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skmaven
Reviews
The Three Musketeers (1993)
Prequel to "At Sword's Point"
Carping about the lack of fidelity of Disney's The Three Musketeers to Dumas' book or to history misses the point. It's not *our* history. It is (implicitly) set in a parallel world, possibly - no, probably - the same one in which the delightfully silly sword-romp At Sword's Point (1952 ) is set. And this too is a delightfully silly sword-romp, not to be taken seriously in the least.
Almost every time the story is revisited, the character of Athos gets another softening. In the book he murdered (or attempted to murder) his wife out-of-hand, without waiting for her to regain consciousness and try to explain (what an SOB!), and still hates even her memory. The relationship never comes up in Fairbanks Sr's The Three Musketeers, and is barely hinted at in a reaction-shot in The Iron Mask - which still manages to make clear that there's some real bad history there. By the 1948 version, he "merely" repudiated her - and never ceased to love her. In the 1993 version he believed her guilty of murder and turned her over to her enemies, and grieved for her ever after.
I don't have a favorite version of The Three Musketeers - each and every one I have seen is flawed, usually in different ways. But this one makes a nice casual treat, particularly on a double bill followed by At Sword's Point.
The Lord of the Rings (1978)
Storyboard in search of a movie (or three)
I saw this some time after its original release
I think. Since I remembered little or nothing about it, I can't have been too impressed. I recently had a chance to see it again, and I'm even less impressed.
They say Peter S. Beagle wrote the screenplay. If so, somebody took every second or third page of his script and threw the rest away. Some omissions are justifiable (the entire Old Forest/Bombadil/Barrow-Downs sequence, which is interesting in its own right but a major digression from the main storyline). Some aren't - who the heck are Sam, Merry and Pippin, and why do they want to accompany Frodo into the unknown? For that matter, who ARE most of these people/characters and why should we care about them?
Some scenes are included that have no relevance and no payoff - Aragorn narrating the story of Beren and Luthien, which falls flat because we are neither told nor shown that it is an uncomfortable parallel to his own situation. (Instead we get Sam making goo-goo eyes at Frodo, which causes knowledgeable readers to go "WTF?") Some scenes are wretchedly paced and edited - most infamously the Ford of Rivendell sequence, which is excessively repetitive. We really only need to hear the Ringwraiths say "Come back, to Mordor we will take you" ONCE, not THREE times, and the whole chase drags on far too long with far too little interest.
Too much is simply thrown away. We never do get told or shown that the stone "table" in Moria where Gandalf finds the book of the Dwarf colony's tragic fate, is in fact the tomb of Balin. We never really do get to know Treebeard, let alone the other Ents or the Huorns. And not nearly enough is made of the siege ladders at Helm's Deep - they're there, they're used, they're hardly noticeable. They are not focused on long enough to give (especially American) viewers the cold chills that kick in when the connection is made to the Alamo. (Weird that a Kiwi director didn't miss that point, and an American one DID!)
Many reviewers have harped on the characterization of Gandalf and Sam and S/Aruman and others - my personal pet peeve is Bakshi's treatment of Galadriel, who acts more like Glinda the Good, right down to laughingly dismissing what ought by rights to be a genuinely sinister moment. (In the book, she IS strongly tempted - and has a hard time resisting.)
Sooner or later I have to get around to saying something about the visuals. I'd rather not. The film should have been all-traditional or all-experimental, not the jarring mish-mash that it is. The color palette starts out relatively normal, but gets uglier and muddier as the movie rolls on (and the budget gets cut, and cut, and cut again). That's bad enough. But the character designs! It's hard to go wrong with Gandalf - everyone knows what he looks like. Saruman shouldn't be, but is, a carbon copy in red rather than blue (both colors are wrong - Gandalf is "The Grey", Saruman "The White"). Frodo, Merry, and Pippin look way too much alike, and all of them switch wigs between scenes. Sam is a Mr. Potato Head with hairy feet. Boromir - GMAFB! THAT is a representative of an ancient and still strong, if declining, empire? No, no, no, no, NO! He's NOT a refugee from a third-rate Conan sequel! And worst of all, ugly ersatz-Conan Aragorn! GACK! There are three "make or break" roles in any version of the Lord of the Ring. Frodo is one. Gandalf is another. Aragorn is the third. This is a "break".
