I’m happy to report that I have gotten everything watched I had to this weekend, but didn’t have time to do more. Here are my brief reviews of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Grapes of Wrath, Harvey and two more episodes of Torchwood.

So, here is what I watched this weekend:

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

What an original and compelling concept. Having never heard much about the film despite its Oscar to Gig Young, I found it most unusual and certainly most interesting. The story is set during the Great Depression where desperate people would do anything to scrape up a few coins. The film itself focuses on a dance competition where over one hundred couples hope to take home $1,500 by putting themselves through physical pain and discomfort. There are several couples we spend a great deal of time watching including a pregnant woman and her husband, a vain starlet hoping to catch her big break, a World War I sailor and his girlfriend, and a determined young woman and the young man off the street whom she pulls in at the last minute when then man she arrived with is disqualified due to health problems.

Most of the performances are quite special with Susannah York as the starlet leading the pack. Strangely enough, Fonda as the determined young woman with no real background, to me, is one of the weaker performers, never creating an emotional tie to her frequently abrasive character. Seeing films in a non-chronological order, it makes it hard for me not to picture Fonda in one of her in the many dramatic roles giving this same performance regularly. There are a few scenes, such as the two where contestants are forced to speed walk for 10 minutes to avoid a triple elimination, where she lets herself go with the character, but soon after she gets forceful and energetic in ways that don’t feel natural, though were revelatory for many at the time, this being her first major dramatic role. I can see why some might have wanted Gig Young to have an Oscar for such a dour role, and he’s good in it, but he’s out classed by two others : Red Buttons, as the aging sailor and Bruce Dern as the pregnant woman’s husband.

The performances certainly enhance the film, but the story itself is what draws me to the film. Spending the length sequestered in this massive auditorium as dozens of spectators filter in and out watching these despairing people try to eke out a few meager pennies for their entertainment. To have an entire film locked into such a small, confined space is a daring thing, but director Sydney Pollack does admirably well with the subject. It’s not often you get to see another side to the miserable stories of the Great Depression which seemed to focus mostly on hard up farmers, and this one does an excellent job exploring the deplorable events that catered to the wealthy and used the poor masses to provide that entertainment. And those closing scenes where Young asks Fonda and her partner to get married on the floor and afterward are so shocking and depressing that it makes the entire competition feel like a circus of greed. Although some of the scenes seem surreal and the entire opening credits featuring the horse in the field seem more like part of a distinct era of filmmaking than as a part of a grander whole. So, the film doesn’t always feel like one of universal appeal, it’s a film everyone should see at least once.

The Grapes of Wrath

It may shock many of you that I had never seen The Grapes of Wrath before. It’s definitely not the type of film I enjoy watching and since the likelihood of a feature about the Oklahoma dust bowl and Great Depression being, well, depressing, also kept me from wanting to pop this one in. I’m glad that I did wait because I’m afraid that as a younger viewer I might have dismissed the film entirely instead of in just a few small ways as I will be doing today. The film focus on a family of 10 Oklahoma farmers moving hundreds of miles west in the desperate hope of finding employment in the boom towns of California. Forced off their land during the dust bowl area by greedy landlords wanting to decrease overhead by eliminating their tenant farmers, the Joads try to make a life for themselves along with the thousands of others moving out west.

There are two performances that stand out from the film. The first is that of Henry Fonda whose Tom Joad, a paroled murderer who returns home to find his family has been forced to move away, generally comes off as a strong central character. The main problem with Fonda’s performance is that in the first 30 minutes, he seems far too worldly and wealthy to be playing Tom Joad. As the film goes on, that presence quietly shifts into the character, but often I was reminded that I was watching Fonda give a performance, not watching Fonda as Tom Joad. And while the rest of the actors are good enough and John Carradine is the best of them, they don’t hold up well against Darwell or Fonda.

The second performance of import is that of Jane Darwell who plays Ma Joad, the film’s emotional core. Through her, you can see all the hope and desperation of the family. You witness the conviction, the passion and the sorrow and you’re almost convinced this could have been your mother. However, there are so many scenes where John Ford brings us in close-up of Darwell who lets her two decades of silent work mar her facial expressions with overwrought sentimentality. These scenes are thankfully few and are more than made up for in her lonely scene sitting in front of a mirror next to the woodfire stove. As she’s perusing her memories attempting to choose what she can throw away and what she should keep, she finds a pair of earrings that remind her of how things used to be. It’s perhaps one of the single most powerful scenes I’ve seen on film and reminds me of the lonely telephone chat in Make Way for Tomorrow.

The film itself has its powerful moments and tells an important saga that, in 1940, would have been far closer to the emotional spirit of the people of the time. And while it may not have that entire impact today, there are similarities to our current financial crisis with foreclosures and high unemployment forcing desperate families to do what they have to do to survive. It’s an important lesson and, if I thought corporate executives had hearts, I’d say this should be required viewing for them, but their greed knows as little bounds today as it did to those shysters in California over-employing themselves and paying less to do so. While there are several scenes that haunt, there are several that inspire, but a few that feel a teensy bit phony.

Harvey

It’s an interesting story about a grown man with a pooka spirit in the form of a 6’3″ rabbit named Harvey. The problem is that no one can see Elwood P. Dowd’s imaginary companion, but as the film shows, sometimes the imaginary can influence the lives of those around them.

James Stewart delivers a spot-on performance as the friendly Dowd. Having perfected it no doubt on the British stage, it comes as little surprise that he does so well with it. Yet, he’s surrounded by a good, but not great supporting cast including Oscar winner Josephine Hull whose manic performance is fun, but not nearly as impressive as an Oscar winner should be. Playing the seemingly sane Elwood’s uptight and repressed sister is a bit of a challenge, but any number of actresses in that period could have carried it off that well. That she also carried over from the stage production may have been a factor in the decision.

The film is certainly amusing at times and had they left the audience with the impression that Harvey was entirely a figment of Elwood’s imagination instead of giving them several clues that he was real, it might have carried a bit more weight with me. As it stands, I find it a good movie, but like it’s supporting cast, not great. Entertaining as it may be, I was not emotionally invested with the characters, I couldn’t have cared less if Harvey had gotten so tired of it all he had just run off. He is still a nice representation of the power within us all to embellish and enhance the lives of those around us, even those whose lives are not the most benevolent or happy. Sometimes even someone who seems to have no grasp on reality can be more sane than those who look like they do.

Torchwood

With such a shortfall on time this weekend and in the past week, I did not have a chance to get much further into Torchwood and although the stories are getting more strange, they are still quite interesting. I’m not a fan of sudden character development that doesn’t feel built to. And while I appreciate getting to know some of the minor characters on the program, I still don’t feel I’ve gotten enough of an idea of who these people are outside of traditional roles. But, this is the most creative science fiction film I’ve seen since The X-Files, so it does have something of an appeal to me, though for character development, both Battlestar Galactica and most of the Star Trek series, have done a far better job.