Quinoa1984

All That Money Can Buy sits as a wonderful sort of accessible middle ground between the ultra German Expressionism of like Murnau's Faust (you reading this might go, a silent film, heck I need sound in my cinema movie) and something a little more like a Fairy Tale as a piece of Gothic Americana like Night of the Hunter. While I'm not sure I could argue this film being greater than either of those, this is worth watching still to this day for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the world of Folk Horror. I wont claim to be an expert on that sub genre, but this definitely feels like it has an essential place in that pantheon.

Probably that's because of how rich and starkly the filmmaker William Dieterle takes the sides of Good and Bad, and how easy it is for a man to go towards corruption because of money, sure, but also influence and power and just stuff in general. We see naive and stalwart Jabez (Craig, who looks so All American as they can get I wouldn't be surprised if he was an understudy for Gregory Peck or Gary Cooper at one time or another) fall prey to Mr Stitch (Walter Huston in his second greatest work after Sierra Madre), who promises him riches for seven years after Jabez has a dire moment in his barn over giving up his soul for two cents.

He gets riches but he also loses all the heart and love that he has with his true love, Mary (Anne Shirley, quite good in a tricky role where she puts up with a lot and really tries to understand Jabez even, specially when, he turns even more foolish and pals around with the maid-cum-harlot Belle), and with his mother (Darwell, fresh off the Joad farm and so pure in her line readings and performance you hang on every syllable she's that good) doubting his bad ways most of all. There is a lot of speeches and clunky dialog in the middle of the film that date things a little much and I was worried that the movie would possibly get bogged down in exposition over Jabez's blasted soul and the sides of bad and good.

I was still with the film though and always impressed by the emphasis on shadows and almost early film-noir level Expressionism in the lighting and framing if many scenes - like Night of the Hunter it's a film that straddles the line between Noir and Horror like any piece of Folsky Americana, though this is New England vs the South - but then Edward Arnold as Daniel Webster, Man of New Hampshire, comes more into focus and comes to the defense of our poor lead, and the film clicked into a stronger place. Some may even make the criticism I just did that the final monologue is just one overlong speech, but Arnold at that defense in the court is so powerful because he is speaking to what is in the proverbial National Character and he's got dialog that you want to believe in.

Is it possible to be too cynical and on the side of Mr. Scratch? Sure. But that's what the movie is at heart about; being tested and really facing the fact that without a soul life has little meaning, past the shallow facade of things and immediate wants and gluttony, is a challenge and one that many are going to face in their lives, and the opening text speaks to that (more for men than women but likely them sometimes too). It's easy for Devil and Daniel Webster to turn into sentimental tripe, but Dieterle latches on to something that, and I'm sure Darwell being there isn't all a coincidence, John Steinbeck did as well in Grapes of Wrath: men who work the farms and plains and spend their lives having to work for a living will be tempted by sin, maybe have to be, and some are also going to fail. Will someone come back from it?

This is classic Gothic Americana and I'm glad I finally got around to it, up to an including that Bernard Herrmann score (won the Oscar for that instead of Kane, which is funny as some of the themes are slightly, if you listen carefully, just like the eerie tones from Kubla Khan... don't forget it isn't a trick to make money if all you want... is to make money).

Black Bag is a sleek and inscrutable Espionage Thriller with such a tried and true idea at the center - John LeCarre of course cooked this up, but so did the franchise writer Koepp was involved in at the start, Mission: Impossible, which is: someone has this list, someone has this special formula that will tear apart this or that country and what will become of the operatives, who will turn on who - that the filmmakers understand and take full opportunity that this set up really is an excuse to get some great actors some sharply written characters.

It's also a crackling-good example of how Hitchcock did it to the point of a whole type of film being named after him: what *that* part of the story is about isn't anywhere near what the audience cares about - it's about what, say, Grant and Bergman are going to do talking around it and in kissing one another until, ok fine, back to the story and the MacMuffin or whatever it's called. Black Bag has one of those, and it has oodles of style, but more than anything it has a terrific - but execution-dependant - script, a game cast, and a director returning to and finding new life and ideas in material he's explored before, chiefly: how does a marriage work when put under the strain of trust?

And it's interesting to see that Soderbergh wasn't sure initially how to pull off two very long and essential dinner set pieces hosted by the main married couple, George and Catherine (Fassbinder and Blanchett, as playful and deadpan and funny and deathly serious as they've ever been, and romantic to boot), who are spies in an agency where one may watch the other and the other watching them, but now that it comes down to this all-sacred Lives at Stake list, their marriage will be tested.

Those dinner scenes could be stock and dry in another or lesser director's hands. What Soderbergh shows and how he rises to the challenge there, as throughout this quite talky but always engaging story, is to ask himself and then answer through camera and editing just this: what is the scene about, yes, but what is this next moment or exchange about (Burke and Marisa Abela, wow), who's point of view do we need to recognize now, and what will become significant so that if we return to it later it's not just repeating for the sake of it all? There are plenty of quiet moments here too, times where it's Fassbender thinking on a lake with his fishing line, but even there notice when he cuts back to the fishing line, the subtle ways to give Mary Ann Bernard what she needs on the edits.

