A Fistful of Autry: "Ride Ranger Ride" and "Prairie Moon"

We're back. Two entries! To be honest I was 80% certain I'd get through that first post and then rediscover this blog 4 years from now after some adbot posted a spam comment on it.

As promised last time, I chewed through two Gene Autry movies: Ride Ranger Ride and Prairie Moon. This was my first foray into the land of the Singing Cowboy, and I gotta get something off my chest before we get down to the nitty-gritty:

HOLY RACISM, BATMAN!

Let's start with Ride Ranger Ride, which makes Birth of a Nation look like an episode of Roots. This is the plot, as summarized on IMDB:

"Gene is a Texas Ranger working undercover to protect an Army wagon train full of ammunition and supplies. The Army doesn't believe him at first, until the Commanches arrive."

This is the synopsis that you'll see on both of the youtube versions of the film (one version's better quality, the other has the right aspect ratio-- pick your poison). It 's also a complete load of cow pie. Here's a more accurate version, which I'll be submitting for immediate IMDB disapproval:

Discharged from the Texas Rangers, Gene Autry (along with improbably-named sidekicks Rufe Jones and Frog Milhouse) joins the US Army Cavalry and must stop a pompous Colonel from brokering a peace treaty with a tribe of savage Comanche before the two-faced redskins attack a wagon train. 

Yes, that's right, Ride Ranger Ride not only involves Upstanding White Folk squaring off against a Bloodthirsty Other, it goes out of its way to villainize anyone silly enough to attempt peaceful coexistence! That's what I call going the extra mile. 

The film's story mostly concerns Gene's efforts to stop the Comanche plot and bird dog the Colonel's flirtatious daughter. Along the way, we get plenty of Western derring-do, two back-to-back barfights, a credulity-straining jailhouse escape (involving a flattened pie tin), and lots of country crooning. 

Minus the constant stream of racist wisecracks about Native Americans (Rufe takes first prize when he quips "I always fire when I sees injuns, that’s why I stay so healthy!") and a wacky sideplot about a scalp-crazy Comanche, Ride Ranger Ride is-- I will shamefully admit-- a pretty well made movie.  The actors are charming, the songs are catchy, the action is tightly shot and edited. It's like Triumph of the Will with cowboy spurs: despite its ugly message, you have to admit it was made by some filmmakers who really knew what they were doing. 

And although Ride Ranger Ride is on the surface a piece of innocuous fluff, I wonder if it's not all the more insidious because of its easygoing charm. Riefenstahl at least had the decency to make fascism look like serious business; Ride Ranger Ride hides its xenophobia behind Gene Autry's pearly white smile. 

At any rate, it was a more engaging experience than Prairie Moon, a baffling Western/Gangster hybrid. After a fairly standard opening involving Gene in pursuit of a gang of cattle rustlers, we cut back to town where a 1930's car jarringly roars through the western backlot and pulls up to the general store.  Out pops Chicago gangster Jim "Legs" Barton, hot on the lam (yes, we actually hear cop sirens in the background), and eager to hole up at his ranch house.

Faster than you can say "wait, when does this movie take place?", Gene and his deputies get caught in a cowboy vs. gangster shootout and Prairie Moon briefly becomes the raddest Western you've never heard of. But sadly, once a trigger-happy cop punches Barton's ticket, the real premise of the movie is revealed. 

See, it turns out ol' Legs left the deed to his ranch to his three rascally, wisecrackin' sons back in Chicago. Naturally, Gene take the orphaned miscreants under his wing and wacky hijinks ensue as the street urchins (Nails, Brains, and Slick Barton as they demand to be called) adapt to country livin'. Throw in a pretty young schoolteacher for Gene to romance and a complication or two with the aforementioned cattle rustlers (who are using Barton's property as a hideout for their schemes) and we have ourselves a movie.

Neither as well put together nor as memorably appalling as Ride Ranger Ride, I have to brand Prairie Moon as the weaker of the two films. It definitely loses points for following its fantastic "Scarface Goes West" intro with such a hokey, kid-centric plot. Then again, what was I really expecting? A hyper violent orgy of six shooters and tommy guns punctuated by folksy cowboy ballads?

Oh wait, that actually sounds pretty awesome.

NEXT TIME:   Fasten your seatbelts! I'll be reviewing The Fast and the Furious. No, not the Vin Diesel one, the other one. No, not Tokyo Drift,  the Roger Corman one. Yes, really, there was a Roger Corman one. The more you know!

