Witless or Profound In The Old West: "Welcome To Hard Times"

Welcome To Hard Times (1967)
Directed by Burt Kennedy
Starring Henry Fonda, Janis Rule, Kenan Wynn, Aldo Ray, Warren Oates

With my lazy, no-working afternoons I've been watching more movies lately. Saw a depressing 1967 Western yesterday based on a short story by E.L. Doctorow, who used to be one of my favorite authors in the 80s (Billy Bathgate, Loon Lake, Ragtime). It's called Welcome To Hard Times with Henry Fonda.

 This was one of those stories where I was like, ???? There is a rickety little one-horse, nothing town on the plains in the Old West with one saloon, one store, and one cemetery. Fonda plays Blue, the reluctant mayor who had kicked around the country doing this and that until he decided to settle there. The town is in the valley below a busy mine, and the miners stream down the mountain on weekends to drink, carouse, and dally with the handful of hookers. 

But then Aldo Ray, "The Man From Bodie," shows up out of the plains, and he's just a wordless, murderous hellraiser who guzzles whiskey as the saloon keeper (Lon Chaney Jr.) just tries to jolly him up.  This man is so crazy violent that he has no patience for corks and such, he just smashes the tops of the bottles to pour alcohol into his maw. He then assaults, tortures and kills one of the girls, smashes up the saloon, beats and shoots people for fun. For no reason. 

When the townspeople go to Blue, a lawyer by training, and beg him to do something, he's unmoved, like: I ain't the law, I'm not trying to catch a bullet, what am I supposed to do? I'm watching this, stunned, thinking: Shoot the MF between the eyes! But no one does it, no one can stop him. One of the town's founders, a widower named Fee, tries to fight him, but gets his neck broken. The undertaker drives up in his rig, and seeing that the man has commandeered his horse, tries to reason with him and is shot down in cold blood. At this point, Blue and the rest are all standing around while this one-man disaster decimates their town -- and that's how this man 's actions are regarded, as some kind of natural disaster that they are powerless to do anything about. 

Reluctantly, Blue tries to use saloon girl Molly as a distraction so he can shoot the dude, but he's too slow because he's conflicted about violence.  The stranger assaults Molly then sets fire to the few buildings on the main strip. The town is in cinders and smoke, one of the town's founders is killed, the undertaker's funeral wagon set adrift on the open plains by terrified horses, and poor Molly, we have to assume she took a beating or worse, and is found burned but alive, face down in the street. The crazy man rides away on a stolen horse laughing. 

Blue decides to stay on with Molly and the newly fatherless boy Jimmy while the rest admit the town of Hard Times is over and leave. Then Zar (Keenan Wynn) shows up on a wagon with a tent, liquor, and some goodtime girls, looking to drive up to the mine. Blue explains that the wagon would never make it up the mountainside and convinces him to stay in Hard Times and help rebuild the saloon and other parts of the town. Soon the storekeeper's brother arrives, unaware that his sibling has exited the scene, and Blue convinces him to stay and open the store again. A drifter, Warren Oates, shows up in the undertaker's found wagon and stays.

Blue tells the newcomers that Molly is his wife so she can live with him and heal, and not get put to work in the saloon. Except Molly is bitter, wants to leave, is convinced the Man From Bodie is going to return, and calls Blue a coward and not a real man every chance she gets. I'm like, Damn Girl! Give It A Rest! She's like, Do you have any idea what that horrible man did to me? We can only imagine. She doesn't understand Blue, even as she is falling for him. She and Blue then get into a battle for young Jimmy's soul: Molly pushing him to "be a man" and become a gunslinging trigger-happy revenge seeker (it was his pa who was killed), while Blue wants him to become educated, analytical, forgiving and well-grounded. This, I assume, is the crux of the film's message, which is, Does revenge ever achieve justice? How can peace ever be achieved when folks are so embittered that they continue to retaliate for the wrongs done to them? When does "turn the other cheek" become the guiding principle in a lawless world? 

With many of the buildings rebuilt, the fun-seeking miners and the stagecoach come through as usual and for a while, things are popping again in Hard Times. Relationships are cemented. Despite Molly's bitterness, she, Jimmy and Blue have formed a nuclear family. The new tent saloon does well. But then the seasons turn and the townspeople suffer through a hard winter. The mine closes temporarily, threatening all their livelihoods. And then, as soon as things warm up, The Man From Bodie shows up again, terrorizing the town just as he did before. 

Evil Man From Bodie

I couldn't believe my eyes, like the minute he rode into town they should have had Warren Oates, who was supposed to be the new sheriff not to mention a sharpshooter, gun the guy down before he even got off his horse. But they didn't. They let him drink a gallon of liquor, rough up and kill one of the new girls, and burn down the saloon -- AGAIN. When Oates finally goes into action, he mistakenly kills Keenan Wynn, blecch. 

Finally, finally, when The Man From Bodie runs out of bullet, Blue is able to shoot him down. And to shut Molly up, he hauls the dying maniac over to his house and throws him on the table. But then the Maniac opens his eyes, Molly goes for the knife but Maniac grabs her. Young Jimmy blasts him dead with a shotgun but of course catches Molly right in the gut with some buckshot. She's done for. Oh well, hookers always pay for their sins in the movies.  Besides, she was never going to be happy with Blue because of her belief that those sins from her past mark her as no good for love. Oh the irony. Still, the film ends on a semi-promising note, with Blue and young Jimmy surveying what's left of the town from the cemetery hill and imagining a new future. 

