Searching for . . . (“The Searchers”)

I admit it: westerns aren’t my favorite genre. And it’s taken me quite a while to like one of John Ford’s most admired westerns, The Searchers. But I could always see why the film was popular. Shot in 1956, it takes full advantage of color cinematography in showing off Ford’s all-time favorite locale, Monument Valley, with its stark red buttes pointing toward the bright blue sky. 

Anyone wanting to know more about The Searchers should seek out my colleague Glenn Frankel’s 2014 book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. Suffice it to say here that this film has had a huge influence on other major filmmakers, including David Lean, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, and George Lucas, who applied some of Ford’s shooting techniques to his Star Wars films. As for me, I returned to The Searchers after many years because it was referenced in a new biography of the actress Vera Miles. Who knew she was credited as the film’s third lead, after John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter?  All I remembered was Natalie Wood as Debbie, the young white woman who’d spent nine long years as a Comanche captive: after all, she was what the search of the title was all about.

Vera Miles, I should explain, plays a major role in what Roger Ebert once called the film’s “silly romantic subplot.” The feisty daughter of settlers, Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen is in love with Martin Pawley, the earnest young man whom Wayne’s Ethan Edwards reluctantly allows to accompany him on his quest for the missing girl. What stands out about Wayne’s character is how thoroughly he detests anything to do with Native American life. His intrinsic racism extends particularly to captive women whom he views as defiled by Indian “bucks.” Given that Wayne is generally seen on film –by Ford and others—in a heroic light, it’s uncomfortable accepting him as a bigot who goes out of his way to be cruel. But there’s a tiny moment at film’s end that shows us a sliver of good will in his character, before he leaves the reunited family to enjoy some happy domesticity and heads out solo into the unknown.

Watching The Searchers again reminded me of how many films are structured around a quest for a missing person, usually a family member. Some examples include Missing (1982), Searching (2018) and what seem like a raft of Liam Neeson flicks, including Taken (2008). But  I was reminded of a very different search in an extremely arty 1999 movie called Three Seasons, the first film shot in Vietnam after President Clinton lifted a longtime embargo. Set in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), it contains several plot lines that explore the changes in Vietnam since the infamous war of the Sixties and Seventies. In one  key subplot, Harvey Keitel plays a former American G.I.  who has returned to the country to find a daughter he’s never seen. 

I saw this film for a funny reason. At a favorite L.A. restaurant I got to know a waitress who was friendly and capable, with a faintly exotic look. It turns out she was Amerasian, and had just been cast as Keitel’s elusive daughter. I watched the film with excitement, waiting for Lola to come on screen. And at long last she did. At the very end of the film, we saw—through a window—the two sitting in a cafe, deep in conversation. What did father and daughter talk about? I have no idea. The movie ended there, leaving the viewer outside looking in. 

David Lynch Sings the Blues

I’d never say that the films of David Lynch are favorites of mine. They’re rather too puzzling and too macabre to make me want to watch them more than once. Still, Lynch’s recent death seent me back to the film that cemented his reputation in the film world. So I sat down and watched Blue Velvet, which I hadn’t seen since its release in 1986. 

Lynch shot Blue Velvet after he’d already made a truly bizarre body horror indie (Eraserhead), a screen adaptation of a Broadway costume-drama (The Elephant Man), and a big-budget space opera (Dune). Following the latter serious but doomed effort to crank out a film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, Lynch leapt at the chance to do something more intimate. As his acclaimed TV series, Twin Peaks, would later show, Lynch was fascinated by the hidden corners of small-town America, the dark secrets behind the sunny facades. Blue Velvet begins (to the syrupy tune of the Bobby Vinton pop hit) with glimpses of happy Americana: cheery flowers blooming, an off-duty fireman waving at the locals from his truck, a neat row of clean-cut school kids crossing a street, a middle-aged man watering his lawn. Then suddenly the man collapses to the ground, and we realize that Middle America isn’t all sunbeams and rosebuds. (Ironically, at this early point we’ve already caught a glimpse of the fallen man’s wife, curled up on a comfy couch to watch a TV episode in which somebody is pointing a gun.) 

