sixteen years. Undertaker Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford) careens through the Texas territory in his horse-drawn hearse, picking up the participants: lawyer Otto Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy), who abandons a closing argument in a murder trial to make the game; cattle-baron Henry Drummond (Jason Robards) skips out on his daughter's wedding. When the three get to Sam's saloon in Laredo, they are joined by Jesse Buford (John Qualen) and Dennis Wilcox (Robert Middleton) and convene to the backroom of Sam's, leaving the bar-flies to hang out and conjecture about what might be happening behind the door of the invitation-only exclusive "big game."

Not much it turns out. The millionaires all know each other and the game proceeds without many changes except the heighth of the chips.

Then, as they are wont to do, a stranger comes into town. Meredith (Henry Fonda) is moving with his family—his wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and son Jackie (Gerald Michenaud)—to buy a house and property in the neighboring county, but a busted wagon wheel keeps them put in Laredo until the blacksmith can repair it. They come to the crowded saloon to pass the time until they can get on the trail again.

The prim and proper family makes an odd contrast to the rough and tumble saloon dwellers, but Meredith seems more comfortable in the honky-tonk, and is genuinely interested in the poker game going on in the backroom when he gets wind of it. He gets "the gambler's itch" and pretty soon, he's eyeing the families' stakes for the $500 to buy in. Mary argues with her husband that they've scrimped and saved for a long time for the stake and she doesn't want him risking it. Then, there's his gambling addiction, which he's resisted long enough for them to get that stake. But, that wagon-wheel needs fixing and if they just get a little more...

The regulars at the poker table, particularly Drummond, object to Meredith joining, but Habershaw, taken with Mary, presses the others to let Meredith join the game. 

Things start out okay—Meredith is only a passable poker player—but pretty soon, he's hooked and he starts to lose. He becomes increasingly agitated and starts looking the worse for wear. While Mary frets in the saloon, Meredith is sweating through some mediocre hands until he gets a hand that he knows he can win, but he doesn't have the money to meet Drummond's raised bet. The strain causes Meredith to collapse, stricken.

The town doctor (Burgess Meredith) is called, and he orders Meredith taken out of the room and back to his office for examination, leaving Mary in the situation to play the hand and either lose or keep the family farm. It does not bode well when she turns to Drummond and asks politely "How do you play this game?" 

How does she get out of it? How does she play the hand without the collateral funds to make a bet? How will she buy the farm...without buying the farm?

This is where A Big Hand for the Little Lady really gets interesting...and entertaining. Everything that has gone before is merely a set-up for the rest of the movie and how "the hand she is dealt" plays out.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady crosses a couple of genres. It is, on the surface, a western, that form that allows the problems of today to be seen in a silvered mirror of the past, making the issues complicated in today's world, simpler and deconstructed and standing out in fine relief. It is, in some instances, a comedy, in how it sets up a male-female tension. And it is a satire of how men can be "played," especially by forces that may be outside of their comfort zones.

But, it is also something of a feminist tract (Don't run away, boys, the film is entertaining) and might serve as an audio-visual aid to "The Feminine Mystique," illustrating the secret power of women (not so much hidden, but societally repressed) in a world dominated by subjugating men. It is fascinating to behold not only in a western, but also in something so light (when its equivalent is present in the darker, more resolute—and, one has to admit "camp"—Johnny Guitar). That is part of the delight of the construction and the big pay-out for A Big Hand for the Little Lady.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Tora! Tora! Tora! aka (トラ・トラ・トラ！) (Kinji Fukasaku/Toshio Masuda/Richard Fleischer, 1970) "The American Pacific Fleet was attacked and partially destroyed by Japan on . . . Sunday Morning December 7, 1941. This attack led to the entering of the United States into World War II. All of the events and characters depicted are true to historical fact."