And then there are those Polygraph scenes late in the film. By the time we get to those beats between Fassbender and the other actors, Soderbergh and Koepp have set everything up with these players (not counting Catherine, who George of course is not including in the lie detection test because, after all, they're even tighter by that point than ever), it's all so masterful and delightful because it's less about story and more about behavior. Did I also mention much of this is as funny as anything in an Ocean's movie, albeit at a dry-as-sandpaper level? Even a shot of a live fish about to be cut open feels like a set up to something that is paid off seconds later.

I could perhaps presume, as with Soderbergh's long-ago debut film, Sex Lies and Videotape, that there's something personal being worked out in this story, or just something the director sees in this material on some deeper level that hasn't been explored through this genre in such this way (having Fassbender in an icy-cool manner through much of this is meaningful too, especially because there are times that his George does get unnerved and uneasy and even scared, maybe at himself and how he may react more than his fears over Catherine).

I think sensing that personal touch, especially when it comes to what one holds in and holds back and then let's out emotionally, in Black Bag is enough and what is so awesome is because of what the script has to say about a marriage, how much trust is bent in one way and then comes right back around the other way. It's a story of X chemical winding up in Y's hands (though even here there is some taut and relevant political commentary as well visa vi Russia and its war in Ukraine with barely showing more than... two Russians?) And we are riveted because on one level Page can deliver exposition like nobody's business as well as Harris can give a good diagnoses and all these characters form this set (Side Effects comes to mind too).

It's also about how compelling a dynamic is between a couple and anyone who has been together long enough know how strong that dynamic has to be to endure. Or, to put it in my own way, when you're married you'll understand the importance of giving/receiving a back scratch. So, do come to Black Bag for what we come to hope Soderbergh/Andrews/Bernard will deliver on stylistically (wonderful score too, by the by, taut and clever on its own), but stay for a sharp and biting and ultimately really heartfelt examination of how to be in a relationship and how the act of spy-craft itself becomes a sort of metaphor for that.

As the kids say, a "Banger."

My first hot off the stove take is that while I could never say truly that this is a greater film than The Searchers, I will put forward that it has a better balance between the drama - which is often quite sad and disparities and sometimes quite harrowing - and the comedic bits, which flows mostly from the timing of Willis Bouchey of the court martial and his "water," which is certainly not that, and from his interactions with Billie Burke. My second hot take is the reveal in the climax of this is... really wild.

Watching Sergeant Rutledge so soon, like within days, of also seeing Judge Priest is quite the study in contrasts while being from the same artist and filmmaker - and these both being stories that end up as courtroom sagas may be a coincidence but I have to wonder if it occurred to Pappy Ford (albeit he did his own sort of remake of JP as The Sun Shines Bright, his own personal favorites of his work before this). They are set in different parts of America and one is much lighter and more irreverent in tone, but Rutledge in particular is distinguished not just for the filmmaker specifically but for the time itself that a Black man is in a story about identity and dignity and how quickly judgment is passed because, you know, it was a different time.

It's frankly a good thing that someone like Ford, who was very much into traditions and such when it came to how familys and communities come together and thrive and the poetry to be found in behavior, could change with the times; the Ford who had Stepin Fetchit chucking and jiving and mumbling through his role is not the same Ford who puts Woody Strode, who never had a real leading role like this before and is performing this much closer to someone with Actor's studio intensive training (he was an athlete before being an actor and his physicality on screen is impressive), front and center with as much if not more screen time than his white co-star Jeffrey Hunter (who is pretty good, if a slightly greater star was in the role this could be almost up there with Liberty Valance as a major late work).

There is also the complexity in the fact that Sergeant Rutledge, which is told in flashbacks and there are points of view that jump around in not quite entirely a linear manner (making this almost Ford's Rashomon, kind of, maybe AK was an unlikely but surefire influence), shows Rutledge and a troop of other Black officers in the cavalry, the "Buffalo Soldiers" as they were called, and they too are written and played to be full of dimension and vitality and sadness and when one of them dies in Rutledge's arms it's a real tragic moment... while at the same time showing the Apaches as vicious and the ones we are supposed to root for being gunned down, regardless of what their function in the story as being obstacles and threats.

Those images can't ever not be loaded with their own context - and this is still not that far removed from the towering ultra-complicated work of The Searchers and there is more humanity even as they're the antagonists of that story given to them there than here - but that's not a hindrance to finding so much to admire and like here.

The court-martial scenes are thrilling and engaging and, yeah, sometimes disarmingly funny and that juggling of tones is wonderful to see Ford able to pull off (kudos to Carleton Young who I think may be underrated here), and the scenes where Hunter and Strode have face to face conversations in the flashbacks and they are especially strong together. Constance Towers may just be more okay in her role compared to the men, but even she gets a few moments to show some deeper contemplation about how rough things have been for her and what she's lost.

This is all to say that I was hoping for this film to be a good Ford Western and, to be sure, you have those shots in Monument Valley where it's half the location and more this uncanny poetic sensibility that the director has in putting figures and shapes in those spaces that always feels so special; I was more amazed by the depths of humanity that Ford and the writers strip bare for us to see in this story, how much race and perception and how twisted around masculinity gets when it's threatened by this "other" race especially when it's clear that hate is and always will be an excuse. Ford could get pulled into more conservative ideals in his work, but this is powerful and moving since it has a dedication to the dignity of representation without being preachy.