JUBAL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Gorgeous Technicolor Western Shines On Criterion's Stunning DVD & BRD.

Jubal (1956) ****
Dir. Delmer Daves
Starring: Glenn Ford, Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, Charles Bronson, Valerie French, Felicia Farr, Noah Beery, Jack Elam

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Jubal is a rip-snorter of a picture - much beloved by those who've come to know it well, but also a film that kind of slipped through the cracks over the decades. It was written and directed by Delmer Daves and those movie fans who do remember his name usually associate it with his superb western 3:10 to Yuma (a film, to put it mildly, that's worth remembering to be sure). I'm so Daves-nutty these days, that it seems thoroughly appropriate to declare that he was, without argument (I'll not accept any, anyway) one of cinema's genuinely great American directors.

Other than a few well placed pockets of support, though, it feels like Daves still hasn't garnered the kind of critical adulation that even lesser directors have been afforded. In addition to helming a couple of ultra-cool film noir melodramas, the creepy Edward G. Robinson vehicle The Red House and my own personal favourite Bogart and Bacall picture Dark Passage, Daves delivered the goods on several westerns which, frankly, are all up there with the best Anthony Mann and Robert Aldrich psycho-melodrama oaters from the same period and a couple even flit, like moths to light, against the untouchable sphere of The Searchers.

He began his career as an extremely prolific screenwriter - highly adept at shifting between genres. Much of his writing prior to his directing career involved script doctoring - sometimes credited, other times not - and though many of the pictures he wrote were by-the-numbers studio programmers, he is associated as a screenwriter on two terrific pictures, The Petrified Forest and Leo McCarey's Love Affair (the much superior 1939 original version of McCarey's 50s remake with Cary Grant An Affair To Remember).

As a director, though, Daves's star shone brightly in the sky whether we recognized it or not - he made picture after picture that so many of us loved and now, more than ever seems like the perfect time for a Daves explosion of the Super-Nova variety, especially considering that the Criterion Collection is honouring his memory with two exquisite new releases from the Daves canon - the famous aforementioned 3:10 to Yuma and the not-so-famous-but-should-be Jubal.

Jubal, might actually be the best of the two. And even if it's not really better, it's sure as shootin' way more entertaining. It's a great story - a raging, exciting melodrama driven by yearning, but tempered with loyalty and friendship. Glenn Ford is the title character - a man who's searched his whole life for a sense of family and belonging. Shep Horgan (the perpetually grinning and/or grimacing Ernest Borgnine), a gregarious cattle rancher, takes Jubal under his wing and in this lusty, friendly, kind-hearted man, our hero discovers a friend, mentor and father-figure all rolled into one.

Alas, things are never this easy for men like Jubal. Shep is married to Mae (Valerie French), a gorgeous, young trophy wife (from Canada, no less) who takes an immediate interest in our handsome, mysterious hero. This annoys Pinky Pinkum (a pudgy, sweating, ham-oozing Rod Steiger) to no end. He's been porking Mae in secret, but with Jubal's arrival, she clamps her legs tighter than a vise, hoping to spread 'em for some bone de Glenn Ford. To add insult to Pinky's injury, he witnesses how close Jubal and Shep are getting - including dinner invites in the holy matrimonial hearth of the main house. Where Pinky goes completely apoplectic is when Shep offers the Cattle Foreman position.

Things get especially rip-snorting when "Jube" (how Shep affectionately addresses our hero), though tempted by the prospects of boning sultry Mae, his, uh, boner swivels in the directed of Naomi (the insanely gorgeous Felicia Farr), a Mennonite gal whose family is camped out on Shep's spread as they search for the "promised land". Naomi, it seems, is betrothed to a rather humourless and brutish Mennonite and he begins to display some rather Un-Christian attitudes when he realizes that his honey pie is getting plumb moist over "Jube".

So, let's do the math so far:

Shep loves Mae. Mae doesn't love Shep.

Pinky was boning Mae, then she stops the boning because she really would prefer to be boned by Jube.

Jube wants to bone Naomi. She is, after all, a virgin.

The Mennonite Brute wants to bone Naomi, but Naomi wants to bone Jube.

This is turning into one hootenanny of boners. In fact, there's either gonna' be a whole lotta bonin' goin' on (in more ways than one) or no boning at all if this all adds up to a pile of bodies riddled with bullets. It all adds up to this: There are some folks who might want to make things awful difficult for Jube to get back at him for being such a prime specimen of manhood and if, for some reason, one or more of them was to steer Shep to thinkin' the wrong way about Jube, the Apocalypse will be more than nigh.