20th Century Fox's former studio head Darryl F. Zanuck had served in the second World War, and spent his senior years at 20th by the overseeing of large movies showcasing major battles of that war, his most prominent being The Longest Day, based on Cornelius Ryan's book documenting the Normandy Invasion.  But, in 1966 plans were put in place to make an historically accurate film about the Pearl Harbor attack, based on Ladislas Farago's "The Broken Seal."  Ambitious in its scope, the film would be made with both Japanese and American crews, and for a great deal of the pre-production the man in charge of the Japanese unit was director Akira Kurosawa (who did extensive work on the screenplay).  Kurosawa agreed to the film, thinking that David Lean was making the American section, but when he discovered it was, instead, Richard Fleischer, the Japanese master bent some rules in order to allow himself to be "fired" from the film.  He was replaced by two directors known to be as efficient and workmanlike at bringing films in on-time and under-budget as Fleischer.  The intention was not to make great art, but to make an historically accurate film, devoid of trumped-up drama (From Here to Eternity had done that already) and stick to the main subject of the planning and execution of the attack.

The result, although accurate, is rather flat. Fleischer's American scenes seem drab and stale and, peopled with character actors like Jason Robards, E.G. Marshall, Joseph Cotten and Martin Balsam, lacking in star power.* The Japanese sequences, perhaps because they have less of an American film studio-feel, seem to have more verve and energy...and better performances. The movie seems to reflect the situation of the real life events: the Japanese have all the bright ideas, while the Americans have the lethargy associated with "a sleeping giant."** Still, the battle sequences and attack footage is extraordinarily well done, a combination of L.B. Abbott's and A.D. Flowers' model work and the Fox Studio's sometimes hair-raising practical effects crews and stuntmen.

I attended the premiere of Tora! Tora! Tora! with my family at a special showing at the old Paramount theater in Seattle. It was a special preview for the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors, of which my father, John Wilson, late of the U.S.S. Missouri, was a member. The only story my Father ever told of the war was the events of December 7th, when he was waiting on the dock of the U.S.S. Arizona to attend on-board church services with his friend, Howie Whims, who, for whatever reason, was late. Were it not for his buddy's tardiness, my Father would have been aboard the doomed Arizona at the time of the attack, and likely might have joined the ranks of the sailors who are still entombed there.***

It was an odd thing sitting in that audience with that audience. 29 years previously, they had witnessed the true horrific events of what was being fictionalized on screen. The mistakes made (by both sides) that made the devastation so complete was laid out for all to see. But, however good the effects and pyrotechnics, they couldn't recreate the carnage of that day: the deafening noise, the stench of burning oil that enveloped Pearl for weeks, the bodies, the desperation; the sight of good friends and comrades-in-arms caught in the gears of the attack and lost forever.**** 

The retired sailors sat stonily, watching the film—no doubt poor competition for the memories unreeling in their own heads and hearts and souls. There was a smattering of applause when a Japanese zero was shot down, but it was unenthusiastic, hardly celebratory. For them, it was a film about—and I say this hopefully—the worst day of their lives. However artfully done, however accurately portrayed, who would want to sit through that?  As Sam Fuller succinctly put it in The Big Red One, "Surviving is the only glory in war."  

I hope, on that day, they could appreciate their own glory.

As part of the marketing of the film, 20th Century Fox had artist Robert McCall do a series of designs for use in poster art (as he had with 2001: a Space Odyssey). The images are quite extraordinary.

* Actually, it's not a bad strategy.  Less attention is paid to the actors on-screen to the advantage of the story.  Films such as Zanuck's The Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far become parlor games after awhile ("Look!  There's Sal Mineo and Richard Beymer! Isn't Gene Hackman in this movie?")

** That's taken from the thing the movie is most famous for—Yamamoto's assessment of the attack ("I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve").  Even Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor used it.  It's a good line, making the Imperial General seem both prescient and tragic.  Unfortunately, it appears that, historically, Yamamoto never actually said it.