The hero of the story turns out to be Jeffrey, the son of the injured man. As played by Kyle MacLaughlin (who’d starred as Paul Atreides in Lynch’s version of Dune), Jeffrey’s a handsome and well-meaning fellow, home from college because of his father’s accident. Taking a walk in his neighborhood, he comes across a startling sight: a severed human ear. That’s when he can’t resist doing some sleuthing of his own. It quickly includes his neighbor, a pretty blonde high schooler named Sandy (Laura Dern), who jumps at the chance of playing Nancy Drew. 

What they discover is a side of Lumberton, their cozy home town, that they hadn’t anticipated. There’s a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) with a masochistic streak, a psychopathic drug dealer (Dennis Hopper) with rape on his mind, and a weirdly effeminate creep (Dean Stockwell) who’s into karaoke. And, of course, a guy with a missing ear. The clean-cut Jeffrey can’t resist getting mixed up in all of this, acknowledging with fascination that “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.”

The curious thing about Blue Velvet is that, despite a good deal of grotesque violence, the movie ends on an upbeat note. Jeffrey and Sandy are a happy couple, Dad is well again, flowers are blooming against a bright blue sky. It’s as though none of the ugliness we’ve just seen has ever happened. Still: those flowers look suspiciously phony, as does the chirping bird (a callback to Sandy’s earlier romantic dream of happiness) that perches outside the window of the family kitchen. And look! Isn’t that a worm in its beak? 

Blue Velvet will never be in my personal pantheon of truly great movies. I’ve liked other Lynch films better because I’ve found their characters more appealing: see, particularly, Wild at Heart (which stars Dern again, with Nicolas Cage). And the conundrums in later Lynch films like Mulholland Drive seem more worth figuring out. Still, Blue Velvet paved the way for the rest of Lynch’s important career. And it’s fun to see Isabella Rossellini wearing something other than a nun’s habit. 

 

Good and Evil in the Films of Gene Hackman

Once upon a time, I felt the big mystery involving Gene Hackman was exactly why he got fired in 1967 from the plum role of Mr. Robinson, spouse of the notorious middle-aged housewife who beds young Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. When I  researched the film for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, I put this question to producer Larry Turman. He had no good answer for me, saying only that this was a choice made by director Mike Nichols. The firing hardly hurt the finished film: Murray Hamilton was unforgettable in the role. And Hackman recouped by playing Buck Barrow in the same year’s Bonnie and Clyde, landing himself an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

Today, of course, there’s a much sadder mystery to ponder:  what killed the 96-year-old retired actor, his decades-younger wife, and one of their three dogs inside their Santa Fe home? A report last Friday concludes Hackman died from a combination of Alzheimer’s and heart disease, following his wife’s very sudden death from Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome. (No word yet about what killed the dog.) All we fans can do now is remember Hackman in his prime, as an actor’s actor. Though he was never a handsome leading-man type, he carried his films with an artistry and power few can match.  

I’ve hardly watched all of Hackman’s 70-plus screen roles, but I’ve deeply admired his performances in films like The French Connection (for which he won his first Oscar) and The Conversation. Though he was most recognized for his work in dramas, I enjoyed seeing his comedic side emerge in projects like The Birdcage (in which he played a conservative U.S. Senator who discovers his daughter’s about to marry the son of a flamboyant gay couple). The sight of the straitlaced Senator Keeley dodging the press by dressing in drag and dancing to “We are Family” is matched in hilarity only by Hackman’s goofy scene as the cheery blind man in Young Frankenstein. 

Still, it was in serious dramas that Hackman found his permanent niche.  In his memory, I’ve just (re)watched two of them, 1988’s Mississippi Burning and 1992’s Unforgiven, the Oscar Best Picture recipient that won Hackman his second Oscar. Seeing them back to back, and remembering Hackman’s other celebrated roles, I came to an interesting conclusion. In Mississippi Burning, which chronicles the 1964 search for three missing civil rights activists in the American South, Hackman is on the side of the good guys. Though a former Mississippi sheriff, he now works for the FBI, assisting the by-the-book agent played by Willem Dafoe in tracking down the killers of the three young men. Certainly we can admire his values (as well as his gentleness toward the young woman married to a local deputy with clear Klan connections), but he can also be infuriating. He’s first seen cheerfully belting out a KKK theme song, and he’s prone to telling jokes that might certainly be offensive in this context. Moreover, his strategies for catching the perps are not entirely ethical (though they do work). In other words, he’s a good guy we’re not sure we like very much.

