MOVIE DIARY 2023: SOME THINGS A MAN HAS TO DO, SO HE DOES 'EM.
We’re back again with some CINEMA this week, thanks to my beloved pal and one of my favorite bloggers, Cait Schneider! Cait’s been here before, and I’m super excited to have her back on the MOVIE DIARY scene. Make sure to keep up with her on Discourse Blog! My personal favorite is when she blogs about birds, that’s extremely my shit and it will be yours too because you’re copying me.
Opening Night (1977) - dir. John Cassavetes
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: CAIT SCHNEIDER
I wish I could remember why I wanted to watch Opening Night (1977) in the first place, but I can’t! It was almost certainly a tweet? Or something someone said on a podcast? Sadly, it’s now lost to history which is really too bad because I would really like to thank whatever entity guided me toward this weird and mesmerizing movie.
I was actually pointedly not going to write about Opening Night MOVIE DIARY because I knew almost nothing about it going in, and that’s the experience I’d wish for anyone who was going to watch it…but I also want to recommend it and therein lies the rub. Anyway, stop reading now if you want to stay pure.
Opening Night was written and directed by John Cassavetes and stars his longtime partner and criminally under-lauded actor (she is lauded, but not lauded enough), Gena Rowlands. It was made just a few years after A Woman Under the Influence (1974), but the two films—both directed by Cassavetes and starring Rowlands—are sort of sister works, both depicting a meltdown of small worlds and social systems and the woman at the center of them.
A Woman Under the Influence is regarded as Cassavetes’ masterpiece, but I’m planting my flag here as an Opening Night girlie because it’s far more subtle, strange, and disquieting! (Both are deeply 1970s though, and that’s a compliment). In it, Rowlands is a famous actress named Myrtle Gordon who is rehearsing for a new play and to put it lightly, can’t quite connect with the material. This alone is not exactly the stuff of dramaturgical fireworks, but layered on top of (or perhaps foundational to) Gordon’s professional angst is a deeply traumatic event in which a young fan gets hit by a bus and dies soon after securing an autograph from Gordon outside the theater. The fan, played by Laura Johnson, has a kind of young Sissy Spacek energy: Innocent, fragile, perhaps a bit unwell, certainly underserved and underappreciated by the world at large, and absolutely capable of seeing through your soul. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore, and I really wish they did.
After the incident, which happens relatively early, we slowly watch Gordon and her costars (Cassavetes among them) rehearse the play, and witness Gordon unraveling in increasingly upsetting and riveting ways. We see her self-medicate. We see her unable to cope with her shock and grief, and unable to properly interface with anyone about her struggles, all while confronting quieter and more universal existential dread over age, personal connections, and mortality. Oh yeah, and she also has visceral visions of the dead girl.
As the movie unspools we see more and more of what the play actually is, which itself is a lovely act of worldbuilding and one that reminded me of the last hour or so of Drive My Car. But Opening Night is also a high-stakes theater drama mixed with horror, which reminded me of Black Swan. But then it also kind of reminded me of a few Olivier Assayas movies. There’s a lot going on! There’s also a gorgeous non-cameo cameo from Peter Falk, and it’s a very welcome bit of relief in the midst of an intense portrait of a psychological breakdown.
Am I writing around the plot a bit here? Yes, but I’ve also told you everything you need to know. People love to talk about how movies are too long these days (I am among them), but this film is 2 hours and 24 minutes of quiet mental dissolution and you do feel it, but once you settle into its rhythm, it’s a luxurious and hypnotic ride. By the end, I was crushed that it was over. The costumes, set design, and palettes are fantastic, but more than that, I could watch Gena Rowlands every day for the rest of my life. She’s a certified stunner and observing her simply applying lipstick in her backstage dressing room is inspiring, but she also manages to exude total control and complete abandon in the same breath. She acts with her entire body. She’s graceful, impish, human, funny and sad, raw and guarded. I’m not sure I can think of another actor quite like her. Watching her go, even back in time and through a screen, is exhilarating.
Opening Night careens toward a climactic final act that had me holding my breath the entire time except for when I guffawed, groaned in agony, or gulped up an anticipatory breath in fear of what was coming next. It’s a perfect illustration of what much of the movie is about: the bizarre dance we all do to put on a show (in this case literally) while internally falling apart, and how much space exists in between our private and public selves. And honestly, the greatest twist of all in this dark exploration of psychological instability is that it ends up being a full-throated endorsement of improv.
At one point during a particularly grueling rehearsal, Gordon says: “I seem to have lost the reality of the . . . reality.” That may be true for her, and for those of us watching, but inside that confusion is something that feels deeply true.
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Cait Schneider (she/her) manages audience development for Slate podcasts, and is a writer and co-owner of Discourse Blog. She lives in Los Angeles.
Winchester ‘73 (1950) - dir. Anthony Mann
Haha wow can you even believe the American West? I’d never seen any of Anthony Mann’s movies before, and I loved this. A solid, western that turns its central conflict into something grand, approaching the mythic. Jimmy Stewart plays Lin McAdam, a tough guy cowboy sharpshooter who rolls into town in hot pursuit of Dutch Henry Brown, a violent killer and a real fucking asshole. They come across each other at the saloon (that’s old west for “bar”), but their big fight gets put on hold as they both get roped into entering the town’s big Fourth of July shooting competition. Up for grabs is the titular Winchester ‘73, by all accounts the perfect gun. Everybody wants this damn thing, and the only way to get it is to win it.
