Bob-321

This movie starts at A and never quite reaches B. Its title promises far more than the film delivers. It's superficial and filled with the usual cliches of a story in which a guy questions his sexuality. The people are agreeable, even the obligatory flamboyant type. The lead (Kevin McKidd) overacts insofar as there's a reason for him to act at all. Simon Callow, playing a horny straight, is always worth watching, and he's by far the only reason to stay with the movie. However, the rubbish about his men's group "meditations" or whatever they are grows extremely tiresome in short order. They seem to have been thrown into the movie's mild mix in a misguided effort to vary the setting and non-stop inaction. The same comment applies to a really odd and unconvincing camping trip. Don't worry about pausing the tape so you can get a snack. Let the thing run; you won't miss anything. Hugo Weaving's character is superfluous. He appears in a sequence with one of the lesser leads and doesn't even meet the rest at all. The outcome of that sequence isn't explained, and Hugo's real estate dealings have nothing to do with the story. The movie is a total disappointment at the end, because there is no resolution. The thing simply fades out and we're sent to the closing credits. This is an interlude with no structure.

It's very difficult to discuss this terrible movie without giving away more of the story than a reviewer properly should. Maltin says it was panned when it first came out. That's readily understandable. He adds that it's since become a classic. That isn't. `Valance' is seriously flawed in almost every aspect, although the huge cast is filled with fine, familiar faces, John Ford regulars. Jimmy Stewart and Vera Miles are peerless. Lee Marvin is a marvelous sneering heavy. His villainy is never explained; he's just pure evil. He plays Liberty, by the way, and the originality of the name is one of the movie's few interesting points. The entire film is cast as a flashback, a clumsy device that accomplishes absolutely nothing. We're given a climactic – but amateurishly devised – flashback within the flashback. The story is a mishmash of several stillborn plot lines. An eastern tenderfoot (Stewart) in the Old West is befriended by a swaggering John Wayne, who of course has a heart of gold. There's an inevitable love triangle, assumed by the audience but never actually dramatized. There's an underdeveloped conflict between homesteaders and open-range cattlemen in a quest for statehood. The territory isn't named. Presumably it's Arizona, since a few fake saguaros are stuck here and there in the infrequent location shots. At one point, some lines are quoted from the Declaration of Independence, and Jefferson is named as the (principal) writer. But the quote is said to be from the Constitution. Superb research there. Even the splendid John Ford slips seriously in leading us to believe an important character has died when he hasn't. It's a flat-out error in direction, or perhaps – to be kind – an uncorrectable result of a last-minute rewrite. The inept cut that ends the `deathbed' scene only makes the mistake more obvious. Long before the welcome end of the film, so many artistic failures had accumulated that I found it hard to pay attention to the screen, despite the eminently talented people involved. The writers are not included in this group. It's generous not even to name them.

If anyone wants to see an excellent movie made before the banner cinematic year of 1939, this would be a film to watch. It could hardly have gone wrong, with David O. Selznick as producer and John Cromwell as director. And a superlative cast of popular stalwarts, mostly from Hollywood's British colony. Ronald Colman is his usual smooth and accomplished self in a dual role, King Rupert (of some fictitious country) and look-alike Englishman Rudolph Rassendyll, very distant cousins. The scenes in which he faces himself onscreen – called `trick photography' then – are remarkable for the period. Lovely Madeleine Carroll plays a princess, betrothed to the king. Her equal in elegance and beauty wasn't seen on the screen again until Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews. Many critics have praised Douglas Fairbanks, jr, as a likeable rogue. He's very good, in an easy role. My applause goes to the two stars. The film is a glamorous combination of romance, spectacle and adventure. Don't even dream of realism; there was too much realism in ordinary life during most of the Thirties. This is a grand escape to a time and place that never were. If I had to pick a favorite scene in the film, it would be the famous entrance of Colman and Carroll into the coronation ball. The shot opens on the couple, walking fast, arm in arm, directly toward us. The camera pulls back and back and BACK until the grand staircase of the palace and the entire ballroom, filled with people, are revealed. Visually and technically, this single fluid shot is a stunning achievement. It shows us the creative work that could be done at the time, by hugely talented artists, long before the advent of zoom lenses and computer graphics. Elegance and class are not hallmarks of most current movies. `The Prisoner of Zenda' (1937) is a stylish and very satisfying example – a symbol, perhaps – of what escapist entertainment can be. And of what it could and should be, now and then, even today.