In Unforgiven, he’s again a lawman, this time in a small Texas town, circa 1880. He claims to have banned firearms, but Big Whiskey is rife with crime and violence, and he’s ultimately taken down (by star Clint Eastwood) late in the game. Still, he’s a fascinatingly genial guy, and we almost agree with his final insistence that he doesn’t deserve what he gets. Gene Hackman’s good bad-guys and bad good-guys will long stay with me. Hail and farewell. 

 

Losing It At the Movies: Memories of Local Movie Houses

Sean Baker, the newly minted king of the movie world, has publicly pleaded with studios and moviegoers to support local cinemas. This is a subject about which I too feel passionate. And so does my new friend Kendra Nordin Beato, a staff writer at the venerable Christian Science Monitor. Here’s a link to her recent—and fascinating—CSM article, titled ‘I didn’t know I needed it.’ Why neighborhoods rally to save movie houses.’ And here’s a companion link to a CSM audio featurette, A documentarian’s take on the magic of moviegoing, about a filmmaker currently chronicling the movement to preserve neighborhood theatres. 

Growing up in L.A., I was surrounded by a wealth of movie houses. Beyond exotic palaces like Grauman’s Chinese and the Egyptian, both glamorous venues on Hollywood Blvd., there were friendly local spots like the Picwood (where Pico met Westwood Blvd.) and the Picfair (yup, at Pico and Fairfax). Also the Stadium (now a synagogue), where generations of kids hung out at Saturday matinees. And Santa Monica’s own Aero, which during World War II played movies ‘round the clock, to accommodate shift workers at nearby aircraft plants. All of these were stand-alone theatres, usually featuring double-bills along with the occasional newsreel and a batch of cartoons.  (Joe Dante’s great little 1993 film, Matinee, captures what it was like for young movie-goers in 1962, though he also interpolates the Cuban Missile Crisis.) 

But the times they were a-changin’, and the stand-alones were either leveled or replaced by multiplexes. You picked one film from a menu of several of the latest releases . . .  and when it was over, you couldn’t hang around to watch it again. And forget about having a choice of seating in advance. 

Here are a few of my most vivid movie house memories: 

(1) The Graduate (1967) – Part of the thrill of this legendary romantic comedy was rooting for Benjamin and Elaine in their flight from the domination of their parents. Closely studying this film years later for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, I realized that the charm of the ending came from seeing young people openly defying the will of the previous generation. Movie theatres rocked with the cheers of young cinephiles. It wasn’t until years later, watching on our couches at home, that we all started to wonder: where will this newly-minted couple go from here? 

 (2) A Clockwork Orange (1971) – I remember seeing this bold Stanley Kubrick translation of the Anthony Burgess novel at the storied Grauman’s Chinese. The house was packed. When the cruel, sadistic rape scene (performed to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain”) came on screen, all the men in the theatre seemed to erupt with gleeful laughter. Never have I ever felt so female . . . or so vulnerable. 

(3) Rocky (1978) – I’m hardly a fan of prizefighting. Still, I was all in for Rocky Balboa in his climactic fight against the champ, Apollo Creed. Watching this is a medium-sized house in the San Fernando Valley, I truly felt I was ringside for the fight of the century. Everyone in every seat felt the same way: we were all wonderfully united in cheering on the underdog in his bout against the pro. 

Then, as a young film critic, I watched Teshigahara’s 1964 Japanese masterpiece, Woman in the Dunes, completely alone in a large revival house. It’s a film about isolation—and I felt it in every fiber of my being. 

Kudos to Hollywood’s Quentin Tarantino, Jason Reitman, and others who’ve taken on the mission to preserve some legendary local theatres, like the UCLA-adjacent Village.  

 

And the Oscar Goes To . . .

