The Disc Jockey
A little-seen Peckinpah gem, Disney goes to war, and more
By Noel Murray
Sam Peckinpah's 1972 neo-western Junior Bonner is one of those wonderful little discoveries that pop up if you spend any time at all perusing '70s American cinema. Like Five Easy Pieces, Payday and Cockfighter, it's a stylish character study set precariously between the modern world and earthy traditionalism. Steve McQueen plays the title character, a melancholy rodeo star returning home to compete in his Arizona small town's annual July 4th event. Peckinpah mostly lingers on long, hushed conversations between Junior and his equally bruised friends and family members; but the director also relishes the roping and riding and Independence Day pageantry, all of which he dresses up with split-screens, slow motion, freeze-frames, color washes, machine-gun edits and artful pans and push-ins.
Sam Peckinpah's 1972 neo-western Junior Bonner is one of those wonderful little discoveries that pop up if you spend any time at all perusing '70s American cinema. Like Five Easy Pieces, Payday and Cockfighter, it's a stylish character study set precariously between the modern world and earthy traditionalism. Steve McQueen plays the title character, a melancholy rodeo star returning home to compete in his Arizona small town's annual July 4th event. Peckinpah mostly lingers on long, hushed conversations between Junior and his equally bruised friends and family members; but the director also relishes the roping and riding and Independence Day pageantry, all of which he dresses up with split-screens, slow motion, freeze-frames, color washes, machine-gun edits and artful pans and push-ins.
The plot is practically nonexistent. While Junior wrangles to assure that he'll draw the bull he wants, his father Ace (played by Robert Preston) is stuck in a hospital and planning to move to Australia to mine gold, and his brother Curly (Joe Don Baker) is making money as a mobile-home magnate. The action takes place over a couple of days, as people try to persuade Junior to lend them his reputation, and Junior remains inscrutable.
Junior Bonner is a little rough and corny in spots: Curly's skeptical wife Ruth (played by Mary Murphy) is too conveniently bitchy, Junior's mother Elvira (Ida Lupino) is underused, and the movie suffers from a handful of generic brawls that seem pasted in from other westerns, dragging the pace towards the end. But on the whole the film is charmingly unassuming, full of laconic Jeb Rosebrook-penned exchanges like: "You finished second." "Well, second's better than third." MGM's new DVD edition comes with a lively commentary track featuring a trio of Peckinpah biographers. Contemporary American independent filmmakers would do well to study the movie and the conversation about it.
Also Available: Steve McQueen fans should also be overjoyed with MGM's new double-disc special edition of The Great Escape, which matches the vigor of John Sturges' 1963 WWII prison camp epic. In addition to the still-rousing main feature on disc one (complete with a commentary culled from interviews with Sturges, James Garner, James Coburn and other cast and crew members), disc two offers an incisive set of featurettes that cover the ways in which the movie takes liberties with the true-life story.
♦A couple of taut '50s thrillers have just made it to DVD in nice new editions. Image has a sharp-looking version of the 1954 public-domain mainstay Suddenly, which stars Frank Sinatra as a would-be presidential assassin eluding small-town sheriff Sterling Hayden. The action takes place almost entirely in a house near a train depot where Eisenhower will be stopping, and the claustrophobic setting and flavorful dialogue work with the briskly paced plot to make a diverting study of changing attitudes towards violence. The Janus Films disc of Joseph Losey's 1957 UK noir Time Without Pity is even better, featuring text pieces that explain the film's place as the first product of Losey's post-blacklist career, as well as tossing in Losey's bizarre, animated 1939 oil-industry propaganda short "Pete Roleum And His Friends." The movie itself is the main selling point, though, with Michael Redgrave playing an alcoholic writer trying to track down evidence that will halt his convict son's imminent execution. The casual amorality of nearly everyone he meets in his investigation drives him back to the bottle, while the ticking clock reminds him of everything his own weaknesses have kept him from accomplishing.
♦The third wave of the annual limited edition collectors' sets dubbed "Walt Disney Treasures" may be the best yet. Walt Disney On The Front Lines assembles public-service announcements, declassified training films, and the Army-themed adventures of characters like Goofy and Donald Duck, along with the rarely seen feature Victory Through Air Power, which illustrates Alex De Seversky's 1942 treatise on how the U.S. should counter Germany and Japan's aerial prowess. The instructional materials, though bone-dry at times, make fascinating documents of the times, and display some inventive animation to boot. Tomorrowland: Disney In Space And Beyond is drawn from the first two seasons of the Disneyland TV show, and presents hour-long programs like "Mars And Beyond" and "Eyes In Outer Space," which collectively have a sense of awe and optimism that makes real space travel look small and clunky. The highlight of Tomorrowland-and maybe the most moving film I've seen all year-is Walt Disney's half-hour pitch for EPCOT as he originally imagined it, as an actual working city of the future, complete with bubble-domed downtown, a radial street plan, and individualized electric-rail transportation. Disney's genius for making the artificial look friendly and livable transformed the American mallscape, and it's heartening to encounter the man's own optimistic vision, unblemished by cynicism.
♦ The last two entries in the "Walt Disney Treasures" third wave are cartoon collections: Mickey Mouse in Mickey Mouse In Living Color-Volume Two: 1939-Today (in which the rascally rodent settles into his easy chair and watches Pluto get into trouble for a change) and The Chronological Donald-Volume One: 1934-1941 (in which the flippant fowl tries to get an edge on the world, only to find that the world isn't cooperating). Leonard Maltin pops up regularly to apologize for all the drinking and minstrelsy.
♦ Early in the music documentary The Story Of The Undertones: Teenage Kicks, one of the Irish punk band's first fans talks about how he played a demo of "Teenage Kicks" every night for two months straight before his friends began to understand how great the song really is. If you're one of the many rockophiles who came to The Undertones late and have always thought of the band as a poor man's Buzzcocks, check out Sanctuary's DVD of Teenage Kicks, which combines the exhaustive hour-long biography with all of the band's videos, tracing their progression from the energized, puckish angst of the late '70s to the soulful complexity of the early '80s. It's a pop artifact designed to make converts.