*** It's one of the reasons I have no patience with Michael Bay's post-Titanic disaster, Pearl Harbor: there is one shot, meticulously recreated, following the path of the most damaging bomb that struck the ship—one of those CGI-sailors scrambling for cover below could likely be my Father, and it irks me that Bay's sensibilities had more gung-ho enthusiasm for the bombs than for the victims.

**** Those sailors' names are etched in stone at the Pearl Harbor Memorial, which is constructed over the still capsized hulk of the Arizona, which still burbles oil to the surface to this day.  But, there's another section, a more recent section, with fresher names cut into the rectangular portal that leads under the surface to the Arizona.  It's for survivors of the attack, who after living through the war, living a full life with wives and families, still chose as their final resting place the ship in the Harbor where they lost so many friends.  I never fully understood "survivor's guilt" until I saw that.

A Boy and His Dog

A Boy and His Dog (L.Q. Jones, 1975) L.Q. Jones (real name Justice McQueen—his stage name is the name of the first character he played in movies) is most well-known as a quirky character actor, usually playing rangy, seedy types in westerns for the likes of directors like Sam Peckinpah—he was part of Peckinpah's stock company—and Robert Altman--he played the character based on Chet Atkins in Altman's last film, A Prairie Home Companion.

But in 1975, he also joined the director pantheon, putting together A Boy and His Dog, a low-budget high-concept picture based on the 1969 sci-fi story written by Harlan Ellison. That story, "Blood's a Rover,"* tells the story of a young adult male in a post-apocalyptic world whose only companion is a telepathic dog or "Rover," named "Blood." Blood sniffs out food and women for Vic, reads minds, and communicates telepathically...but only with "Vic." It's a bizarre story with an odd little twist, and is one of Ellison's best-known tales.

The film Jones made of it is simultaneously satiric, savage, sassy, and right on the edge of burlesque as Vic (a very young, pre-"Miami Vice" Don Johnson), and his pooch (voiced by Tim McIntire) roam their post-nuclear countryside that bears a passing resemblance to the world of Mad Max,** with mutants and squalor. The film is gritty, low on aesthetics, but bears a witty screenplay (with contributions from Ellison, Jones, and producer Alvy Moore) with clever dialogue, even if the concepts behind the movie are rather...base. At one point, Vic is lured by one of his female victims (Suzanne Benton) to an underground society of American nostalgists led by Jason Robards, who appear to have stepped right out of the River City, Iowa of The Music Man,*** except, of course, for the deranged robots, goon squads, and man-milking machines (the society is sterile and Vic is "utilized" to provide genetic material). Young Vic must make a choice between this semblance of civilization, monogamy, and the scorched-earth policies above ground.

In fact, the undergound scenes are where the movie loses a lot of steam—mostly because they don't have the prickly dynamic between Vic and Blood (Blood calls him "Albert" merely to annoy him, and has all the good lines of the movie), as Vic is something of a hormonal moron and Blood is cultured and appears well-read, with a wry sarcasm that McIntire doesn't overdo. Their scenes together have a tendency to crackle, despite Johnson's only acting against a canine co-star and the vocal component added in post-production.

Ellison's attitude towards it is rather strange, initially saying that it was a good adaptation, but then turning on it as misogynistic (especially for its gut-crunching last line). An odd sentiment from the story's creator as that is all reflected in his yarn in the first place. And yet the author has gone on and produced sequels to the original story without any attempt to disown the political incorrectness of the original. I guess he felt Jones was too blasé about subjects Ellison had second thoughts about. Still, Jones' vision of a post-holocaust nuclear society has stayed relevant for decades.  As the poster says "it's a future you may live to see!"  

And see again in movie after movie.

* Taken from a line from A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad"

** Jones' post-apocalyptic garage-sale look preceded Mad Max by three years, and The Road Warrior, which it resembles by five years.

*** All of these residents are heavily made-up in what I thought at the time was clown make-up, but I realize now is reflective of the look of rosy-cheeked painted-over family portraits. The undergrounders are heavily made-up to compensate for the lack of sun.