So that's what became of John Harkness

Watching Rio Bravo yesterday on TCM I was reminded of the time that I actually saw director Howard Hawks in person. It had to be 1977, the first year of the Montreal World Film Festival, and only a few months before the famed director’s death. He was walking down the aisle and I was sitting nearby along with someone I knew from college days, John Harkness. Harkness, a large boisterous man with thick beard and wire rimmed glasses, shouted out to the passing director, “Thank you!” to which Hawks turn slightly in acknowledgement. Watching Hawks’s  famed Western Rio Bravo (1959) starring John Wayne, Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson - I must say I was disappointed in the supposedly great movie because of its plodding pace and longevity, and quit halfway through - I couldn't help thinking of Harkness, and whatever became of him. Last time I checked he was staff film critic for Toronto's alternate weekly, Now. So I looked him up and there were a couple of obituaries of him. He died in 2007. We were both born in 1954 and attended Carleton University together. We worked on the same college newspaper, The Charlatan. He of course wrote film reviews. Then I bumped into him a few years later in Montreal. Harkness apparently died of a heart attack. I didn’t know him very well but certainly knew that he was astute, had a scathing wit and had an encyclopedic knowledge of film. After university he attended Columbia University to study expressly under the famed Village Voice film critic, Andrew Sarris, originator of the “auteur” theory of cinema, in which the film is ultimately the sole creation or vision of the director. It must have been Harkness’s dream come true. Returning to Canada he freelanced and then landed the film critic job at the soon to be born Now in 1981, where he worked for 26 years. I’m not sure if he was Canada’s best film critic - I thought the late great Jay Scott at The Globe and Mail working at the same time was probably best  - but Harkness’s deep knowledge of film and fine analytical and critical skills certainly made him top tier. There were a couple of things about him that made him stand out. One would think, given his pedigree, he’d be a sure champion of foreign and independent films. But he wasn't. In fact he championed, much like New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, mainstream Hollywood. As Now co-founder Michael Hollett wrote in tribute, “He could see beauty in a cartoon, a fistfight and a fuck. He knew in his bones why John Ford was certain there was no better image than a man thundering across a screen on a galloping horse, and he could still get goosebumps watching a chopper fly low and fast over a rice paddy, all the while enjoying the classical music exploding on the soundtrack.” And while his sensibilities and bohemian outward appearance might have made him seem open-minded to alternative lifestyles, he was of single mind when it came to film. Asked to contribute to Now’s first gay-themed issue, Harkness, Hollett writes,  “confessed that he just couldn’t watch men kiss on screen sorry, folks, that’s just the way it is.” Would he make such a comment in today’s sharp edged uber politically correct and de-platformed environment? Harkness never compromised in his reviews, regardless of the director, whether old school or independent wunderkind. His refusal to compromise lost Now a huge boatload of advertising from Cineplex, when the company cancelled its ad buy after Harkness criticized in GQ magazine the chain’s inferior programming. I could just picture him, in the face of scathing  backlash, standing there, his huge belly protruding, with a fixed glance on the offended party, thinking the reaction entirely beside the point in wake of an intellectually sound and ethical film review.

Speaking of John Wayne and de-platforming, that was terrible that University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts this month pulled an exhibit dedicated to Duke after caving to student protests over one-time controversial remarks made by Wayne about minorities. If you scratch eight out of 10 people - including the protesters - you would probably find some history of objectionable behavior. Get over it, learn from it, but preserve the legacy.

