The Rip

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon

Joe Carnahan's The Rip is a good meat and potatoes crime film that stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and is now streaming on Netflix. The duo are members of a Tactical Narcotics Team investigating crooked cops ripping off narcotics dealers in Miami. The portrayal of law enforcement officials on the border line of criminality couldn't be more timely. No character in the film seems completely trustworthy and there are two outright rat finks among them. Carnahan's films are pretty much always studies in machismo and The Rip is no exception. Even the distaff members of Ben and Matt's crew, Teyana Taylor and Catalina Sandino Moreno, engage in the chop busting banter so typical of males in packs. 

Carnahan's screenplay is well constructed and smart, but there is an inevitable sense of déjà vu to the proceedings. If you've seen one corrupt cop movie, you've seen a facsimile of The Rip. Still, the performances are solid and Juan Miguel Azpiroz's cinematography bathes the action sequences in delirious colors, making this, by far, Carnahan's most visually exciting film. The finale of the film has Affleck and Damon having a beer together on a beach as the sun rises over Miami. If this is their last film together, then this would be a fittingly romantic capstone to an onscreen bromance that has spanned the decades.

A Confucian Confusion

Shiang-Cyi Chen and Shu-Chun Ni

Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion is an engrossing polyphonic portrait of Taipei released in 1994.  If I had to categorize this winning film, I would call it a workplace based romantic comedy, since a number of the characters work at a public relations agency, but that would be pigeonholing a work that defies easy categorization. What strikes me about the film, which juggles the lives of over a dozen characters over the course of of two days, is the overall mood of romantic dissatisfaction that permeates throughout. All of the couples we witness are well past the honeymoon period of their relationship. This is more a movie about conscious uncoupling than one about romance sparking. When a relationship is consummated in the film, regret is inevitable and almost instantaneous. Yet, the film, though rueful, is never depressing, but is ultimately buoyant in its handling of its characters' travails.

A Confucian Confusion fragmented narrative mirrors the disconnected lives of its characters. The film is edited into shards of plot, Confucian parables, painted legends, and advertising slogans. The mise-en-scene entraps the characters at luxurious offices and TGIFridays giving the picture a lost in the supermarket feel of anomie. The surfaces are bright, reflecting the lives of the pretty young things enjoying the luxuries of Taiwan's economic miracle. The characters are miserable despite the appointed decor, the to die for couture, and the bling. They careen around after work doing cartwheels, puking into potted plants, and bickering in cabs. Dual poles within a narrow society are displayed. Postmodern amorality is contrasted with delusional traditionalism, ascetic artists with gleefully vulgar ones. The film is on a par with such masterpieces as A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi. It has been paired in an attractive package by the ever dependable Criterion Collection with Yang's 1996 effort Mahjong.

Mahjong is less successful, but most movies are. The international actors seem ill at ease. Once again we are faced with Confucian parables and perfidious western influence. TGIFridays is reprised and The Hard Rock Cafe is the featured location. Amoral criminality reigns supreme. The film's most successful procurer, Diana Dupuis' Ginger, struck me as a double for Ghislaine Maxwell in this farsighted and somber film whose main theme is sexual grooming. This Criterion two pack would grace any film lover's video library.

Springfield Rifle

Philip Carey, Gary Cooper, and Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams

André De Toth's Springfield Rifle is a very good and under sung Western released in 1952.  It was a part of wave of films that featured weapons in their title, a trend heralded by the success of Winchester '73 in 1950. Titles included Colt .45, Carbine Williams, Kentucky Rifle, and many more on American television. The film, which had multiple writers attached to it, seems a little like a stitched together Frankenstein's monster. It is set during the Civil War and has Gary Cooper attached to a fort in Colorado where he and his cohorts must thwart Confederate rustlers who are stealing Yankee horses. The titular rifles are one of the stuck on bits. They are mentioned briefly at the beginning and arrive at the nick of time as a deus ex machina to save Coop and the Yanks. Springfield rifles had been made at the armory in Massachusetts since the Mexican War era, but a new innovation occurred during the 1860s. The Civil War marked the shift from muzzle loading rifles to the easier to use breech loading models which gave the more industrial North an edge. 

Another negative aspect of this filmic kluge is the romance angle. Phyllis Thaxter travels all the way from West Chester, PA. to Coop's fort to beg him to turn his sword into a plowshare. The scenes are pointless, a repeat of Coop's equally tedious scenes with Grace Kelly in High Noon which had opened three months before Springfield Rifle. Hollywood always has been a place with many echo chambers. What is original about the film is that it is an espionage flick with Western trappings. There is a spy at Coop's fort who must be unmasked. Coop, we learn, must go under cover, even undergoing a trumped up court martial. Once he is cast out of the Yankee fort with the yellow stripe of cowardice on his back, he ingratiates himself with the rustlers and is able to unmask the traitor. Critics and audiences at the time bridled against the film as needlessly convoluted for a Western. However, this is what I like about the film. Cooper's character has only a limited number of people he can trust, the number of whom diminishes as the movie unspools. The air of the film is rife with paranoia. Most of the characters, Yank or Reb, seem nice enough, though we know there is a two faced traitor in their midst. Characters often hide their true motivations and De Toth treats them all equivocally. This is not a film of good guys and bad guys. Even the villain has his reasons.

I view Springfield Rifle as largely a Cold War allegory concocted in the shadow of the arrest and trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were arrested in the summer of 1950 and their trial began in March of 1951. They were executed in 1953. Springfield Rifle trumpets its theme: that counterespionage is necessary to the preservation of our Republic. A message that must have seemed pertinent in the age of the Red Menace. This theme seems most obviously to be the work of screenwriter Charles Marquis Warren. As the late Philip French has pointed out 🌵, Warren was on the hawkish Hollywood right wing and wrote and directed another 1952 Western, Hellgate, that can be seen as a pro-McCarthy statement. Despite the rigidity of Springfield Rifle's theme, Warren and De Toth sketch ambivalent characters with multiple dimensions. Cooper's character can bond with the Rebs as well as he can with his compatriots. It helps that such capable and familiar, to my generation, actors such as Martin Milner, Alan Hale Jr., and Fess Parker are on hand. De Toth handles his cast with aplomb. Even Lon Chaney Jr., a clumsy performer if you ask me, is effective as a craven killer. De Toth handles his exteriors as well as his actors with Mt. Whitney and its surrounding standing in for the Rockies. The snow draped hills provide an apt setting for treachery, as they do in De Toth's Day of the Outlaw.

Phylllis Thaxter's profile and Paul Kelly

                                                                  Spoiler Alert

Cooper is an axiomatic personality: if you've seen him once, you pretty much know what you are going to get. The performance that most impressed me was Paul Kelly's as the traitor. He provides a smooth and unruffled facade, but also hints at the inner turmoil of a man who is not what he seems. I'd enjoyed Kelly in a number of films, like The President Vanishes, The Roaring Twenties, Flying Tigers, Crossfire, and Side Street, but wonder why he had a career that seems partially submerged. He began onstage, but was featured in film as early as 1919 when he wooed Mary Miles Minter in Anne of Green Gables. In 1927 he beat to a pulp actor Ray Raymond, a brawl precipitated by Kelly's affair with actress Dorothy Mackaye. Raymond never regained consciousness and Kelly was convicted of manslaughter. Kelly was sentenced to serve ten years, but was sprung after 25 months. He eventually married Mackaye and they were wed until her death in 1940 from injuries resulting from a automobile accident.

🌵 Philip French, Westerns, Pgs. 81-82.