In the parlance of cowpokes everywhere: "Yeeeeeeeeehhhhhaaaaaaaaaa!"

This movie oozes with sexuality and violence and as such, is one ripe tale. Daves handles the proceedings with verve, tautness and style. Add to the boiling, roiling pot of passion a stellar cast, a fine sense of humour and stunningly gorgeous Technicolor photography, and the final sum of this equation is that Jubal is one hell of a great western.

"JUBAL" is available on Blu-Ray or DVD in an absolutely stunning new transfer via the Criterion Collection.

PART II of GREG KLYMKIW'S GUIDE: How to raise your child with the highest degree of cinema literacy!

IF YOU HAVEN'T READ PART ONE YET, CLICK HERE

In this edition of "How To Make Your Child Cinema Literate" you'll see why and how classic product (like that of Walt Disney), will instil a high degree of cinema literacy within your child, thus arming the happy toddler with the supreme taste it'll require to take out every inferior child within the sphere of its peers. For example, Disney's immortal SONG OF THE SOUTH, is difficult to acquire nowadays because it's been unfairly treated with pariah-like status by narrow-minded politically correct fascists. They myopically refuse to acknowledge that children learn so much more about the history of our world (AND art) when they're presented with unexpurgated and CONSTANT exposure to materials that display the highest degrees of aesthetic excellence, yet often represent perspectives which. in contemporary society are indeed no longer acceptable. The bottom line, dearest reader, is that your child will not become a lemming if YOU aren't a lemming yourself. So read on, learn and apply with fortitude and no shame.

PART II

How To Make Your Child Cinema Literate

Commentary and Guide by Greg Klymkiw

If you don't want your child to become a Philistine, herewith as promised is PART TWO of the handy-dandy Klymkiw Film Corner treatise on coaching select parents and their even more select children to ensure the utmost level of cinema literacy in one's progeny. I realize that most of you can't cut the mustard, and though I bear you no ill will or malice, it's important to avoid eventual heartache and just give up now if you're one of those miserable cretins who are beneath those who have the ability to positively take from this advice and make the most of their children's futures. For you who are, indeed of a superior persuasion, you're in the right place. Here you'll find tips, tricks and some viewing suggestions that allowed MY own child to choose the ideal fork in the road.

And maybe, just maybe, yours too.

In the parlance of Michael Haneke: ROTFLMFAO!

SILENT, 2-strip & 3-strip TECHNICOLOR and B&W - ONLY

1. Pre-birth and Toddler Years

Before your child is even born, there are two important things you must do. First of all, place the mother of the child in front of your home entertainment system and screen all the acceptable motion pictures - repeatedly if need be, since this will also be beneficial to the carrier of your seed. If possible, the Mother's belly should be as close to the monitor as possible. This might not work for those who use wall-mounted monitors and/or massive pull-down screens, but do your best. (A well-placed ladder could work wonders here.)

Secondly, prepare viewing lists for the first 2-to-3 years of the child's life. For home viewing, nothing on my list went beyond the release date of the mid-1960s and most were well before that date. Keep in mind that the list must be used as strictly as possible, but I do allow some leeway if the list is used as a springboard to show the child contemporary work inspired by the directors in question.

If, for example, you're going through a period where you're screening an abundance of Warner Brothers gangster films, I'd be delighted to hear that you also screened some select Martin Scorsese pictures for your toddler - notably Mean Streets and Goodfellas. My own child was especially enamoured with the latter title, so I screened it for her repeatedly, BUT made sure to ALWAYS sprinkle said screenings with palate-cleansers like White Heat, The Roaring Twenties, City For Conquest, Scarface (the Howard Hawks version, obviously) and The Public Enemy.

After screening THE PUBLIC ENEMY, it was especially delightful seeing the child at age 2, slicing a variety of citrus fruits and attempting, like Mr. Cagney, pictured above, to grind them into the face of her mother. You, like I, MUST gently chastise the child by saying, "Now, now, your Mommy isn't Mae Clarke."

At the end of the day, though, I always made sure that a good many of the films were silent and if they were "talkies", I favoured  those that were shot in monochrome (black and white for those of the uninitiated persuasion).

John Ford's HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY is a GREAT movie to show your children as early in their lives as you possibly can (and then repeat viewings every 6 months or so until they begin choosing it themselves as a movie to watch repeatedly). It's also a wonderful film to discuss composition, lighting and overall mise-en-scene with your kids since it might well be one of the most gorgeously photographed B&W movies ever made. Its cinematographer was the immortal 7-time Oscar nominee and 3-time Oscar winner Arthur Charles Miller.