More violence in the hood, Big Easy style

Okay, I guess this is as good a reason to make a film as any other. Coming up on the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina we have a crime-in-the-hood novella set in the battered and besieged Lower 9^th Ward of New Orleans, during and in the immediate aftermath of the devastating – and highly controversial in terms of emergency response – 2005 tropical storm. Of course, that’s a good hook for the story as well. The film, Cut Throat City by RZA (rapper and producer Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) opens at various (stateside) theatres on Friday. (UPDATE July 23: Now re-scheduled TBA in August.). The set-up is this. An aspiring graphic novelist, Blink (Shameik Moore) has a bright future ahead of him as a legitimate artist. He marries and all appears as if he’ll go on the straight and narrow. However, the fact he and his new wife Demyra (Kat Graham) can’t get FEMA money because their neighborhood wasn’t devastated enough, leads him back to his homies and to a major heist. The story is pretty pro forma, with Blink and his foursome lamenting their lives and how they have been screwed over by the government. “Hurricanes and shit..they’ve been using them for years to kill black people,” the only difference is that hurricanes now are also named after blacks. But Blink’s gang is small fry in the Lower 9th crime hierarchy. Their heist goes sideways and they have to pay, on the run from both the cops and their overlord, a very nasty ‘Cousin’ Bass (Tip ‘Til’ Harris), who sics mean varmints on miscreants’ private parts. Politics aside this is a pretty typical “hood” movie, with script banter of the “N” word de rigueur and all manner of slice ‘em and dice ‘em gang talk. There is redemption, yes, but I’m not sure everyone would want to forage through the tranches of violence to get there. However, the director should be congratulated for a very inventive ending (don’t leave when the credits start!). Ethan Hawke has a small role as ex-police corrupt city councilor Jackson Symms. I think the best performance is by Eiza González as Det. Valencia – no nonsense and unflappable. Given the aftermath of the recent mass protests and holocaust of rioting in the wake of the George Floyd death, I kept looking for film resonances. But, of course, the picture was made before this. Still, the NOPD is portrayed as virtually all white with one racist overture. And, in this Defund the Police moment, one cop informer poignantly tells Valencia, “They let them all go. Day One. Now we’ll get more criminals, more violence, less intelligence, less cops.”

Brando, Taylor electric in Golden Eye

Finally, I got to see, in its entirety, John Huston’s 1967 Reflections in a Golden Eye (TCM). It was by far the best movie I watched over the past week. It stars Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Brian Keith. Based on a 1941 novel by Carson McCullers, it’s a film of layers – about masculinity, gender power relations, homosexuality, sexual attraction and voyeurism. Yes - all that. Set on an army base Brando is Maj. Weldon Penderton, a man of exceedingly austere emotions. If you thought Brando did a good Godfather impersonation as Vito Corleone, here he holds in his breath with a diminutive monotone as the uptight Penderton, seemingly on the exterior tough but really a weakling in his personal affairs. Meanwhile, his wife Leonora (Taylor) is a coquettish philandering southern belle, cheating on the straitlaced major and mocking any of his attempts to confront her. Taylor is exquisite in the role, totally lacking self-consciousness with an effervescence, putting one in mind of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara. Meanwhile, lurking below the surface is Pvt. Williams (Robert Forster) who meanders around the Penderton’s house and invades it late at night when all are asleep. On horseback rides the major spots Forster in a field, utterly nude. He becomes obsessed with the private. Meanwhile, Brian Keith as Lt. Col. Langdon carries on an affair with Leonora, essentially in the emotionally (and sexually?) impotent Maj. Penderton’s face. Julie Harris plays Landon’s wife Alison, bedridden and mentally distressed, entranced by the houseboy, Anacleto (Zorro David). Psychologists – maybe Freudians? – would have a field day with this story. I’m no psychologist but the storylines, with their outward shows of hypocrisy and subliminal seething, are enough to keep a viewer transfixed. The film is shot through a gold filter, giving the entire production the resulting “golden” hue, as befits the title. 

Other recent films of note:

François Ozon’s 5 x 2 (Criterion Channel) explores the marriage of Marion (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) in receding flashbacks from divorce to their first meeting. Every chapter features a transgression by one or the other spouse. The film features an inventive plot technique and good acting by the principles in what, some would say, is an oh-so-French story.

Joan Micklin Silver’s Between the Lines (1977) (Criterion Channel) is an ensemble production that in my opinion presages Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983) six years later. The settings are different but there are a lot of similarities. Enough to make you wonder if this movie sparked Kasdan to take the idea a step further. Set in an alternative newspaper of the era it stars John Heard, Lindsay Crouse and Jeff Goldblum - even the then cult hero Michael J. Pollard - as a kind of communal family with its countercultural highs and lows. The perky soundtrack alone makes you think this could have been turned into a light TV drama. Crouse as Abbie in particular stands out as a very cute yet exceedingly assertive staff photographer.