ERNEST BORGNINE: AN APPRECIATION

Like most kids of my generation, my first exposure to Ernest Borgnine came on the TV show McHale's Navy, one of those comedies in a genre which quickly, during the Vietnam War, lost its appeal (though offbeat variations on the war-is-fun theme survived, like Hogan's Heroes, or F Troop, which could be read as a fantasy of the Vietnam experience, with friendly Indians replacing Viet Cong). But my memory of McHale's is positive, with the interchange between Borgnine's frustrated McHale and Tim Conway's bumbling ensign the key to the comedy. They would reprise their collaboration thirty years later in a Sponge Bob movie.

It wasn't much later, however, that I discovered Marty, one of my mother's favourite movies (I dunno, whadda you wanna do Marty? was one of her catchphrases), and one of Borgnine's best performances. Many years later, living in Belsize Park, I became friendly with Betsy Blair (see this appreciation of her here) and she told me about what a wonderful man Borgnine has been to work with—their chemistry still jumps off the screen in a non-glamorous way that's almost totally gone from movies today.

Then came what I'd call Borgnine's renaissance, the high points being The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969). In the former he more or less set the template for the rest of his career—playing the good-natured sidekick or foil in a big-name, big-budget cast or film. He did it in Ice Station Zebra, in disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure, in Sam Peckinpah's Convoy and many others—often he was the most watchable thing about an otherwise bloated movie. But as Dutch in The Wild Bunch he embues the sidekick with great depth. He provides the moral conscience of the film, seems to relish the nihilism of the Bunch's finish, and also plays subtly with the romantic nature of his partnership with Pike Bishop. It's probably my favourite of all his roles. His embrace of nihilism reflects the quality which made him so memorable: under the surface of affability there lurked an explosion of violence or humour--in his best films you never know which is going to appear, and in Marty the brilliance is that under the surface lurks a great sensitive vulnerability

Although you might also say he defined his screen persona in his first creative golden age, with a series of films around Marty. He was Fatso in From Here To Eternity (1952), in Johnny Guitar and Vera Cruz (the prototype Wild Bunch) both in 1954, along with a brilliant piece of cowardly bullying in Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) which made that year a pretty good one for his performances.

I also liked Borgnine because he was a local hero: born in Hamden, Connecticut and went to Hillhouse High in New Haven, he not only spent ten years in the Navy after high school, but then went to drama school in Hartford! And after a spell in stock in Virginia, landed a role as a nurse in Harvey on Broadway: from Harvey to From Here To Eternity!

He did lots of TV, TV movies, voice-overs: he's a better J Edgar Hoover than Leonardo (though maybe not as good as Broderick Crawford) in the very obscure Hoover. He also played Italians in a couple of sports movies, Vince Lombardi in a 1973 TV movie called Legend In Granite and Angelo Dundee in the 1977 film The Greatest.He was a good actor who could do serious, but never seemed to take himself seriously. And he lived to 95 and seemed to have a great deal of fun—his book tour at age 90-something was a hoot, you can see the you tube clip on Fox if you like hearing naughty words in the morning! And he was married five times, including, back to back, to Katy Jurado and Ethel Merman, which is some sort of Daily Double! The marriage to Merman lasted only 32 days—Borgnine claimed that was due to his being more popular than her, due to McHale's Navy; Merman's chapter on the marriage in her autobiography was a blank page.

There is something about the final shootout of The Wild Bunch which resonates in terms of American myth as well as Peckinpah's violent cinema. And it's Borgnine's presence that stops it from going over the top--he provides both the comic relief and the tragic undertones: Oates does the nihilism, and Holden is doing what Joel McCrea did at the end of Ride The High Country. 'C'mon you lazy bastard' says Pike Bishop, and Dutch does come on, to die.

13 ASSASSINS: A SAMURAI EPIC WITH WESTERN APPEAL

In one sense, Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins is familiar; following in the footsteps of films you've seen (The Seven Samurai and its American remake The Magnificient Seven being the best-known) and films you haven't (Kudo Eiichi's Jusanin No Shikaku—a 1963 film on whose screenplay Miike's film is based, and serves as the Japanese title) and I haven't either. Miike certainly lives up to the spectacle of Seven Samurai; this is a big action movie staged with great flair, an big-screen epic immensely satisfying on that level.

