QOTD

[randy_byers]

Rancho Notorious (1952)

'Vern’s crusade to track down the rapist and murderer of his love pushes the film (and the usually somewhat milquetoast [Arthur] Kennedy) into unusually dark territory for such a docile-looking product. Vern is a conniving and sinister hero, willing to fake friendliness and even romance to insinuate himself deep into the milieu of outlaws and loose women in order to achieve his ends. This is how he hears of the “Chuck-a-Luck” (Fritz Lang’s own title for the film before Howard Hughes made him change it for something equally nonsensical), the desperado safe-house run by former bordello denizen, La Dietrich. Her character –- the weirdly named Altar Keane -– is a strange, revisionist take on her usual persona, a relocation of Von Sternberg’s mercurial, indefatigable anti-heroine ultra-vixen to a West slightly less Wild than it used to be. Appropriately, Altar is introduced in flashback, conducting a Weimar-style bacchanal in a gold-rush saloon run by William Frawley (Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy; here, he’s “Baldy”, a pimp and casino-king, who tries to screw Altar Keane out of her money). Cultural translation is definitely underway when Dietrich sings in her woozy German monotone the old adultery ballad “Black Jack Davy,” popularized as frontier lore by the Carter Family (among many others). With this first sight of Marlene riding like a jockey on a man’s back in a bout of ecstatic, tawdry whoring, we’re experiencing a kind of compound nostalgia for various bygone eras of Hollywood and Germany and the American Frontier, however fictional these eras might be.'

-- Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Comments

[kdotdammit.livejournal.com]

WOW. That sounds amazing.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I don't know that it's actually amazing, but it's a very strange movie. Lots of people compare it to Johnny Guitar, although I think JG is a far better movie (as do most of the people who compare the two). Still, it's pretty interesting and odd. One of those movies that's hard to categorize. This guy does a pretty good job of pointing out all the unusual connections.

One of the downsides of the movie is that it frequently shows its lack of budget. Lang does some great things with minimalist effects, but sometimes it just looks like a crappy TV show on a two-bit set.