Sunday, May 17, 2009
What Chuck and Jill were up to From Noon Till Three
There is an entire sub-genre in American film that took place in the sixties and seventies. It was what happened when the screwball or broad comedy got gene-spliced with the western. There was quite a lineage of these. Let's begin with John Wayne in McLintock (1963) and link up to Cat Ballou (1965), The Hallelujah Trail (1965), Waterhole #3 (1967), Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), Dirty Dingus Magee (1971), Skin Game (1971), and Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971). And then, of course there is Blazing Saddles (1974)
From Noon Till Three (1976) is best viewed as an artifact in this tradition, but color it screwball western or not, it is one of the strangest films I have ever seen. It features Jill Ireland and Charles Bronson at the height of their Hollywood couple fame where they were kind of cross between Dick & Liz and Burt & Lonnie. Actually, this is the time I consciously recall seeing both of them in a film besides the ubiquitous and actually a tiny bit moving PSA spot that was produced in the midst of Jill's battle with breast cancer. Maybe this was due in part to Chuck's pensive and always a little bit spooky delivery.
This film begins with a very elaborate dream sequence and that allows writer/director Frank D. Gilroy, (The Subject was Roses) to proceed into his tale a little bit off kilter. It starts deceptively simple enough. An outlaw plagued by nightmares stays at an aristocratic farmhouse a lot like the one in Days of Heaven which is owned by a very beautiful and rich widow with Boston bluebood roots. They get into some sexual power politics and then into sex and love. Then things get real different. If you think you will never see this film you can read the 750 word synopsis at the film's Wikipedia page.
It is a romantic comedy on one level, but it takes some rather curious and thought-provoking turns into themes and explorations of the nature of celebrity, identity and the power of Romanticism on human nature. It wasn't what I had expected when I thought I was beginning Charles Bronson/Jill Ireland's take on the screwball western.
From Noon Till Three can be rented at Netflix or viewed into a bunch of longish clip chapters at You Tube.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:07 AM
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