A New Blog/ "Pale Flower"

Okay, here it is: I have way too many movies in my Netflix instant queue. Do you ever go to the grocery store and buy a shitload of tofu because you just saw Food Inc. and you're feeling guilty about the baconator you horked down for lunch? You make some half-assed commitment to cook at least one vegetarian meal a week, but then you blink and three months have passed, the bottom of your car is lined with Wendy's wrappers and there's a big brick of moldy tofu lurking in the back of your fridge.

This is me, every day, with my Netflix queue. I fritter away my waking hours pigging out on junk food media-- Jersey Shores, youtube cat videos, etc.-- and then come the evening, I remember that life is fleeting, I could die at any moment, and I still haven't watched Ballad of a Soldier. Thus I flee to Netflix, spend two hours picking out a Movie for Grown Ups to watch, and then give up and fall asleep to an episode of MST3K.

I realize that as far as obnoxious White Person Problems go, having a bunch of arty movies to watch is right up there with "I have too many liberal news blogs in my Google Reader feed". Nonetheless, here's the plan: Within one year's time, I shall destroy my Netflix instant queue, which currently stands at 310 movies. As proof of this herculean achievement in slackerdom, I'll be blogging my thoughts and reflections on each film as I burn through them.

So, come and join me on this magical adventure through Internet Movie Land! Our strange journey begins today, with the 1964 japanese yakuza flick, PALE FLOWER!



THE MOVIE: Pale Flower

WHY IT'S ON MY QUEUE: I am an admitted slut for Japanese films, gangster movies, and anything with that big honkin' Criteron "C" on the cover, so this one was pretty much a no brainer.

ANYWAY: Pale Flower tells the story of newly-paroled hitman Muraki, who upon leaving the Big House comes to the swift conclusion that everything pretty much blows. In a moody opening voice-over, Muraki angsts about how nothing ever changes and calls the rest of humanity a bunch of "stupid animals". Bored out of his skull, Muraki visits a yakuza gambling den, where he befriends Saeko, the titular Pale Flower-- a beautiful, privileged city girl with an unquenchable thirst for seedy late-night thrills.

Together, they go traipsing through the underworld of 60's Tokyo: as Saeko's quest for kicks takes a dark turn down Heroin Alley, Muraki mopes his way into a yakuza clan kerfuffle and finds himself tasked with killing another dude.

So, yeah, it's basically Japanese New Wave 101, which is to say, it's catnip for film geeks. Yes, Pale Flower truly has it all: a jazzy, avant-garde score, dazzling black-and-white cinematography, and preposterous noir-drenched dialogue ("Here's a kick that beats even dope: I'm going to kill a man.").  Plus, it's in Japanese! How cool is that?

I'll ease up on the smug irony here and get to the point. Stripped of its (admittedly impeccable) style, Pale Flower ain't got much going for it.  Something tells me that in English, shot on digital, Pale Flower’s tale of the nihilist hitman who totally doesn’t give a fuck and his femme fatale-cum-manic pixie dreamgirl sidekick would meet with a lot more eye rolling and a lot less breathless admiration.

I get that these tropes hadn’t reached the level of student film cliché back in the 1960’s (though one has to wonder if setting your big final assassination scene to opera music was ever not lame), but even compared to its contemporaries, Pale Flower’s attempts at genre subversion fall short. After all, New Wave yakuza flicks were all about arthouse experimentation— next to Branded to Kill or A Colt is My Passport, Pale Flower seems downright conventional.  

Which, of course, wouldn’t matter in the slightest if Pale Flower told a story you could give a shit about. But alas-- in its pursuit of artiness, the film shrugs off any thought of satisfying the audience with a compelling narrative. And since Pale Flower only achieves a surface level cool, the film winds up stuck in New Wave Limbo: too shallow to hang with the arthouse crowd, and too viscerally unsatisfying to thrive as pulp cinema.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Uhh... 7 out of 10? I feel like as a fan of the genre, I'm being a bit too hard on Pale Flower. It might be style over substance (and surface-level style at that), but it is a very, very slick movie. The cinematography is stunning and the dialogue crackles, but there's just so much better stuff out there in the exact same genre that I can't really let it off the hook. The director, Masahiro Shinoda, did go on to direct the equally eye-popping Samurai Spy, though for my money it too was a little creaky and uninspired compared to its contemporaries (namely the other films in Criteron's totally rad Rebel Samurai box set). Maybe underwhelming me is just this guy's thing.

UP NEXT: We leave the isle of Japan for a totally-not-at-all-jarring-segue to a Gene Autry Double Feature! For reasons completely lost to me, two of the Singing Cowboy's finest are the next items up on my queue. Until next time, Pilgrims!