Olde Review: Rooster Cogburn

This was part of a series of reviews I did back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts. 

Written October, 27, 1975

Rooster Cogburn (Stuart Millar, 1975) Stopped by the Renton* to see Stuart Millar's Rooster Cogburn. It was...pleasant. Not particularly exciting, but...pleasant. When I think of all the possibilities of a script involving John Wayne building on an earlier role and Katherine Hepburn....

I can even think of the possibilities of direction within the limitations imposed by the script....

Well, anyway, with the talent showcased there, let's just say the glass could have been cleaned a little better. The "Rooster Cogburn" character is described as "having gone to seed." I must agree. Cogburn is but a shadow of the characterization Wayne created in 1969, and as if to off-set it, Wayne overplays it, especially in the opening sequences, but his efforts come out looking like amateurish mugging.

Hepburn fares much better in her role but then why shouldn't she? She played the same type of character in The African Queen. The action sequences lack the punch that a more seasoned director like Howard Hawks or Henry Hathaway might've delivered. For example, the shoot-out at the Goodnight mission where a number of Indians and Eula Goodnight's father are murdered by a gang of desperadoes--the scene should have been frightening, a horrible thing to watch, as it must have been to the Hepburn character.. But after a well-used slow zoom into the growing commotion, Millar shows us the massacre from high overhead at least 30 feet away, showing all the action encompassed in the frame, keeping us at a safe and unparticipatory distance.

Another sequence that had great had great potential was the character "Breed's" (Anthony Zerbe) showdown with Hawk (Richard Jordan), as he is exposed for being a traitor to him. After a very lengthy series of shots between the two characters as Breed hesitates in handing over his gun, Hawk kicks him and he slides down the slope. Then, there's a shot of Breed's hat sliding down the slope (nice try, but it just doesn't work, symbolically or otherwise), and ALL OF A SUDDEN ** there is a shot of Breed falling over a cliff (I remember thinking to myself "Was there a cliff there?" Yes, but we didn't know that until the character fell off it!) There was no suspense in this scene, but there certainly would have been if Millar had told us, somehow, that there was a cliff behind him. We would have been able to think ahead even further than we had when "Hawk" asked to see "Breed's" gun. We would have seen what was coming and squirmed a bit for the character. This way, nothing. A momentary shock and it's over.***

Rooster Cogburn is full of missed chances like this, and it really is too bad.

It really was (and is). I remember reading about the trials and tribulations director Millar had with his iconic, and feisty and flinty stars out on location in Oregon, and how they'd do a scene, and not do a re-take if they thought it was good. Wayne wasn't in the best of health, but felt he had to do his own horse-riding in front of Hepburn--the male-pride thing. And though Wayne and Hepburn got along like a house afire—Hepburn told her pal Peter O'Toole that where he was a willow, Wayne was a great oak—it was just an unpleasant shoot. And Millar was more of a producer than a director. He was 44 when he directed Rooster Cogburn but his "legacy" stars treated him like a snot-nosed kid.

It is too bad. This is the only movie that Wayne and Hepburn did together—at this point in her career, she was starting to go the rounds of veteran actors with whom she hadn't sparred before, like Henry Fonda, Laurence Olivier...and Wayne—and it would have been nice to have a good, decent script instead of this hashed-together combination of The African Queen and warmed-over True Grit (written by "Martin Julien", but actually actress Martha Hyer, the wife of producer Hal Wallis, and though she was an arresting and competent actress, as an author-by-nepotism, she was basically "copy and paste"). And whatever talents director Millar had, he didn't know how to gather enough material to make a film that could be cut together smoothly, or build anything approaching dramatic tension. John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel were directors who could shoot economically having already edited the movie in their head before filming, but Millar—if he had a plan—was undercut by what he could accomplish on location.

Sometimes projects are brought together on a whim and star-power but without the good foundation of a solid script or a director who could find gold in a coal-mine, it'd be like building a cardboard house on the sea-shore. The whole thing collapses before there's any equity. It usually happens when a screen-couple are re-united after a big hit. Anybody remember John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John's second pairing after Grease? Yeah, me, neither.****

Still, when they're together on-screen Hepburn and Wayne take the creases and mugging out of their performances and produce something that feels like grace. But, it is far from either of their best work. Wayne is gentlemanly in her presence and Hepburn rather school-girlish. I don't know if either of those serve the characters very well, and one appreciates such things in small doses when the characters should be more sand than sugar. Impressed with the amount of the stunt work they did on the Rogue and Deschutes Rivers, though.

Wayne regrouped with a brilliant performance in his last film The Shootist, and Hepburn remained iconic even to her last film 19 years after this one.

* The Renton Cinema, demolished in the 80's, is now the AMC Renton Village 8. Same location, though.

** Emphasis, mine.

*** This is the basic "Hitchcock Rule:" A scene is much more exciting if you give the audience more information. If a bomb goes off on a train *BOOM* it's over, a little disorientation and shock and it's done. But tell the audience there's a bomb..show them where it is and what time's it's going to go off...and show all the people who might see it but don't, with the clock ticking down and you have a long period of suspense where people know the situation and are helpless to do anything about it. It's a much more effective scene.

**** Okay, I lied. Two of a Kind.

The Dead Zone (1983)

The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983)  Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" was written as a defense of assassination as a preventive measure for disaster (No, really...what if you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a child?*). What if you had the power of foreknowledge and did nothing to prevent something catastrophic?

