El incorregible

I just saw this hauntingly beautiful film last night on AMC. It's subtle beauty requires viewers' attention and participation. Do not watch it if you're in the mood for an easy escape film. To appreciate it you must be sensitive to facial expression and non-verbal signal. It also helps to understand a little about the culture of the South.

It works on two levels, at least:

First, it tells the story of a wife's dawning understanding of the hopelessness of her marriage and her resolve to have a good life anyway.

Second, it shows the tragedy of severe child abuse in great depth and reveals the community's culpability. I've never seen a more powerful visual metaphor than Henry's escape attempt, where camera facing him head-on, he runs furiously, climbing and clinging and failing to make it onto the back of a speeding truck.

The film juxtaposes Henry's relationship to his adopted mother to the relationship of his wife to their daughter. This loving, beautiful relationship is the pivot around which the story revolves. Henry, dull, unintelligent, abused Henry is lost, but in one area he had supreme luck (or supreme judgment). His child has what he never had, and will grow up beautifully. He could not have chosen a better mother for his daughter.

The screenplay, acting and direction are all superb.

Beautiful performances from Steve McQueen and especially Lee Remick highlight this rather sad rambling film of the type Hollywood doesn't make anymore. A small personal drama that explores the lives of regular people just struggling to make a place for themselves in the world. Nothing blows up, it's all about emotions here. Horton Foote's screenplay, based on his play, shows his customary understanding of how people react and interact with each other while Ernest Laszlo stark black and white cinematography evokes the dusty small town Texas setting in a way color never could. Something that you'd find either on the indie circuit or maybe on cable today certainly not in major markets as this was and hardly with stars of this magnitude.

This movie is short on plot, but long on attitude. As I watched this movie, I kept looking for it to take a more optimistic, even-the-bad- guys will overcome story line.

In its time, it was a remarkable realistic view of the life of someone on the outside, one who didn't fit. The images and emotions displayed all combine to help you understand those people who were not the class presidents, sports stars, or young professionals. There are no heroes in this film.

I understand that this movie is semi-biographical for Steve McQueen. I think that is why he plays his role so well.

The team that brought you To Kill A Mockingbird has also given us Baby The Rain Must Fall another southern based drama though the protagonist is hardly as admirable as Atticus Finch. Steve McQueen and Lee Remick star in this film as a married couple trying to make a new start in life after McQueen is released on parole from prison.

McQueen is a musician/singer of sorts and while I doubt he could have a career in big time country music, he doesn't have the talent to make the really big time. You won't see McQueen at the Grand Ole Opry, but he could make a respectable living doing the honky-tonks if it weren't for an ungovernable temper. In the few instances we see it displayed we never do see exactly what sets him off, the film might have been better if we had, we might understand McQueen more.

But the temper is a given and he's on parole. A wife and a daughter who the people of his Texas home town have never met and don't know the existence of, have come to join him. Lee Remick is the patient and loving wife, but she's coming slowly to the realization that this just isn't going to work.

Don Murray plays the local sheriff and a childhood friend who does what he can for McQueen. It's interesting to speculate whether Remick and Murray will get together afterward. Paul Fix has the same kind of part he did in To Kill A Mockingbird as a kindly judge.

If James Dean had lived this would have been a perfect role for him. But McQueen who had a background of foster care, who was a product of the social welfare system raising him, had a lot to draw on for his performance.

Steve McQueen did his own vocals though country singer Glenn Yarborough had a hit from the title song. Better that way then to have a real singer doing it lest the viewer think this guy has the talent to make it big.

Although this is not as good as To Kill A Mockingbird, writer Horton Foote and director Robert Mulligan did a bang up job in Baby The Rain Must Fall.

This film comes close to being something truly great. It is beautifully photographed and acted (particularly the work of Lee Remick), and the theme, not confronted head on, of child abandonment/abuse, which plays under the images, is quite powerfully evoked. The film's shortcomings are mainly mechanical: some rough transitions in the story-telling; the unsatisfactory attempts by Steve McQueen at miming to a too-professional singing voice; and the omission from the scenario of one or two more direct references to the childhood from which McQueen's dysfunctional character has emerged. Certainly, the loving inactions between Remick's character and her screen daughter, Margaret Rose, are completely convincing and form a strong counterpoint to her husband's damaged personality. But we are not sure where we should be focusing: on their relationship, on the wife and husband relationship, or on his relationship with his adoptive mother (who appears only briefly, but is the unspoken menace). Of course, this difficulty is very much part of what the film is about; however, the various relationships sit so apart from each other, the tragic impact of the one on the others is somewhat lost. I suppose it is a testament to the delicacy and understated-ness of Robert Mulligan's directorial touch (seen to greater effect in 'To Kill a Mockingbird') that this sort of reaction is called up at all. One feels this film has so much that is good, the potential is there... A reflection of its time, perhaps: while it was being made, news broke of a shooting in Dallas and the death of a young president.