The Candidate

Robert Redford's irresistible good looks and cool magnetism have perhaps never been put to better use than in director Michael Ritchie's 1972 political satire The Candidate. Redford plays Bill McKay, a lawyer who grew up in the political limelight because of his dad, played by Melvyn Douglas, who was Governor of California. McKay's exposure to the compromises, the mendacity, and the phoniness of the American political theater turned him off years ago, and now he's trying to seek change on a small scale. But McKay unexpectedly throws his hat into an unwinnable race against a popular Republican incumbent when a desperate election manager assures McKay that he can say whatever he wants, since his opponent's victory is a lock.

The film shows us the complexity of the two-party system: how a man with ideals and the ability to speak directly to the public can be sucked into the system and slowly change in order to make himself more appealing. When you watch The Candidate in 2015, you might be watching a film made in the last year or so. The issues haven't changed--the environment and pollution are serious points of discussion in the film, not to mention race and poverty and unemployment--nor have the ways politicians gloss over them. 

Ritchie uses Redford's Western handsomeness in fascinating ways, sometimes giving us a close-up of the actor as he speaks at various events or sits in front of cameras for a televised debate. We see him pausing with effect, perhaps considering his next sentence with care, or maybe just letting the previous one sink in. Redford's use of silence, his difficult-to-interpret facial expressions (he's by turns appealing, appeasing, befuddled, disgusted, measured, and reflective), and his "I'm just a guy who's here to show up and get to work" attitude make him some kind of perfect political candidate. He's transfixing. You can almost forgive the movie's occasional bouts of sexism, depicting vapid-looking young women who say things like, "I voted for McKay because he's handsome!" 

The Candidate doesn't quite rise to the level of a Robert Altman-style film, yet its tone and its style feel reminiscent of Altman's work. Ritchie is perhaps too singular in his vision of what The Candidate is, and indeed, this singularity represents both an attribute and a flaw. We're immersed in a satire that doesn't really feel like a satire. Like HBO's terrifically dark and funny show Veep, it feels simply as though we were flies on the wall watching real life. And yet, there isn't the rich tapestry that an Altman film is so adept at creating. We get little from McKay's wife Nancy (Karen Carlson), for instance, and in her few short scenes, she shows promise, if her character gets to do anything at all.

Peter Boyle, as the good-naturedly calculating campaign manager, gives a fine performance, the kind of performance that generally doesn't get noticed because it's not as flashy as Redford's. But he's excellent in this film. He represents a man who's already been jaded by the system, and his attempts to "protect" McKay are the instincts of a man who no longer thinks on purely idealistic terms, a thought process that Redford's character continues to nurture even as it slips through his fingers.

One Is A Lonely Number

If The Mary Tyler Moore Show had been adapted into a dramatic film, One Is A Lonely Number (1972) is what it might have turned into. It opens with a man walking out on his wife of four years with virtually no reason given, and then follows her journey into self-reliance and acceptance. Her name is Amy, and she's never had to live without a man. She fights off the grubby advances of a sleazy employment agent, gets a job as a lifeguard, befriends a four-time divorcee (Janet Leigh) who's now the head of a club for divorced women who want to get even with their ex-husbands, and forges a sort of father-daughter relationship with an elderly produce man (Melvyn Douglas).

This film is a good example of the many episodic, slightly whimsical dramas to come out of the early 1970s. The director, Mel Stuart (best known for helming Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) manages to keep Amy from being too pathetic, but she has her moments, especially when she breaks down at a production of Shakespeare, crying on the shoulder of the wise old grocer who tells her to "cry until she's finished crying and then learn to live again." It's a noble, obvious women's picture, bolstered by Amy's eventual pluckiness. And the moral of the story isn't something completely silly like, "just wait and you'll find the right man." (When the "right man" does come along--a suave art aficionado played by Monte Markham--he turns out to be married.) Instead, Amy learns to forge a life for herself, and we're left with a cliched but encouraging image of her diving into a swimming pool, frozen in the air so she resembles a bird finally taking flight.

One Is A Lonely Number is certainly dated, but that's part of its charm. It has an enjoyable time-capsule quality to it, and it's refreshing that the film never pretends to be anything other than the story of a woman learning to live on her own. If you can accept the movie on those terms, you'll likely enjoy it.