But Miike rises above that in a number of impressive ways. The first third of the film needs to set the stage, and he begins brilliantly with a samurai committing seppuku. It is 1844, and Japan is living in the last days of Edo and the rule of the shoguns. The suicide, is shot with an almost abstract simplicity that recalled, for me, the extreme stylisation of Paul Schrader's Mishima, but more importantly focuses the audience on the ritual, the obligations, on the strict lines of demarcation of Japanese society, and on its concepts of honour. The death is a protest against the abuses of the Shogun's son, Lord Naritsugu, a psychopath and a sadist almost in the sense of DeSade's cod philosophy, but also a spoiled child who abuses the absolute power he has. Naritsugu is played brilliantly by Inagaki Goro, once a boy-band pop star, with a cruel insouciance and a sometimes child-like wonder; he carries almost every scene he's in.

There is nothing that can be done within the system to stop Naritsugu, so officials look beyond, to a seemingly retired samurai, Shinzaemon (Yakisho Koji), who, after being shown Naritsugu's worst atrocities, and understanding the dangers to the current age of peace his being placed on the ruling council would bring, undertakes his assassination, and assembles a team of 12,basically untraceable, samurai to accomplish that. The gathering of the team is familiar stuff, but the 13th assassin is not a samurai, but a hunter they meet as the travel to their objective—Koyata, half hunter, half forest spirit, who provides comic relief but turns out to be quite a fighter himself. Leading Naritsugu's guard is Hanbei, an old rival and colleague of Shinza's going back to their days in the samurai dojo.

The final third of the film is the battle—with an entire village turned into an exploding trap, the finale of a sort of game of go for Shinza and Hanbei, which Hanbei appears to have won when he shows up with some 200 samurai, not the 70 Shinza was expecting. It's a spectacularly well-staged battle, and the amazing thing is that we follow each of the 13 characters to their individual fates, understanding who they are—if you think back to The Magnificent Seven, that is exactly what gave the film its power.

If you also think back to The Magnificent Seven, and how Eli Wallach's bandit becomes such an entertaining foil, you will get an idea of Miike's subtlety, because although Naritsugu is a monster, he is not the battle-foil, that is Hanbei, who is remaining true to the code of the samurai, and loyalty to his master. And this is what gives the film its true power.

Miike wrings every ounce of drama from the ambiguity of the samurai code, and the epic, in another sense, breakdown of society's order that the assassination itself signifies. At one point, as Naritsugu's pleasure in seeing the slaughter around him leads him to yearn for a return to the age of war, you almost think Hanbei will turn against this maniac, a Hitler-cum Genghis Kahn-cum Donald Rumsfeld. But his sense of samurai duty is too strong. And when Hanbei and Shinza stage their ultimate duel, Shinza reminds him they were always equals in the dojo, before 'cheating' his way to victory. What is the virtue in loyalty to the wrong cause? Of blind obedience? At one point Shinza points out that rulers have some responsibility to servants and Naritsugu, who has addressed almost everyone as 'servant', finds this notion somewhat strange and amusing.

In that sense, and in another way, Miike seems drawn to another western model, The Wild Bunch. There is much looking back to the age of war, which some fondness, and there is a lot of living up to the true code of the samurai which reflects the debates about what a man has to live up to in Peckinpah's movie. In one sense you can see that film as Pike Bishop atoning for first abandoning Deke Thornton, who goes to prison as a result, and then abandoning Angel in a similar fashion. They are happy to engage in a massacre, knowing they are likely to die, for the simple pleasure of knowing they will be going out doing what they perceive of as the right thing. That it turns out to be futile for them is not the case in 13 Assassins, but the impulse is the same, and Miike also undercuts that western ethos by having the 13th assassin, the forest-imp Koyata declares, in the end, samurai bore him when they aren't fighting one-on-one.

It's a wonderful combination of traditional samurai epic with modern ambiguity. You might expect the latter from Miike, but there is little in his previous work to suggest either the scale or the control of this film. If the ball has been bouncing back and forth between samurai epics and epic westerns (with the odd spaghetti western thrown in), Miike has put the ball firmly back in the western court.