This flick was a complete downer and headscratcher. The immediate relief that The Man From Bodie is gone is tempered -- at least in my mind -- by the miserable deaths of all these folks, and the fact that Blue noted mid-picture that the barren lawless landscape of the West seems to breed up these types of violent characters. So there's the specter of another Man From Bodie, or Man From Somewhere, showing up to burn it all down in the future.  It's Sisyphean, an endless purgatory of building up the town only to see it decimated, over and over. 

The film tries to end on an upbeat note, but it's a Pyrrhic victory (what's with me and the Greek references today?).  Seems that many have to die in this atmosphere so just a few can live.  But at what cost?  And yet, doesn't every town and everybody face Hard Times? 

Three Years On: Classic Jazz In "Soul" and "Sylvie's Love"

I had written brief reviews of these two films from 2020, then promptly forgot about them. Though they are in two different genres -- an animated comedy and an old-fashioned romance -- they both use music, specifically jazz, as an essential part of the life of the characters. And two years on, they are both worth watching. 

1. Soul (2020)
Directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers
With the voices of Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Phylicia Rashad, and others

I am generally fond of animated movies, and this one is special for a number of reasons. It's the first Disney animated movie to feature a modern-day African American man as the main protagonist. It's a story that centers on the value of an African American music genre, jazz, and shows in detail what it is to perform it and how transforming it can be for listeners and creators. It posits an African American woman instrumentalist as the leader of her own jazz band. It shows specific aspects of African American life, such as the role of the barbershop, and makes New York City look both realistic and magical. Its  deeper story is an examination of what gives us human beings, regardless of race, our unique personalities and special spark to live to the fullest the life that is gifted to us. 

The film is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, and the voice characterizations by Jamie Foxx as a middle-aged, middle school music teacher and Tina Fey as a disaffected and stubborn new soul resisting being sent to Earth are wonderful. Through their tandem journey to reclaim Joe's life -- cut short by a freak accident -- they both come to gain a powerful appreciation for what it is to exist. 

The Pixar animation is stunningly detailed in the Earth-set sequences, especially the work showing Joe's piano playing. It calls to mind the work done on The Secret Life Of Pets, where city life is charmingly delineated. The studio consulted with several musicians, including Grammy winners Terri Lyne Carrington and Herbie Hancock, and photographed pianist Jon Batiste, who also contributed music, to get the images just right. The film also employs alternate animation styles incorporating line drawings and amorphous shapes and colors to depict the alternative plane where souls are launched and recycled. 

It's a delightful, refreshing, and thought-provoking film worth checking out over and over again. 

2. Sylvie's Love (2020)
Written, directed and produced by Eugene Ashe
Starring Tessa Thompson, Nnamdi Asomugha, Ryan Michelle Bathe, Regé-Jean Page, Aja Naomi King, and Eva Longoria 

A gentle but affecting story of Black romance in 1960s New York City, this stars Tessa Thompson as music-loving Sylvie, the daughter of a record shop owner and a prominent black etiquette school operator, much like Harlem's trailblazing Ophelia DeVore. Engaged to a soldier fighting overseas in the Korean war, Sylvie is biding her time by watching "I Love Lucy" and helping her father sell records when she meets saxophone player Robert, played by football player turned thespian Nnamdi Asomugha, who also produced. 

Sylvie slowly falls for the talented and sexy Robert, who her father has hired to help in the record shop, and despite her engagement to the upstanding, well-connected Lacy, Sylvie gets swept into a romance through a series of dates: picnics in the park, time spent on "tar beach" on the roof with her cousin, and dancing in the jazz clubs Robert frequents. THe film is set in 1960s America, and the audience is aware that prejudice still exists, but Sylvie is able to pursue a career in television production. Once again, jazz is treated as an essential and pivotal art form and a path to success for Robert, whose band is offered a rare opportunity to play an extended gig with his band in Paris. 

This type of melodramatic romance -- a love that nearly doesn't happen, blazes into passion, is lost, then found -- has the familiar tropes of classic tearjerking Douglas Sirk films of the 1950s like All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession, where social class and family expectations separate the lovers. Though tempted, Sylvie decides not to accompany Robert to Paris, thus seemingly dooming their relationship. But Sylvie has a secret and makes the choice so as not to tie him down and stall what looks to be a promising musical career. 

This plot turn also put me in mind of two French-set musicals of the early 1960s: Fanny, starring Leslie Caron, and the French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve. In both films, a youthful and passionate romance ends with the young man going off on a compelling mission, and the young woman left to raise the child the man didn't know they had.  But unlike those classics, Sylvie's Love gives its heroine a chance to reclaim both her love and a sense of agency in her career. 

My friend, jazz artist manager Karen Kennedy put it: "In Sylvie's Love we finally have a Black film that is delightfully mundane - no histrionics, no fights, no maids or slaves. No black children saved/rescued/adopted/elevated by white women or white coaches. No prison story, no ghetto escape, no gang violence, no token Black intellectual, no surprise appearance by the 'articulate and bright' guy. Just straight up excellence with  narrative, casting, acting, producing, composing, filming. styling, editing, makeup. Tessa Thompson & #nnamdiasomugha are a slice of real. I feel seen and heard, I feel good. I feel normal." 

When a jazz professional heaps praise on a jazz-related story, you have to give it props.