As for the lead actress, Trish Van Devere, this was her star vehicle. Van Devere's film career was mostly eclipsed by her more famous husband, George C. Scott (with whom she starred opposite many times). But here she's quite good, though miscast. Trish Van Devere almost always is miscast. She's a capable actress who has the makings of an ice queen or a sexy New England boarding school headmistress. But it's hard to believe she could ever be from San Francisco (where this movie is set). (Indeed, Van Devere hails from New Jersey, and she exudes that proper, almost English dignity that makes her always appear to be acting. You can hardly picture Van Devere allowing a man to treat her so badly in real life.) But when she's smiling and cutting up her acting loosens up.

It doesn't help that the dialogue (the script is by David Seltzer from a Rebecca Morris story) feels stilted and stagey, too much like writing. But, as it is, I enjoyed One Is A Lonely Number. (It comes on Turner Classic Movies every once in a while. Since it's never been available on DVD, this is the only way to see it currently.) With Jane Elliot. 97 min. ★★★

Hud

Hud (1963) is just about the only great Western I've ever seen, and one of the great entertainments of the 1960s. It's a grown-up Western, set in modern times and unconcerned with Indians and lawless towns. Instead, Hud concerns itself with the encroaching decay of civilization. It's a battle waged between the aging rancher, Homer (Melvyn Douglas), a man who lives his life according to the law, like Moses with a cowboy hat, and Hud (Paul Newman), his son, who doesn't put much stock in morality, and has a reputation as a womanizer. Homer despises him, and Homer's 17-year-old grandson, Lon (Brandon deWilde)--Hud's nephew--idolizes him, to a degree. (Lon seems to be making up his mind about things for most of the movie.) Lon sees Hud as independent and charming. He leads an exciting life (as exciting as one life can be in a flat Texas cattle town), always bedding a different married woman in town, living it up at the local bar. Hud represents the kind of excitement that is denied someone of Homer's strict moral constitution.

There's an arc written into the story--which was adapted by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. from Larry McMurtry's novel Horseman, Pass By--about Homer's cattle being infected with foot-and-mouth disease, which forces Homer to have every single one of his cows shot in a big, dramatic scene near the end of the movie. This scene was held up as a somber, powerful moment of modern tragic cinema by some critics, and criticized as audience manipulation by others. I would argue that it's somewhere in the middle. It's mostly the plot contrivance that gets the action of the movie rolling. The characters, and their pieces of the overall story of Hud, are what make it a fascinating, tough, lean, and outstanding movie. The cows are merely fodder.

Newman gives one of his best performances: he's mean and selfish, and even suggests unloading the cattle (which could potentially spark a nationwide epidemic) rather than take an enormous loss by killing them, but it's hard not like Paul Newman, even when he's a boor. It is one of those brilliant casting choices in movie history, because as bad as Hud is, and as convincingly as Paul Newman plays him, it's still Paul Newman. There's no pleasure from hating Hud, the way you get a kick out of despising a nasty villain (and such contempt is usually rewarded when said villain suffers some kind of justice for his wickedness at the end of the movie). Instead we're lead deeper into Hud's amorality, as though we could start to buy into some of his logic simply because it's him pitching it. And there's nothing all that appealing about what stodgy old Melvyn Douglas is peddling. He's sanctimonious and weather-worn, and we're led to believe that the two go hand-in-hand with such a principled existence applied over some seventy years.

Patricia Neal, as the sexy-plain housekeeper Alma, also delivers a good performance. She keeps pouring cold water on Hud's sexual advances, but always with a look of coy design in her eyes, as though she's turning him down to build him up for the ultimate acquiescence. Neal and Douglas won Academy Awards for their performances, and Newman was nominated, but once again lost. Cinematographer James Wong Howe also won an Oscar for what is an impressively mounted picture that moves along with a sort of deceptively breezy consistency. Howe and director Martin Ritt manage to make the film weighty without feeling portentous: he turns a genre piece into a movie with panache and real narrative style.

(For this review, I must give some credit to Pauline Kael, whose piece "Deep In the Divided Heart of Hollywood" goes into further detail on the appeal of Hud, why it's a great movie, and why critics at the time of its release, despite much praise, missed out on why it was so great. Her thoughts have certainly helped shape mine, even though I loved the picture well before I read the review. You can find that essay in her book I Lost it at the Movies.)