The only colour films on this list (save for contemporary exceptions noted above) are choice classics photographed in original two-or-three-strip Technicolor.

David O. Selznick's GONE WITH THE WIND is a perfect movie to begin showing your child as early as possible. It's replete with one shot after another that will allow you to examine and explain to your child why real Technicolor was and still is better than any other colour film stock, but that sadly, this process was abandoned many years ago.

NEVER discriminate with respect to genre - musicals, drama, comedy, horror, western, romance, documentary, neorealism - all are fine so long as they stay within the aforementioned parameters. Remain true to your lists with only minor variants that are mere springboards from whatever is on them.

RABBIT EARS ONLY

2. Broadcast Television in Moderation

If you must have broadcast television available, do NOT under any circumstance allow cable television in the home. Use rabbit ears ONLY and make sure you set the channel changer to only carry programming like Teletubbies. When the child is asleep, I highly recommend you fire up a dubie and view Teletubbies all by your lonesome - alone, mind you - no need to corrupt your child. Other people's miserable children will do a good job in the corruption department. (A constant challenge to the bearer of superior parenting skills.)

TELETUBBIES 4 ALL!!!

There really are only two acceptable broadcast choices:

(A.) TVO (educational TV in Ontario - if your province does not have educational TV, you lose and if you're American, PBS is not much of a substitute for the excellence and superiority of Canadian public EDUCATIONAL television, but it will have to do I'm afraid and if you're one of my ridiculously huge number of readers in Europe, I know most of you DO have excellent public broadcasting of all kinds).

A JUBILEE OF CBC

(B.) CBC (in Canada, this is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, our national public television network - however, since my dear cousin Slawko Klymkiw stopped being the Head of Programming after he got an un-requested ass-fucking for the top-job, the programming became shittier and shittier due to - ahem - "visionaries" - so it's much harder these days, save for some exceptions, to recommend this option, and for my American readers, you're pretty much fucked and my European readers, you already know the score, so go for it).

SIR NATURE BOY TO YOU!

Programming choices in Canada for the aforementioned can ONLY be early morning Children's programming, documentaries (preferably "nature" docs - others are fine, but kids fucking LOVE animals, go figure) and extremely select dramatic shows. Programming choices for Americans are nil, though PBS will do if you narrow the choices to nature and select British mystery series. And, uh, you Europeans can pretty much let anything play in your home that's on your publicly owned networks.

3. What movies can your nippers see

In movie theatres, take them to everything and anything (except contemporary Disney, though selective Pixar titles are fine). Screw babysitters. Children's admission prices are free up until two years old (but if you shove a baby bottle in the child's mouth and caution them to NEVER talk, you can stretch the freebies out until they're four years of age). Also, never buy anything at the cinema, just sneak in your own beverages and munchies and if you're really smart, it's not impossible to scope out free or reasonable parking. The myth of how much it could cost you to go to the movies is just that - a myth. 

Censorship is, of course, verboten.

That said, toddlers and pre-teens might be better off if you chose not to screen the following titles: 

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
Probably NOT a Good Idea 2 Show 2 Kids #1

SALO: THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM
Probably NOT a Good Idea 2 Show 2 Kids #2

NEKROMANTIK
Probably NOT a Good Idea 2 Show 2 Kids #3

THE LION KING
Probably NOT a Good Idea 2 Show 2 Kids #4

4. Animation: To show or not to show?

Animation poses a special challenge since the bad stuff is REALLY awful, yet all little nippers love cartoons - they really, really do and most importantly you cannot leave animation out if your goal is to boost their cinema literacy. Well, don't fret. That's why I'm here, folks.

The following animation is acceptable for your child:

Anything by the Fleischer Brothers - includes Popeye, Betty Boop and their many one-offs, the Somewhere in Dreamland-styled Talkartoons

Anything by Jan Švankmajer

Anything by the Brothers Quay

Anything by Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli

Any Anime & Manga, but skip pictures involving demons with 20-foot-long penises chasing after pre-teen girls. Anime has tons of violent sexual imagery, so you might wish to pass on anything featuring rape. (For live-action drama - Deliverance and A Clockwork Orange are obvious exceptions to this rule. They're movies all kids must see!)