The Oscar awards broadcast last Sunday night was fascinating, infuriating, and a bit dull—in other words, it was not much different from the shows of the recent past. New host Conan O’Brien added a bit of impish charm to the event: blessedly, he had a few effective political zingers, like the one praising ultimate top winner Anora for taking down powerful Russian oligarchs in a way that our political leaders recently failed to do. There were also splashy musical numbers, some of which were relevant (Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande encoring the big song from Wicked) and some which were decidedly not. Why the show felt the need for a musical salute to the James Bond franchise, featuring Margaret Qualley in a sexy dance number and then three (count ‘em) pop singers belting out Bond theme songs, I can’t begin to guess.

Mostly, the results of the Oscar balloting left me happy. It was great to hear Anora’s Sean Baker (who won a record-breaking 4 Oscars—for writing, editing, directing, and producing a single film) champion independent filmmaking as well as the importance of supporting neighborhood movie houses. 

Speaking of which, I’m newly back from New York City, where I visited the kind of local movie house that would warm Baker’s heart. Nitehawk Cinema, a stone’s throw from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, specializes in indies, oldies, and oddities. A pre-show curtain-raiser is a fascinating compilation of old movie trailers and offbeat interviews, and you can order a nosh or a cocktail at your seat. My evening at the Nitehawk allowed me to watch the entire list of Oscar-nominated live action shorts. 

As always, in the short-film categories, most of the 2025 nominees were from faraway places. All of them under 30 minutes in length, they came from such faraway places as India, Croatia, and South Africa. My companion and I wholly agreed on the likely winner, but it turned out we were far off-base. Here’s the rundown:

“The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent,” from Croatia, is a very brief (13 minutes) and disturbing tale of a man removed from a train, at a time of political repression apparently connected to the Chechen War early in this century. The L.A. Times reviewer deeply admired this film, but we felt it was too cryptic to sustain our interest.

“Anuja,” officially American but shot in India (Mindy Kaling was a producer), deals with a smart-as-a-whip street child who must make a difficult choice about her future. Definitely likable, but (to my mind) clearly in need of more time and more money in order to carry the story to its logical conclusion. I’d love to see this as a feature-length film. One fascinating note: the child who starred in the movie is an actual street kid reliving a version of her own life story. 

“I Am Not a Robot”—from Holland, a highly original concept, and one that—at least at the start—allows for some welcome humor. Alas, toward the end it bogs down in sentimentality. 

“A Lien” (U.S.) – the title is weird, but this story of a husband and father unexpectedly being picked up at a citizenship hearing and targeted for deportation struck me as powerful and extremely pertinent. I had this pegged as a winner.

“The Last Ranger” (South Africa) – a deftly told tale of rhino poachers, and my second favorite.

The winner? “I Am Not a Robot.” The question is—did voters genuinely like this best, or did they go for a great title, without really assessing the quality of the film? Did they actually  watch these films at all? 

 

No Small Parts: J. K. Simmons in “Break Point”

Though I’m hardly a tennis player, I’ve been wanting to see the much-applauded tennis movie, Challengers. The world in which it’s set reminds me of how many great movies of the past have included tennis in at last one key scene. Just think of the mesmerizing tennis tournament scene in Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train. (The action is on the court, but the audience should be paying attention to a spectator sitting quietly in the stands.) Tennis shows up in movies as different as Annie Hall (Alvy and Annie first meet on a tennis court) and Gigi (Leslie Caron’s girlish character, who cavorts all over the court, stands in joyous contrast to the stiff demoiselles who can’t be bothered to move at all). In Pat and Mike, Katharine Hepburn’s character famously melts down while playing against real-life tennis celebrity Gussie Moran. The recent King Richard is, of course, all about the father who raised tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

The 2014 film Break Point (not to be confused with the 2015 surfing flick Point Break) is an amiable comedy in which tennis takes center stage. It’s written by and stars Jeremy Sisto as a slovenly tennis pro who’s forced to team up with his estranged brother, a wholesome substitute teacher, in order to win a berth in a major tournament. There’s lots of tennis action, but this is more of a human-interest story in which two siblings accept each other’s different choices and a lonely kid finds a substitute family. 