The shooting competition naturally comes down to Lin and Dutch, and it’s really pretty fun to watch the two keeping up with each other shot for shot. There’s obviously a really long and contentious history between them, and it comes through in the pissy little glances they give each other. It’s a nice way to establish the relationship while also getting us to wonder what exactly the deal is between them. The two are pretty evenly matched, but Lin just manages to edge him out with some extra fancy shooting. It’s all going great for Lin, but before he can celebrate, he gets jumped by Dutch and his cronies, and they make off with his Winchester ‘73. Lin and his pal High-Spade once again must take off in pursuit of Dutch.
What follows is not exactly a chase movie, but more a look at how the obsession with this gun leads to ruin for anyone who lays claim to it. We see the gun coming into the possession of a few people after it gets stolen from Lin, and nothing very good ends up happening to any of them. As you can probably already guess, the perfect gun… is a perfect METAPHOR… for westward expansion, manifest destiny, American conquest, etc etc. Let’s talk about everyone who comes across this perfect metaphor:
Lin — our main guy, it starts with him, but he doesn’t have it very long before it gets stolen from him (let’s get into this more later)
Dutch — a real piece of shit, selfish, self-interested, this guy is BAD. We’ll get into it more later since he and Lin are so intertwined. He loses it because he puts himself in a vulnerable situation (in their haste to literally get out of Dodge after robbing Lin, Dutch and the boys left their own guns behind, and Dutch has gambled away all their money), and he’s forced to trade it away to an Indian Trader.
Indian Trader — an opportunist who’s savvy enough to spot and take advantage of Dutch at this desperate moment. He’s America’s growing merchant class, someone who comes into his fortune not by earning it with blood, but rather by taking advantage of other people’s need. But no matter how savvy you are or how good at wheeling and dealing you are, that means fuck all when you come up against someone stronger than you who wants to take something from you. Which brings us to Young Bull.
Young Bull — The trader meets up with Young Bull to sell him and his men some cheap repeaters, but when Young Bull sees the Winchester, he just decides he’s going to kill the trader and take all his guns for his men, keeping the perfect Winchester for himself as the ultimate tool for his war on The White Man. Young Bull eventually gets killed by Lin and some US Cavalry soldiers (Lin gets involved with the soldiers through one of the many weird twists of fate that drive the movie) during a raid on the soldiers’ camp. Young Bull is a man who deals in strength, and like the trader he killed for the gun, Young Bull has come up against something much stronger than him and he’s fallen. The US Cavalry soldiers may have been surrounded and wildly outnumbered, but that doesn’t really matter when you’re dealing as heavily in metaphor as this movie. The soldiers are a stand-in for American military might and America’s idea of righteous conquest of their country. There’s this extra layer here as well of Young Bull being played by Rock Hudson— American conquest is not just limited to dominion over the land, but it also extends to The White Man conquering even the image and perception of the people who would stand against him.
Steve Miller — After Young Bull is killed and his army is driven off by the besieged US Cavalry soldiers, the Winchester is found in the aftermath by a young officer (played by a very young Tony Curtis!). The leader of the Cavalrymen immediately recognizes that this is a special gun, too good for some kid to handle. He wants to award it to Lin, since he was the best shooter of them all during that raid, but Lin was already long gone, heading back out there to continue his search for Dutch. The gun’s given to Steve, who’s literally just some guy who happened into defending the camp because he ended up there while trying to ditch his fiancee Lola as they were being chased by Young Bull’s men out on the road. Embarrassingly, he didn’t manage to ditch Lola and he and Lola survived the raid, so Steve is sort of going through his own sort of Force Majeure (2014) situation and Lola is extremely concerned that her husband to be is a gigantic chump (he is). Steve is representative of a moneyed America. That is, men who have neither strength nor cunning, and who seem to have simply had their fortunes handed to them thanks to circumstances of birth, family, and luck. He doesn’t deserve this gun, he doesn’t deserve to hold its metaphorical power, and further, he wouldn’t even know how to make himself deserving. He’s not holding onto this thing long, obviously.
WACO JOHNNY DEAN — the most entertaining character in the movie, if I’m being honest. Waco Johnny is a real fucking psychopath. He does what he wants to whomever he wants, and not once has he ever thought of the consequences. The first time we see him in the movie, he’s being pursued by some lawmen and he and his gang break into Steve’s house to take cover from a big shootout. When he sees Steve in possession of the Winchester, he tries to get him to sell it to him, and when Steve refuses, Waco Johnny makes it his mission to humiliate him in front of his fiancee. Even if you haven’t seen this movie you know how this is going to play out: Steve decides he’s had enough but as soon as he starts to show some backbone for once in his pathetic life, he gets his shit absolutely wrecked by Waco Johnny. The lesson here is similar to what we learned with Young Bull. The main difference being that Young Bull was driven by some sort of code and the noble purpose of fighting for his people. Waco Johnny is only ever fighting for himself and doing what he wants to do. He’s the charismatic evil that will happily lead America into darkness by force to serve his own ends of ultimate power. You do not want to let this man get the gun.
