Moviegoer Diary: Forty Guns, Remember My Name

FORTY GUNS

Plot In A Nutshell
Samuel Fuller’s 1958 Western about a U.S. marshal (Barry Sullivan) who comes to a town in Arizona to arrest a man for robbing the mails, tangles with the self-assured female landowner (Barbara Stanwyck) who employs him, and eventually finds himself falling in love with her.

Thoughts
In his fantastic memoir A Third Face, Samuel Fuller offers a valuable piece of advice to scriptwriters: “If a script doesn’t give you a hard-on in the first dozen pages,” he counsels, “throw it in the goddamn garbage!” Forty Guns, for instance, begins with Barry Sullivan slowly driving a wagon across the plain, when on the horizon he spots a cloud of men on black horses galloping toward him. He pulls his wagon up short as the men, all 40 of them, led by an exultant Barbara Stanwyck dressed in black and riding the only white stallion in the bunch, all thunder past him on both sides, riding as close to his wagon as they can get, his horses twitching anxiously, barely keeping calm in all the confusion. Then the men are gone, Sullivan and his two passengers looking in wonder as they disappear. There’s a moment of calm, and as Harry Sukman’s rousing score kicks in for the first time, Fuller cuts to an shot of the men still galloping at high speed under the vast Arizona sky, clouds of dust under their horses’ hooves as that wonderful title Forty Guns appears onscreen. Clearly, Sullivan and Stanwyck haven't spoken a word to each other, but lives are on a collision course. Already the film is up and running. Kids, this is how you do it.

Forty Guns is only 75 minutes long, but it finds time not just to develop Sullivan and Stanwyck’s relationship from its initial antagonism to a hot-blooded romance, but to squeeze in a secondary romance between Sullivan’s kid brother Wes (Gene Barry) and Louvenia (Eve Brent), the cute blonde who works at the gun shop, Sullivan’s pursuit of Stanwyck’s amoral kid brother, a couple of gunfights, a failed ambush, some political intrigue, a wedding, a funeral, and even a couple of musical numbers. The script could use a little more focus — Fuller seems undecided as to whether he’s telling a story about sibling loyalty, the taming of the lawless West, or the way even the toughest-seeming women, when you look deep down, just want a man to look after them — but there’s always something lively going on, or some clever bit of direction to enjoy.

For instance, Fuller indulges in a couple of memorably playful point-of-view shots: Wes flirting with Louvenia as he gazes at her face through the barrel of a shotgun; or the screen going all blurry to show us how the world looks to the aging, half-blind town marshal. (The marshal is played by Hank Worden, who is perhaps best known as “Senor Droolcup,” the ancient, ineffectual bellhop at the Great Northern Hotel on Twin Peaks. Worden apparently spent at least four decades playing men overdue for retirement.) In the most memorable scene, Stanwyck and Sullivan are in a romantic clinch when they hear the sound of something thudding softly in the next room. What could it be? I won’t give away the answer, but suffice it to say it’s one of those great Fuller images, simple but surprising, a mix of sound and image that only the movies can pull off.

RATING: 3.5/5

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REMEMBER MY NAME

Plot In A Nutshell
Alan Rudolph’s moody 1978 thriller about a mysterious woman (Geraldine Chaplin) who begins stalking a construction worker (Anthony Perkins) and his wife (Berry Berenson).

Thoughts
I don’t think Samuel Fuller would have approved of the opening of Remember My Name. For about 20 minutes, we get a lot of disconnected scenes of Geraldine Chaplin buying clothes, moving into an apartment, and lining up a cashier job as a hardware store, intercut with short scenes of Anthony Perkins working at a construction site and coming up with excuses for coming home late to his wife. For some reason, whenever we see a TV set, it’s broadcasting news reports about a massive earthquake in Budapest.

And yet the film is absolutely mesmerizing, thanks mainly to Chaplin, who gives one of the most remarkable and genuinely unpredictable female performances of the ’70s, a symphony of cryptic private smiles and unexpected flashes of violence. (We learn that Emily — that’s the character’s name — has been released after serving 12 years in prison, but it’s an open question whether her odd behaviour is the result of her incarceration, or if she was a little touched in the head long before she took up residence in that jail cell.) You truly do not know what Chaplin will do next — Chaplin’s thin, birdlike features give her a vulnerability that makes you feel protective towards her, but then her temper will flare and you’ll realize she can more than take care of herself. In one particularly jaw-dropping moment, she bursts in on a co-worker (Alfre Woodard!) who has told the boss she’s been skimming from the till, grabs her breasts, gives her nipples a vicious twist, and knees her in the groin. Then, for good measure, with the woman collapsed on the floor, Emily tells her to cover the cash shortfall out of her own pocket by the next morning! Chaplin twists the woman’s nipples! Such a vicious move, and she doesn’t hesitate a single second before doing it, either.

I talked at great length about my crush on Alan Rudolph a few posts ago when I wrote about Investigating Sex, and that wasn’t even one of his better movies. With Remember My Name, on the other hand, he’s at the top of his form. It takes place in a more realistic setting than Rudolph’s later films, so there is none of that somewhat overripe artificiality that turns a lot of viewers against him.

At the same time, Remember My Name has the same loose, free-associative, slightly tipsy plotting style as something like Afterglow, with Rudolph constantly wandering away from his main thriller plotline to spend time with characters like the black cop whom Emily seduces (Moses Gunn) or store owner Mr. Nudd (Jeff Goldblum!) who keeps hiring felons out of love for his mother, who herself is serving a long prison sentence. The laid-back song score, composed and sung by blues singer Alberta Hunter, adds to this thriller’s unconventional feel — it anticipates the song score producer Robert Altman would commission a few years later from Sandy Rogers for Fool for Love. And who knows what to make of all that Budapest stuff?

Which is not to say that Remember My Name doesn’t deliver as a thriller. The sequence where Chaplin sneaks into Perkins’ house and watches, an unreadable expression on her face, as Berenson chops up vegetables in the kitchen, is stomach-twistingly creepy — even though it’s staged in broad daylight. (I didn’t realize until the film was over and I looked her up on the IMDb that Berenson was Perkins’ real-life wife until his death in 1992. A photographer by trade, Remember My Name is one of her only four acting roles. She was on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11.)

Remember My Name is currently unavailable on DVD, and I don’t know if there are many people clamouring for its release. But let me add my voice to that tiny chorus anyway; this is a real gem that’s just begging for rediscovery. If I ever got the chance to make a movie, I think this is the kind of movie I’d want to make.


RATING: 5/5