Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Brody Wilder"]<b>WINNER: <i>The Ox-Bow Incident</i></b> When he was 14 years old, actor Henry Fonda witnessed a lynching. "It was the most horrendous sight I’d ever seen . . . We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence. My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope." Fonda would go on to spend his entire career confronting such perversions of justice. He played an innocent man running from the death penalty in Fritz Lang's <i>You Only Live Once</i>, John Brahm's <i>Let Us Live</i>, John Ford's <i>The Fugitive</i>, Alfred Hitchcock's <i>The Wrong Man</i>, and probably more besides. He was the noble outlaw's elder brother Frank in two Jesse James pictures, and the sole holdout on a jury determined to convict in <i>12 Angry Men</i>. In the first great noir western, <i>The Ox-Bow Incident</i>, Fonda played a simple cowpoke who stumbled upon three men about to be hanged for cattle rustling. Far from steering the ship like his civic-minded character in <i>12 Angry Men</i>, here he's reduced to a conscientious objector, a voice of moderation muttering plaintively into the literal and metaphorical darkness. As grim as westerns come, the lean 75-minute running time mercifully keeps things moving to their inexorable conclusion. A beautiful depiction of man at his worst and the perfect counter-programming to this most rah-rah of propaganda years. <b>Army: <i>Sahara</i></b> Switching gears, let's put the fun back in breaking some mother's heart with this action-packed story of a man and his tank, the best World War II movie produced during the war itself. Humphrey Bogart (far from the studio's first choice - they wanted an Aryan ideal like Gary Cooper or Glenn Ford) plays the grimy commander of an M3 Medium named "Lulubelle", lost in the Libyan desert after a retreat. He links up with a multinational rainbow coalition of stranded Allies and leads them to the only watering hole for days. When Rommel's thirsty Afrika Corps comes a-calling, the wiley American sees his chance to hold up an entire battallion with just a handful of men. Ridiculous...ly awesome. (There's a scene near the climax where the black soldier brutally suffocates a white Nazi in hand-to-hand combat, representing the first time American audiences were expected to cheer for such a thing. So that's progress, I guess.) <b>Navy: <i>Destination Tokyo</i></b> With land sorted, what about sea? Well, it looks like everything on the ocean is out to kill Cary Grant, skipper of the submarine sent to deposit a recon team on the fortified island nation of Japan. Minefields, torpedo nets, one crewman's own traitorous appendix organ and more stand between Grant and his titular destination. Do you think he'll make it? Includes an early dramatic role for John Garfield, blacklisted communist and method acting legend. He was sort of the missing link between James Cagney and Marlon Brando, here playing the Cagney role of insubordinate young bowery boy, but doing it in the brooding, taciturn fashion later popularized by Brando. You may not know Garfield, but if you ever watched 1939's <i>Daughters Courageous</i>, you'll remember his pitch-perfect delivery of one particular line: "These peanuts are makin' me thirsty". <b>Army Air Corps: <i>Air Force</i></b> Turning our eyes to the sky, we see an aircrew ferrying their unarmed B-17 bomber from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor. Unluckily for them, they happen to be doing it on the day of the infamous sneak attack. Between the Japanese bombardment and the (entirely fictional) Japanese-American insurgency, they're lucky to escape with their ship in one piece. What follows is an island-hopping tour of Pacific airbases as the crew look everywhere for shelter and the rocks cry out, "No hidin' place". The aerial combat sequences were a significant influence on 1977's <i>Star Wars</i> - the scene in which the Millennium Falcon fends off TIE fighters with its turbolaser turrets being particularly similar. John Garfield is in this one, too, playing much the same character he did in <i>Destination Tokyo</i>. (According to a monologue in <i>Pulp Fiction</i>, he's the airman who flies Butch's grandfather's watch off Wake Island before they're overrun.) <b>Joy Division: <i>The More the Merrier</i></b> All this fighting is bringing me down. Let's take our minds off it with that most escapist of genres, the romantic comedy. Rich old man Charles Coburn arrives in Washington, DC intending to solve the wartime housing crisis. Unable to secure a hotel room, he's forced to rent out half of stridently independent government clerk Jean Arthur's personal apartment. Always the problem-solver, Coburn realizes how empty and unfulfilled the career girl's life must be, and sublets half of his half of the apartment to the sturdiest young buck he can find: Joel McCrae (good job). The remainder of the film is Coburn playing Cupid while Arthur and McCrae weave a sexually frustrated spider's web of misunderstandings and near-misses. The makeout scene on the steps, in which no single kiss could last more than three seconds without violating the production code, might be the hottest thing I've seen in a movie from this era. Make love, not war![/quote]