PART I of GREG KLYMKIW's Two-Part Guide: "How to raise your child to be cinema literate"

How To Raise Your Child To Be Cinema Literate - PART I

By Greg Klymkiw

I'm proud to say that at the age of 18 months, the first movie my daughter ever saw in her life was the thrilling 1963 fantasy-adventure film Jason and the Argonauts (directed by Don - One Million Years B.C. - Chaffey and featuring the jaw-dropping stop-motion effects of the legendary Ray Harryhausen). The second movie during this momentous DVD double feature at home, was none other than It (1927) that delightful, bubbly silent romance starring Clara Bow.

Do you see a pattern forming? No? Are you, perchance, a fucking moron? Can you, as an adult (who should know better) not see that one movie is sans sterile digital special effects, but is instead created with hand-crafted models animated one frame at a time by human beings who must painstakingly move, light and compose the shots whilst meticulously maintaining all the levels and continuity during the gruelling PHYSICAL process of rendering the models on FILM to life? Have you, like some gibbering gibbon, been unable to grasp the simple fact that the other film was in black and white and SILENT, save for the organ accompaniment grafted onto the track of sound to reproduce what it might have been like to see the movie on a huge standard-frame screen, projected onto it from highly explosive nitrate stock in a massive 2000-seat picture palace with some musically gifted genius playing to the images before him? I thought not. THAT, my friend, is why YOUR child will become a cinema-illiterate idiot with a huge mushroom lodged in its skull instead of a cerebellum.

He, who eyes the target of his utter DISGUST

Looking DOWN upon the target of DISGUST

Need I remind you what Roman Polanski as Trelkovsky said to the whining brat who'd lost his toy boat during that seminal moment in The Tenant? You don't?

Idiot!

Just before slugging the little bugger across the face he horked out the following vitriol: "Filthy little brat!" with a delivery ONLY Polanski could pull off - "FEELTHEE, LEETOL BRAT!" (The last word spat out like a snake's venom with the deliciously rolled Eastern European "R").

BABY BOTTLES of GRAPE JUICE & PAMPERS

The first movie my daughter ever saw in a movie theatre not long after the aforementioned DVD double-bill was Peter Weir's gorgeously directed historical swashbuckler Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). Let me tell you: The child was transfixed. Of course, as courteous parents we made sure she was armed with baby bottles full of grape juice and disposable diapers to both keep her quiet and to deal with any natural, shall we say, expunging of the liquid matter processed through her bladder (the latter keeping the child from insisting upon endless trips to the bathroom and ruining the experience for herself, her parents and other patrons - HINT! HINT! To all you idiots who drag your kids to the cinema and don't do likewise). This all, I must add, transpired during a late screening time after a full day of activity, no less. When the movie was over, she wanted to see another.

Great Musical from an unsung American auteur and a film my daughter fell in love with, using Doris Day's spirited rendering of the title character as a role model and mining the copious bounty of its terrific director's other fine work.

Jason and the Argonauts, IT! and Master and Commander were my child's first movie experiences and from there they got better and better. (I know, I shared them, so to speak, with her.) The child's cinematic influences and delights were as varied as the number of insect groups populating our Earth. One of her earliest obsessions - in addition, let me add, to Polanski - was the tremendous 50s musical Calamity Jane starring the effervescent Doris Day as the tomboy-ish, buckskin-adorned, sharp shootin', Injun' fightin' little filly who gets so googly-eyed over the handsome, studly Wild Bill Hickock (Howard Keel, 'natch) that she realizes how important it is for a woman to learn how to be a REAL woman. The film is exuberantly directed by the fine, sadly unsung American auteur David Butler who delivered hit after hit after hit for over 30 years before becoming a prolific director of many of the best works from American TV's Golden Age.

His features included Ali Baba Goes to Town with the brilliant Eddie Cantor, the glorious part-talkie musical comedy extravaganza Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 that features an early appearance from comic genius Stepin Fetchit, Road to Morocco, the third and absolute best of the Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour "Road" comedies and among many, many other delicious cinematic bon bons, Butler was the go-to-guy for Shirley Temple and helmed many of her biggest and most beloved hits. My little girl watched Calamity Jane all the way through about 100 times, but this did not include all the times she'd replay the sprightly musical numbers. It wasn't, however, prudent as a parent to allow the child to watch Calamity Jane repeatedly WITHOUT introducing her to Butler's stellar canon. This, she surely appreciated as all his films offered first-tier entertainment value.

Funny Things Happen in Morocco. VERY funny!!!

The child's taste in movies was varied and, if I do say myself, she was well on her way to cinema literacy. That said, she required someone to gently guide her through 100 years of movie history. Unlike other parents, I took special care with what she was allowed to see. I wished desperately that others would do the same. I recall how often I'd find myself needing to viciously stare down any miserable miscreants of the bairn persuasion who demanded to see the latest Pixar or Disney animated trifle and, as is my wont, I'd drill holes of ocular hatred into all those cretinous little bastards who'd say, "Eeeew, that's not in colour" or worse, "Why are those special effects so cheesy?"