Which brings us back to Dutch and Lin. Dutch takes the gun back from Waco Johnny after he threatens not to cut him in on the big robbery that he’s planned. Dutch leveraging his power and strength to get what he wants is sort of a combination of how the Trader and Young Bull acquire the gun, but I think he gets to hold on to it longer because of his thematic link to Lin, the man who we are meant to see as the true owner of the gun. We find out that Dutch and Lin have been locked in this eternal conflict for a very long time, and like the most thematically rich conflicts, it comes down to a difference of ideology between two people who were once very close. We get clues into their story and we’re able to figure it out before it gets told to us in the movie’s last act. Before Lin and Dutch were locked in this hate for each other, they were brothers. Their father taught them both how to shoot, which is why they shoot so well and so similarly. Thanks to a bank robbery gone wrong, Dutch ends up killing their father before going on the run for the rest of his life, and Lin has sworn vengeance even at the cost of his own life that he’d built for himself.
We’ve got all the ingredients for a fight to the death here, and because of both sides’ connection and their mutual relentlessness, this conflict becomes something mythical, even archetypal. It’s two cowboys shooting at each other, but it’s also good vs. evil, brother vs. brother, devotion to a higher ideal vs. devotion to your own self, etc etc. It’s the story of Cain and Abel told as a black hat/white hat western, with the soul of a new America at stake.
The movie climaxes in a dramatic shootout between Lin and Dutch on a rocky desert cliffside, with Lin eventually landing a shot that hits Dutch and causes him to fall to his death. Lin returns to town, his tragic grudge at an end and in sole possession of the troublesome Winchester ‘73. The swelling music signals a triumph, but the closing shots lingering meaningfully on the gun remind us that this triumph came with a great cost of many lives. I think one could believe that this is all settled now that Lin has the gun, but I think that’s kind of a problem.
Throughout all of this movie, Lin’s been portrayed as a hero. The good man, taking on the unsavory business of avenging his father by hunting down his murderer who is unfortunately also Lin’s brother. Lin is a symbol of idealized American virtue— he’s an honorable man, he’s committed to his family, he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, he occasionally might bend his way around the letter of the law (ie, don’t kill your brother) but it’s always for good, moral reasons. When Lin ends up with the Winchester ‘73, that symbol of power so pure and great that it can conquer the west, it’d be convenient to believe that the gun is finally in its rightful place in the hands of a good, reasonable man, and that everyone else failed to keep their hands on the gun because their vision for America was somehow impure or lacking. The trouble with this is what it implies for Young Bull’s portion of the story, and by extension, what that means for Native Americans. Young Bull loses the gun because he just has to, there’s no way around it. In White America’s vision of its own creation, the Native Americans must lose in every circumstance. There are all sorts of ways for White America to spin this — the Natives were savages, they were a threat to the White way of life, they weren’t God-fearing people and thus they didn’t deserve the gift of this land, the Native Americans were actually willing and grateful for the leadership of white people, take your pick — but what it all comes down to is conquest. Young Bull is driven by the same righteous thirst for revenge as Lin, and he’s probably just as good a man as he is, but no matter how noble Young Bull may have been, he must lose because this is the White Man’s story.
Further, is Lin even as good and perfect as we need him to be if he’s going to wield the ultimate power of the perfect gun? Can we trust the future of the soul of the American West to this man, or any other man for that matter? We’re on Lin’s side because Dutch is a really dangerous killer and criminal, but what about Lin himself? He’s obviously obsessive, he has violence in his heart, plus he has a small line where he fleetingly mentions that in the Civil War, he fought for the Confederacy. The implication with Winchester ‘73’s ending is that the fate of the American West is in good hands as long as men like Lin use their power and righteousness to protect it, but we spend the entire movie watching the irresistible allure of conquest given form in the power of this perfect gun. The gun draws all manner of men to it, and as long as it exists there’s the potential for danger. Someone stronger and meaner will take it, some coward will luck into it and squander it, and the best that we can hope for is that a good man will end up with it and use it responsibly. There’s no guarantee that Lin even is a good man, he’s just good because everyone around him is worse or lacking, so what’s to stop this good man from eventually being corrupted by the gun, intoxicated by its power? We would have all been better off if someone had just gone ahead and buried that gun deep in the middle of the desert because no matter how good a man is, he’s still just a man.
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
Ah fuck I went way too long on Winchester ‘73 so I’m not going to get around to The Card Counter (2021), Paul Schrader’s movie about The War On Terror and Bush-era fallout, but I’ll get to it next time. I’m seeing The Master Gardener (2023) tonight, so next week we’ll get a little post-First Reformed (2018) Schrader double feature.
Big thank you to Cait for coming back to MOVIE DIARY! I gotta get onto watching some more Cassavetes movies. Why don’t you all pop into the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord and you can all tell me what’s your take on Cassavetes.