IT'S HARD FOR ME TO WRITE UNLESS WHAT I'M DOING SCARES ME: THE DENNIS LEHANE INTERVIEW

It wasn't difficult for me to finish Dennis Lehane's new novel, The Given Day, before I got on a plane for Tampa and the Super Bowl, which I was broadcasting for the BBC. What was difficult was carrying it! My main regret was the proof copy was so big I didn't bring it with me; the notes I'd taken had stopped being comprehensive as I got more and more caught up in its many-layered story, eventually I was just jotting down some of the best lines and my admiration of the way he made the structure work. The novel is another quantum leap for a writer who'd already made one such jump, from his Kenzie and Gennaro books to Mystic River; it's an historical novel centered on the Boston police strike of 1919. It's also his first novel in five years, and worth the wait; I'd say it falls somewhere between Mystic River and E.L. Doctorow. It's a risky book too, because Lehane's stock as a 'crime writer' has never been higher, and though the novel is set among the police, and a corrupt police lieutenant is a great villain, worthy of any crime drama, the parameters of the story go far beyond that, to issues of race and class, immigration and melting pots, of unions and management, of government control and government's purpose, and of baseball.

It's a daring move, an epic novel from a writer who's one of the hottest properties in Hollywood, and thus far very well served by the movies. Not only was Mystic River made into a superb film by Clint Eastwood, but Ben Affleck directed brother Casey in a remarkable adaptation of Gone Baby Gone, which seemed to fall lamentably between the cracks when the awards season began. Martin Scorsese is filming Lehane's gothic thriller Shutter Island, a challenge to adapt for the screen, and Lehane himself has scripted for The Wire, the epic TV cop show.