Fuck them!

Fuck them and whatever rotting hobby-horses they rode in on.

Whenever I heard such ignorance spewing from the mouths of bone-brained cinema-illiterate whelps such as these, my first impulse was, in the tradition of Polanski's Trelkovsky, to smash them with a motherfucker of a roundhouse to the face. I would restrain myself, though, for these offending dribblings were clearly the product of nurture, not nature. Nine times out of ten, I had no need to effect corporal punishment since the fault of these grotesque atrocities of taste were, in actuality (and in a less charitable age referred to as freaks of nature), wholly derived from the miserable progenitors of these innocents.

These breeders with careless abandon were solely and with nary a doubt in my sharp mind, the dregs, the reprehensible and UTTERLY STINKING, RANCID FILTH, who truly deserved my ire.

When my daughter was a toddler she'd wake me up every morning at 4 or 5 with the delightfully demanding words, “Movie! On!” And believe you me, it was MY distinct pleasure. Exposing oneself (and one’s children) to only the best not only results in developing exquisite taste in motion picture product (and pretty much everything else) but it allows for an acute awareness of what is truly mediocre. If a child is capable of this, anyone is. Most importantly, such exposure allows for the development of the highest degree of critical analysis. The following example I provide is proof positive of such critical acumen a child is capable of.

A VERY FOOLISH MAN

At age four, I fondly remember when the child joined me for lunch with a film critic/professor pal of mine and sat mutely as we discussed, among other important issues of the day, Raoul Walsh’s magnificent They Died With Their Boots On (starring Errol Flynn as General George Armstrong Custer). This happened to be a film she had, at the time, just seen. During this confab of middle-aged geek discourse, she was finally compelled to interject with the remarkable assertion that General Custer was “a foolish man” and not unlike “Peter Rabbit”. (Yes, believe it or not, I never deprived the child of fine cinema or literature beloved by children the world over. I read Beatrix Potter to her nightly.)

My pal, an American raised to believe that Custer was a heroic military defender of all that was right with might in the making of his country and NOT the perpetrator of mass genocide against the First Nations, queried my child on her admittedly contentious pronouncement and she calmly explained that just as Peter Rabbit unwisely ventured into Mr. MacGregor’s garden where his departed father had been captured and killed by the merciless rabbit-hunting Scotsman, so did General Custer unwisely venture into the Battle of Little Big Horn where he and all his men were spectacularly defeated by the armies of the Sioux Nation. My pal of the American persuasion nodded his head solemnly, lamenting that his own undergraduate students were unable to make similarly astute observations about movies (“or anything, for that matter”, he quipped).

Now before you jump to any conclusions I must state (in my defense) that I never attempted to indoctrinate the child (just as I would never attempt to indoctrinate anyone). My daughter developed this appetite for cinema all on her own. Though I did prepare and ultimately urge her to adhere to strict viewing lists during her youngest years, I did so to ensure well-roundedness.

Not to indoctrinate.

As she enters her tweener years, my dear child has seen over 4000 movies. Even now, she can occasionally point out stylistic traits in certain directors and has developed a great photographic eye. This pleases me greatly (though I do hope she'll eventually be a doctor or lawyer with great taste in movies, literature and art).

Ultimately, I do think that chances are pretty good, given the fine Ukrainian blood coursing through her veins, that she'd have come by all of this quite naturally, but I do suspect her phenomenal cinema literacy came a lot quicker, thanks mostly to my superior form of parenting.

If you don't want your child to become a Philistine, check out Part II of this treatise in the next edition of Klymkiw Film Corner where I'll offer tips, tricks and viewing lists that allowed MY own child to choose the ideal fork in the road. Maybe, yours too. LOL

Here is PART II of this important Guide HERE. If you're interested, feel free to read my daughter's movie reviews at this site. Her review of Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" is HERE, her review of "Jaws" is HERE and her review of "Mirror Mirror" is HERE.

Further readings on my methodologies can be found in the following important tomes:

Psychopathia Sexualis
by Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing

The Ethics of the Dust
by John Ruskin

Là-Bas
by Joris-Karl Huysmans

L'histoire de l'oeil
by Georges Bataille

Les Chants de Maldoror
by the Comte de Lautréamont

Chicken Soup for the Soul
eds. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

PART II CAN BE FOUND BY CLICKING HERE






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