A few kind words for 'genre' films

Whenever I'm asked to name my favorite movie, I'm always caught short. I don't have a favorite movie; I have perhaps a thousand favorite movies. You see, I'm a student— strictly amateur, of course— of film genres, those great "family-trees" of filmmaking. Each genre tells a story, and each film within that genre contributes to the overall story.

If this sounds a bit complicated, it is. The major genres— say, the Western—can have nationalist branches. There are American Westerns, there are Italian Westerns, there are German Westerns. All are Westerns, with a certain family resemblance to each other, but each branch is subtly different, influenced by its national perspective and the tales its citizens want to hear and tell.

The Germans loved Karl May-derived stories of buckskin-clad frontiersmen and noble Indians. In the transplanted American B-movie actor Lex Barker, the Germans found their perfect Aryan hero—just the fellow to tame "frontier hellcats" like Elke Sommer.

Italy's political Westerns

Italian westerns, on the other hand, usually boasted a strong political subtext. Americans would never make a film like Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown, in which a lawman hired to track down a Mexican who has raped and murdered a young girl discovers, in the course of the film's two-hour running time, that the actual culprit is the feckless son of the wealthy landowner who hired him— and who wants the peon dead because he doesn't like his independent attitude. The Price of Power was an Italian take on the Kennedy assassination, while Face to Face tackled the issue of educated men who foment violence as a panacea for what ails them.

Further, each national school is itself fragmented. Not every Italian Western was political in nature; some merely tried to copy successful American formulas. And in the U.S. itself we have a variety of Western formulas to choose from: the epic or "prestige" Western (the very titles of films like Cimmaron, The Big Trail and The Big Country give the game away: these are big pictures on important themes), the B-western (in which John Wayne toiled for much of his early acting career), the revisionist Western (films like Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Wild Bunch, products of the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s that John Wayne loathed, even though he starred in one of the greatest of them, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).

Henry Fonda's rights and wrongs

There are Indian Westerns (the aforementioned Little Big Man, Dances With Wolves, Broken Arrow, Apache—and lest we think these films were only about deifying The Noble Savage we whites had wronged, Ulzana's Raid), and railroad westerns (The Iron Horse, in which the railroad is a good thing; Once Upon A Time in the West, in which the railroad is a snail leaving two beautiful shiny tracks in its wake), and town-tamer westerns (Joel McCrea tames a town one way in Wichita, Robert Mitchum does it differently in Man With a Gun, and America's American Henry Fonda lays out the rights and wrongs of it in Warlock— itself based upon a novel that was a loose re-telling of the career of Wyatt Earp, who was famously played as a near-saint by Fonda himself in John Ford's My Darling Clementine).

The webs spun by the various genre films are what make them so endlessly fascinating— that is, if you go to movies for story, rather than mere spectacle. There are biographical Westerns in which killers like Jesse James could become dashing heroes (Henry King's Jesse James of 1939 wrote the book on white-washing a badman, while The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—a 2007 box-office disaster—told the tale a bit more accurately) and quick-draw lawmen— especially in the time of revisionist Westerns— could become sullen psychotics. (Nobody played Wyatt Earp as a cold-eyed killer better than the usually avuncular James Garner; the scene in which he goads punk gunman Steve Ihnat into drawing on him, then empties his pistol into him is one of the most chilling in all of the Revisionist Western cycle.)

Another joy of genre films is the ways in which they utilized actors. Lee Van Cleef may have been a Grade-A badass in Westerns, but in noir films like Kansas City Confidential and The Big Combo he was strictly a flunky to larger predators like Neville Brand and Richard Conte.

The British approach to science fiction

What got me thinking about all of this again was a review that I heard a few weeks ago of the British science-fiction film Moon. Now, the British have a certain reputation for making somber, realist science-fiction—a galaxy far, far away from the money-machines of George Lucas. The reviewer liked the film, and after cataloguing its various merits, he deigned to award it two and a half stars out of four— hardly a ringing, "Drop what you're doing and go see this movie" endorsement.

This seems to be the fate that regularly befalls genre films. Like Rodney Dangerfield, they get no respect.

It may well be that compared to, say, Slumdog Millionaire or Il Divo (themselves genre films—yes, both are crime movies), Moon deserved only two and a half stars out of four. But genre films need first of all to be measured against and compared with other films of their genre. This is not only how they are best appreciated, it is how they are best understood.

For example, the Brits have a tradition of skeptical sci-fi. Instead of gasping, "Gee whiz," they tend to say, "Yes, but…" Moon fits quite comfortably into a long tradition of films like Satellite in the Sky and Spaceflight IC-1 and The Day the Earth Caught Fire, in which our worst enemies turn out to be not little green men, but ourselves.

New life for Frankenstein's bride

As a movie-mad adolescent, I treasured my dog-eared paperback copy of Steven H. Scheuer's Movies on TV. Yet I was always troubled by some of Scheuer's judgments. In reviewing The Bride of Frankenstein, he judged it "way above average for this kind of trash." Talk about damning with faint praise! Today, of course, The Bride of Frankenstein is considered a high point of American fantasy filmmaking. It is the subject of a BFI Film Guide, and I suspect that any professional critic mouthing such "praise" today would be looked at somewhat askance by his colleagues.

Actually, it was the disrespect shown to genre films that first provoked me to write film reviews. It's why I mostly reviewed genre films rather than mainstream productions. I find the permutations of genre filmmaking endlessly fascinating, even when I disagree with the path that a film takes.

On rating chainsaw films

For instance, I'm a great fan of vintage horror films, but I dislike the post-Scream, post-Chainsaw world in which the horror movie now finds itself. Still, I'd never describe Chainsaw XV—in 3-D as "way above average for this kind of trash." To my mind, the questions to consider in evaluating such a film would be (1) how does it measure up to the 14 "Saw" movies that preceded it?; and (2) what impact has this particular franchise exerted on the horror film genre? If I didn't like the film, it would be because it was either shoddily made or because I didn't like where this film is moving the genre.

(Odd as it may sound, the horror film was traditionally an optimistic genre. It was the crime film that first cornered the market on pessimism. Whether in French or in English, Pepe le Moko won't be reunited with his Gaby; Dix Handley won't regain the family farm; Johnny Cool will fail to wipe out the entire hierarchy of U.S. organized crime, and so on.)

The various genres of poplar film constitute a nation's great book of national fables. The Western tells us a different fable than does the gangster film. The musical and the screwball comedy may traverse similar terrains to reach the same destination, but their journeys are quite different. That's what's so wonderful about the genre film.