I'd arranged to meet Lehane the day after the game, and that Monday it was pouring down rain in St. Petersburg, so I appreciated the old-fashioned portico protecting the sidewalk on the block of Central where the restaurant Bella Brava, incongruously chic and modern, is located. As it turned out Lehane had been at the game too (he actually met his wife at a Super Bowl party!), so we talked football and Bruce Springsteen's halftime show for a while, and noted how this rain seemed to be washing away all trace of the game from the area. He'd just finished with the annual writer's conference he runs at Eckerd College, where he did his own degree in writing; he doesn't spend much of his time in his native Boston anymore, living most of the year in St. Pete with his wife, who's an opthamologist there, and doing his writing in a downtown office. Lehane looks like a character from one of his Boston books, and sounds like it too, so I ask him about his time as a student at Eckerd, which must have been a big change from Boston.
DL: It got me to switch to decaf, if you will. To calm down. I wrote very minimalist at the time, and you could say I've been working away from that.
It's odd, because The Given Day is such a big book, but with its concerns with race and class, and the way you tell the big picture with smaller personal stories, it reminded me a lot of The Wire.
DL: Well, that all predates The Wire, the issues of class and race. My first novel was about race war standing in for class warfare, and that was the point of the last page of that book, if I can give myself props, cause I wrote it in 1990 (it was published in '94), I thought was the best thing I'd written. But The Wire, what it taught me in the last four years was distillation, and structure in a different way. The novelist's structure is unwieldy, and you don't realise how much so until you try an epic. Without The Wire I might have produced a 900 page book.
When I started reading The Given Day, it seemed familiar; the opening scene recalls The Natural, with Babe Ruth getting off the train, and Don DeLillo opened Underworld with the 1951 playoff. But what you did with it, both as framing, and commentary on the story, was impressive, and the way baseball comes back into the main story too, in just a small but significant way.
DL: Do you know the writer Stewart O'Nan? (Here we digress to discuss, as fellow Boston Red Sox fans, Faithful, a book O'Nan co-wrote with Stephen King about the Sox 2004 World Series win, the win which canceled Ruth's so-called 'Curse of the Bambino', and finally rewarded all us long-suffering followers). He has a concept he calls the 'natural clock container', and for me that was Ruth. My clock was from the 1918 World Series to Ruth's sale to the Yankees, and the police strike was the story contained within that container. It's the kind of thing you rarely see done on TV, because it's hard to follow one big story, there's too much indulgence, it's what stopped Twin Peaks, say, from being as great as it could've been. But the story has to stay true to its spine. I'd write stuff for The Wire that I'd love and at the story meetings they'd say 'that's great, but how does it pay off to the ending?', and they were right.
There's a great sense in The Given Day of things reflecting the past eight years in America, particularly in the way the powers that be, including J Edgar Hoover, invite trouble, as an excuse for repression. That's before John Hoover became J. Edgar, and the Bureau of Investigation became the FBI, and it's a great untold story about repression...
DL: Well, I don't think there's a single human being who's not a dirty bomb in Manhattan away from tromping all over civil liberties...
There's a great line, when James J. Storrow, who's sort of the enlightened upper-class, says of the police chief, Edwin Curtis, 'such men fiddle while cities burn...such men love ash'. Curtis, Hoover, governor Calvin Coolidge: we see their equivalents in government today.
DL: Thanks, I'm glad you liked the line, but there's no pat answer for the 'meaning' of the book. If it was pure good and bad, it wouldn't be interesting...
And the FBI agent Rayme Finch sees it, he says 'people don't want truth they want certainty, or the illusion of it.'
DL: Finch was a real character; he was the first Melvin Purvis, a superstar agent, who overshadowed Hoover. But what he's talking about, that's the human impulse.
It reminded me in a lot of ways of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.
DL: Hammett is so great. I have to go back and read that again. Everyone goes back to Chandler, but Hammett's where it starts.
It's interesting too that, in the end, the only union that saves the characters is the marriage union...
DL: I knew I was writing about unions, about all aspects of the word union. If you look back at my books you'll see I'm playing with one word or concept. But if you have to tell people what the ending means, it means you haven't done your job.
The Given Day is such a departure from your previous work; it's as big a jump from that as Mystic River was from your detective novels.
DL: It's hard for me to write unless what I'm doing scares me on some level, unless it's something I haven't done before. I have to stay as loose as possible, you can't worry about what people want. What you owe your audience is a great performance.
But with your next book you're going to return to Kenzie and Gennaro?
DL: Yes, it's ten years later, and it scares me. Do I still have that looseness? They had an ignorance about them, and I wonder if I can recapture that now that I've flirted with self-importance. But he (Patrick Kenzie) hadn't talked to me for ten years, and then all of a sudden I heard his voice in my head.
Was it Casey Affleck's voice?
DL: No, but it's funny, because Casey wasn't anything like what I'd pictured Patrick, but I can't get him out of my mind. But it worked. Only Ben and Casey knew what they were doing there, well, them and the DP (John Toll, cinematographer) but they could see it. Obviously, Patrick has aged, he's not 32 anymore.
You say 'flirted with self-importance'. I read an interview with you, and you talked about success and how you could've become 'a real dick', and your first marriage blowing up. But it wasn't clear in that interview, was this cause and effect?
DL: No, I had lost my wife and home, and then the book (Mystic River) took off. That's when I could've turned into a prick. But that's when I was able to put things into perspective. I tell my students don't become a writer because you need to self-actualise. Go to a therapist! So many have no idea of who they are, they think if they become successful it will tell them who they are, but it doesn't fill that part. I was secure, but with an incredible ego. What's dangerous is when you have the incredible ego but you're still insecure.
It sounds like a definition of Hollywood.
DL: It's so amazing to meet people there who are secure in themselves. They're talented, but it's their work. Ed Harris was like that, just so impressive. It's funny, because when Ben Affleck was shooting Gone Baby, he was shooting lots of coverage, and everyone was looking at each other saying, he must be be scared. If you shoot a lot of coverage either you're scared, or, if you're someone like Scorsese, you're a genius. Turned out, Ben knew exactly what he was doing.
Scorsese is making Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio. That novel was a real departure for you.
DL: I'd tried to jump on the bus and I felt like I'd be hanging on the side for the rest of my life.The first time I'd met Richard Price, who was a literary idol of mine, he asked what was the goofiest thing I could do, and I said write a gothic novel, and I figured if Richard Price didn't laugh me out of the room, I might as well try.
It seems a hard book to adapt for the movies
DL: Well, the script is terrific, and Scorsese's directing. With all that in play, it's all down to alchemy (laughs).
In your early books, and in both the first films, child abuse is a major theme.
DL: I worked with abused kids, as a counselor, and I had to stop. It was an obsession of my early writing, but it's tough, there's a fine line between calling attention to it, and exploiting the issue for entertainment. But coming up in the 80s, in writing workshops, the hardest thing to justify was the killing of a child, or writing about the holocaust. It was like you skipped twenty steps for empathy. It was like when I saw an ad for The Boy In Striped Pajamas. Children and the Holcaust, I said 'enough!'. But seriously, I sealed it for myself with Mystic River, and I don't have to go back there again.
We discussed films for a while, how The Wrestler revisited great 70s movies like Fat City or The Scarecrow. I was looking forward to seeing Gran Torino that night, and we talked Clint Eastwood, and eventually whether the shot of the little boy looking out the back seat of the car was a shot too much in Mystic River; a habit I'd suggested in my book about Clint that he had, when he wanted to make sure he hooked the audience. And finally we got down to the greatest line of dialogue in American film, and we were only a beat apart. For Lehane it's William Holden as Pike Bishop, in The Wild Bunch, saying 'let's go'. I'd always been more partial to Warren Oates' reply: 'why not?', but no, Lehane said, 'Holden's line is action, and Oates' is reaction'. 'Nilhilstic reaction,' I said, 'which is why I liked it'. 'But it's 'let's go' that defines the movie, and them,' he said, and thinking about it, he was right in an American hsitorical sense, even if Oates' line seems more purely Peckinpah, a signal of change, perhaps. 'Did you know,'Lehane asked, 'that Peckinpah wrote a whole scene for that, that they told him to cut, and he shot so little usable that 'let's go' was basically all that was left.' 'So he didn't start out minimalist, like you, he was just edited that way?' I said. There is a sense sometimes that big stories demand their own space, and in The Given Day it seems that Lehane has used no more space than that story demands. It's a major achievement.