It may be, indeed, a sin to kill, but the Catholic Curch also warns of sins of omission—NOT doing something that might prevent the suffering of others (and for a historical example that hits you right in the Vatican, hello there, Pope Pius XII!!).

The extraordinary circumstances of a psychic being able to see the future and acting to prevent it is the stuff of philosophy, morality and science-fiction.** But King, who took horror tropes and turned them on their pointed ears wasn't writing science-fiction. His brand of personal horror turned this cautionary tale into one of tragedy.

Up to that time, David Cronenberg was known for viscerally-filmed Grade-Z horror films with an emphasis on the squishy, but his film of The Dead Zone (one of the early King adaptations after De Palma's Carrie, Kubrick's version of The Shining, and the Tobe Hooper-directed TV version of 'Salem's Lot) was one of the strongest of the bunch. Cronenberg (and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam) took the larky good-nature out of the initial character of Johnny Smith (played in the film by Christopher Walken, but King thought it better suited for Bill Murray) and boiled the story down to essentials. Smith (as anonymous a name as you'd want) goes on a date with Sarah Bracknell (Brooke Adams) and things are going alright—he's fallen in love, in fact—when Fate raises its Huge Hand in the form of a near-fatal traffic accident that puts Johnny into a coma for five years (Cronenberg, perversely, has the collision occur with a milk tanker—as in "no use crying over..."***). Waking up, he finds that life is completely different—Mom's become unhinged, Sarah's up-and-married, he's semi-crippled, even after severe rehabilitation, and he can't find a job as a teacher of English Lit anywhere.

Oh, yes. Then there's "the power." By merely touching another human being, Johnny can see into that person's future, seeing their possible destiny and maybe death. He wants to live a "normal" life, a life of obscurity and happiness, but this "gift" is more of a curse, throwing him into the limelight, giving him responsibilities that he can't want or need. But, a man of conscience, Johnny can't keep his visions to himself—he has to warn people. He can't merely witness, as an innocent by-channeller, he has to act to prevent the tragedies he sees and insert himself between those he touches and their Fates.

A social man, his gift makes him increasingly isolated, trying to hide his abilities, and avoiding people and touching them to keep from seeing those visions. But, as much as he tries to quash his ability to see the future, he is always confronted by it and must come out of his obscurity to prevent them from occurring.

Sounds like classic tragedy to me. With biblical, even apocalyptic echoes.

Cronenberg keeps the tone of the film oppressively heavy (Michael Kamen's score is particularly down-beat) and the Canadian locations have a dull, overcast, obliquely lit feel to them, like every moment is a late afternoon threatening to snow. Smith is a particularly sepulchral figure, Walken's tall frame shrouded by a long black overcoat, hobbling stiff-leggedly with a cane, like a harbinger of doom, his eyes haunted, but Walken's hooded eyes grow wide, when he touches someone or an object they possess, as if grabbing a live electrical wire as he goes into his vision.  Before long, he is perpetually wearing black gloves.

But, on one of his rare excursions out he manages to take the hand of one Gregg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a Senator with eyes towards the presidency, and what he sees is Stillson launching a nuclear attack, ensuring Mutually Assured Destruction, and he becomes obsessed with stopping it. 

Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam does some compression and simplification of the novel that emphasizes coincidence for the sake of a romantically resonant ending, but all in all, it is one of the best of the King screen adaptations (you've got to be careful with King—if you boil down his stories too much and take out too many of his incidents, you can sometimes see that the skeleton of his writing is calcium-deficient). The cast is amazing—Walken, Adams, Lom, but also Tom Skerritt, Anthony Zerbe (playing a strong character for once), Colleen Dewhurst, and the wonderful Jackie Burroughs—and they keep things playing out naturally, with only Sheen veering into a kind of caricature. 

It's one of Cronenberg's tamer, more straightforward early films (relatively, although there's some gut-churning violence), but it's one of his great ones.

Cronenberg gives Smith's visions a perverse power.

Pre-election post-script: early on in the "Trump-How-Low-Can-You-Go-Limbo-to-Electoral-Humiliation," an image showed up on the wires that truly startled me as it was almost a perfect match of the scene where, to prevent himself from being shot by Johnny, Martin Sheen's Stillson shields himself with an infant, the photos of which destroy his campaign and he eventually commits suicide, his ego-driven, rambling, vague-generalities-with-no-substance ambitions having collapsed.

I've been having a private little chuckle about that ever since. Life DOES imitate art.

* It's been years since I've read the book or seen the movie, and I'd forgotten that very question is asked by Smith in both: in the novel to a WWI veteran, and in the movie to his neurologist Dr. Weizack (Herbert Lom). After some serious discussion, Weizack concludes "Yeah, I'd kill the sunovabitch."

** King's next book "11-22-63" is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination.  I'm going to write one called "The Well" about an author who goes back to it one too many times.  (Note: There was a "The Twilight Zone" episode called "Back There"—great score by Jerry Goldsmith, btw—about a man who goes back in time and—unsuccessfully—tries to prevent Lincoln's assassination. It starred Russell Johnson, who, whenever he came into the studio I worked at, I'd make sure that his reading copy had nice big bold type on it as his vision was declining. He appreciated it, and I had a standard exit line for his thanks: "Well, after all, you went back in time to save Lincoln...")

*** In the novel, the accident Johnny is in is caused by drag-racers.