Part of why Break Point is worth watching is the presence of J.K. Simmons, who plays the gruff but loving father of the two tennis-playing brothers. He’s his sons’ biggest fan, always front-row center at their matches. To be honest, I’d never heard of Simmons until 2014. He started making movies back in 1994, and I’m sure I spotted his bald head and his low-register voice in big films like Juno, Up in the Air, and Burn After Reading. He’s pretty well disguised with hair and mustache as J. Jonah Jameson in several Spiderman flicks, which gives me an excuse not to have recognized him there. But in any case he didn’t come into focus for me until the year that Point Break was made. That’s became 2014 was also when Damien Chazelle released Whiplash, in which—playing the leader of a college jazz ensemble—Simmons demands perfection to the point where he’s downright maniacal. The role of Terence Fletcher was Simmon’s first big chance for a truly bravura performance, and he hardly wastes it. The role landed him major critical acclaim, and other more showy roles, like that of William Frawley (the original Fred Mertz) in Being the Ricardos. Still, a guy’s got to eat, and Simmons’ filmography is filled with roles in forgettable films like The Tomorrow War and Ride the Eagle It’s not unusual for him to release six films in a single year. And he also keeps busy using that wonderful basso voice of his in videogames and animated features. He also sings, and has appeared on Broadway as Benny Southstreet in Guys and Dolls

Like J.K. Simmons, there are hundreds of characters actors who’ve long been the backbone of the movie industry. Their names aren’t always familiar to us, but we know their faces and appreciate their reliable professionalism. I interviewed Robert Forster when Whiplash won Simmons an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Forster, an Oscar nominee himself for Jackie Brown, was thrilled for his colleague, a real pro who had truly paid his dues in the motion picture industry.  

 

The Winterly Beauty of “Small Things Like These”

So this year’s Oscar ceremony is almost here. Meanwhile I want to write about  a movie totally absent from the list of nominees, though its star—who’s also one of its producers—won last year’s Best Actor Oscar for playing the title role in Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy, born and raised in Ireland, had fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a tiny but powerful 2021 Irish novella known as the shortest work to ever become a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize. It was he who assembled a production team that includes Matt Damon. 

The resulting film, now on Prime, is acutely sensitive to Keegan’s themes as well as her taut use of language. It’s a small story, as befits a book barely100 pages long. But its concerns are large, because it takes on the horrors of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, in which—until as recently as 1996—Catholic nuns welcomed unwed mothers into their convents, only to exploit their labor and steal their babies. (Contraception was then illegal in Ireland, and the power of the Church was such that no one spoke out for decades about the abuses occurring in their towns.)  

The horrors of the system have been covered in other dramatic films and documentaries. Part of what makes Keegan’s work, and the film it inspired, unique is that the focus is on a man—a middle-aged dealer in gas and coal, circa 1985—whose working-class life is upended when he comes in contact with a victim of the nuns’ double-edged hospitality. Bill Furlong (played, of course by Murphy) has made a comfortable if not a posh, living for himself and his family, which includes a hard-working wife and five school-age daughters. His girls, all of them promising and well-loved, attend St. Margaret’s, “the only good school for girls” in the vicinity, and so it’s vital that he remain on excellent terms with the Mother Superior (a frosty Emily Watson) of the convent next door. All the locals have a sense of what’s going on behind the convent walls, but (as Bill’s wife Eileen tartly reminds him), “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore.”

But Bill, a man prone to introspection, sees in the plight of pregnant young women’s the situation of his own mother. Pregnant with Bill at 16, she was graciously accepted by the local wealthy Protestant widow as domestic help, rather than being treated as a “fallen woman” and sent to labor for the nuns.  And though his mother suddenly died young, the kindly and childless Mrs. Wilson raised Bill in comfortable surroundings, then helped him to find education, a wife, and a business of his own. Now he relishes his role as pater familias, but there comes a time when he finds himself forced to make a difficult but thrilling choice. 

The story takes place at Christmastime, and the cold, damp weather seeps into the film. This makes it all the more stunning when the Mother Superior invites Bill into her cozy study with its blazing fire. The imagery of the novel—its use of crows, for instance, as an ominous symbol of the nuns’ power—is faithfully preserved on screen, and of course the soundtrack is filled with Christmas carols that ironically remind us of comfort and joy. I’m  only sorry that the mystery of Bill’s paternity, sustained throughout the novel, is pretty well answered in the film version, in a way that invites its own questions. 

Not everyone will like this film, but its harsh beauty shines bright in the winterly darkness.