NOTE: This interview also appears on Crime Time: www.crimetime.co.uk
THE GIVEN DAY is published by Doubleday, ISBN 9780385615341

REVISITING GUNFIGHTER NATION: Richard Slotkin Redux

INTRODUCTION: In a piece about The Wire, Dennis Lehane referred to David Simon loving a piece of dialogue from The Wild Bunch: Pike Bishop (William Holden) saying 'let's go'. I've never been able to hear that line in isolation, however; not without Tector Gorch (Warren Oates)'s reply, 'why not?'. I recalled having written as much somewhere, and eventually dug out this essay, originally written a few years ago for the Financial Times' Re-Readings series, but spiked for being too esoteric even for that, mostly because the book was in print only in the USA.

I should declare an interest: nearly 40 years ago I studied American Studies with Rich, wrote him a 55 page paper on The Shadow, and consider him one of my very best teachers. But his work speaks for itself; beyond the Frontier Trilogy, his fiction, of which ABE may be the most accessible, has an uncanny ability to take on the culture of its time; THE CRATER is one of the best 19th century novels written in the later 20th century.

I've added a new concluding paragraph, but otherwise this is as it was originally written. I think it remains valid, and the book worth re-reading (or reading) now....

RE-READINGS: GUNFIGHTER NATION
Richard Slotkin, Atheneum (US), 1993, 850pp

“When the legend becomes truth, print the legend,” advises John Ford in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE. To Richard Slotkin, who over a period of 20 years produced a trilogy of books analysing those legends, they consititute the truths which once bound American society together. In GUNFIGHTER NATION, the last of that trilogy, Slotkin frames his argument in terms even British readers will recognise: the familiar images of film, television, and novels which have become iconic all over the world.

The frontier defines America’s most enduring myths. In REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE (1973) Slotkin portrayed the entire continent as the frontier; colonial America was surrounded by it. The period of exploration ended just before the Civil War. As Manifest Destiny conquered the continent it became THE FATAL ENVIRONMENT (1985); the second volume takes in the rest of the nineteenth century. Dealing with sources less familiar to a general audience, these two books are more academic in style; they won awards, but not necessarily readers, although I recall Robert B Parker having Spenser read REGENERATION in one of his novels. GUNFIGHTER NATION presents its more familiar material in a style which better reflects its sources; it flows like a novel.