The one point on which Bakshi's version betters Jackson's is, in fact, Frodo - Bakshi allows him his courage and his overt defiance. (It's understandable why he has to become a special-delivery package in a live-action film - too hard to fake the size difference between a horse and a hobbit - but he could still have been allowed his moment at the Ford.)
On the whole, Bakshi's version is less a movie in itself than a storyboard for an unfinished movie. And, sure enough, about twenty years later someone used the storyboard and improved on it.
The Great Gatsby (1949)
A Very Good Gatsby in a So-so Production
Everything about this movie is a little bit off-kilter...except the lead role. Alan Ladd knew all about Gatsby, on a gut level and from the inside out - because he'd been there. He himself had been raised dirt-poor, struggled for years, and then suddenly and unexpectedly found himself showered with riches and fame that he didn't feel he deserved.
Ladd was a much better actor than he's generally given credit for, and where Redford made heavy going of showing two levels of the character (wealthy, mysterious Jay Gatsby and hardscrabble Jimmy Gatz), Ladd shifted effortlessly through *four* levels. There's Gatsby, the elegant man of mystery; Gatz, the tough-as-nails racketeer (a screenplay development based on mere hints in the book); Jay, the young man bedazzled by his apparently-limitless wealth; and Jimmy, the little poor boy who never dreamed he could have or deserve so much. And you can always tell which of them is looking through the character's eyes at any given moment.
He didn't get the support he deserved - not from the studio, not from the casting department, and not from the director. Paramount "knew" that any Ladd film was a surefire moneymaker, so they cut every corner they could find. (The film did indeed make money...but not as much as they expected.) The director didn't particularly want to make this film, and his too-casual approach really hurts it. Several key roles are significantly "off" (Betty Field as Daisy, Barry Sullivan as Tom - who is far too suave for the character as written by Fitzgerald, even Macdonald Carey as Nick Carraway, though he tries hard). Several supporting roles were reshaped to align them with the studio's attempt to cash in on a new cycle of gangster films - Lupus (i.e., Wolfsheim) and Klipspringer become Jimmy Gatz's henchmen instead of independent operators. (Klipspringer is played by Elisha Cook, Jr., and allowed to know Gatsby better than anyone else and to comment on him both verbally and musically. He steals every scene that he is in that he doesn't share with Ladd.)
One cameo role from the book was extensively built-up for this version (and completely excised from the 1974 remake): Dan Cody, played by Henry Hull, who is given a Mephistophelean makeup and archly pointed lines like "Old Dan is a devil - but old Dan is always right". He does, in fact, act as a kind of Mephistopheles to Jimmy Gatz's Faust, giving him a warped sense of values that ultimately leads to catastrophe.
Shelley Winters absolutely nailed Myrtle (it already verged on typecasting), and Howard Da Silva could hardly be bettered as her squelched husband George, the proverbial "worm that turns".
In one respect, though, the stingy budget allowed for greater authenticity. Daisy and Jordan really do arrive at Nick's place in a pouring rain, as in the book, and Gatsby really does step out under a rain-spout to create the impression that he too had just arrived (instead of waiting inside for hours, as he had been). In 1974 nobody wanted to damage the actors' elaborate confections, so the weather was pushed aside.
This version is overall less faithful to the book than the 1974 version...but captures its spirit much more accurately.
The Path to 9/11 (2006)
"It's Only a Movie"
The big problem is ABC's pretense that "Path to 9/11" is "based on facts". So, in the same sense, was Warner Brothers' extravagant pro-Custer fantasy, "They Died With Their Boots On". The very basic outline is more or less factual (there was a George A. Custer, he was a cavalry commander, his career went sort-of like that, he and the men under him did get waxed at the Little Big Horn, and he was associated with various other historical figures who get some face time). But the treatment is what's way off-base.
Warner Brothers, more or less to their credit, didn't pretend to be doing anything more than making an entertaining movie with the purpose of making money. (They succeeded in meeting those modest goals, by the way.)