American myth, to Slotkin, has two strands: populist (Jeffersonian, agrarian, democratic) and progressive (Alexander Hamilton via Teddy Roosevelt, expansionist, elitist, implicitly racist). Contrast the Robin Hood myth of Jesse James with the big-business approach to the West (first harvesting buffalo, then marketing the myth as Wild West shows) of Buffalo Bill. Both strands grow out of the frontier, but we see them clearly in conflict in a seminal modern work like Dashiell Hammett’s RED HARVEST, where the detective known only as the Continental Op (operating on behalf of a whole continent) finds himself caught between strikers (populist) and mine owners (progressive) in a town called Poisonville.

Such myths affect not only the way we perceive history, but also the ways we enact that history in the present. Slotkin can analyse both perception and enactment because he is able to present dime novels, pulp magazines, and silent films in the contexts of their times, free of the revisionism encouraged by changing attitudes. Free of scholarly cant. Because he makes the context of popular culture clear, his formal analysis is riveting.

Movies are central to the myth of the West in the past century, and Slotkin’s perception of them puts many film critics to shame. He understands how film works as an art form, he understands too how the film business works. Without such understanding no western movie, from THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY to UNFORGIVEN, can be put into any sort of context. More importantly, he understands the changing society to whose needs those westerns pandered.

The boom time for the Western was probably from 1948 through 1973, corresponding with the triumph of America’s progressive side: the cold war domination which followed World War II. Television continued the B movie ethos of earlier years, while film directors began to take the genre apart. The myths of the frontier were adapted quickly to this new world order, including the transfer of the savage menace from literal to figurative “Reds”. By the time Kennedy became President, this myth was full-blown into the “New Frontier”: Green Berets were the modern “rangers” of frontier myth, fighting in Vietnam’s “Indian Country”.

Vietnam is where the myth hits the fan. Slotkin’s simple analysis of the My Lai massacre, as presented by Life magazine, and a parallel analysis of Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH, reflect not just the intrinsic power of the film's art, but, in the demoralizing of the America it reflects, classic myths became inverted; Americans had crossed-over and become the savages; 'going native' was always the most feared consequence of the Frontier, all the way back to Colonial times. Slotkin marks this change in Pike Bishop’s (William Holden) single line in THE WILD BUNCH: “Let’s go.” My only quibble is that he skips Lyle Gorch”s (Warren Oates) nihilistic and quintessentially American reply: “Why not?”.

When Richard Nixon switched his Vietnam policy from winning the war to “rescuing” US POWs, he was consciously reclaiming another American myth which was the basis of the Puritans' earliest literature: the captivity narrative. This pointed the way for the revisionist Rambo histories of Vietnam, whose betrayal scenarios blamed loss on dissenters at home. What was Ronald Reagan, asks Slotkin, if not America’s last attempt to reclaim the beliefs American myths told Americans should bind society together, even when they were known to be untrue.

Eventually, delusion is doomed to fail. As Slotkin points out dryly, “no mythic system can be perfectly invulnerable to the rebuke of events”. He sees America’s choice now as a falsely idealised past (“a monstrous overgrown Disneyland”) or the challenge of using myth as one of many ways of imagining the truth.It’s a huge jump from the analysis of popular culture, but no one has made a better start.

Sadly, since not long after I wrote that conclusion, America has spent most of the current century revisiting the land of delusion, as if totally inured to the almost constant screaming rebuke of events. Our monstrous overgrown Disneyland has been attacked, and our response has been to both lash out angrily while retreating deeper into Disneyland's fantasies. Indulging our violence while pretending to be victims. Maybe America needed to be reminded of a deeper level of myth than a Top Gun imposter in front of a Mission Accomplished banner. Americans needed to be reminded that the legend had not yet become truth, and it was not their job to make it so. I doubt this piece's running in Britain's FT would have made much difference.