It’s said you can learn just as much from a failure, or more, than you can from a success. Today on TCM, The Marx Brothers run all day long and while many of their movies are celebrated, like Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races, others don’t come off so well. Like The Big Store. In fact, it’s considered by a lot of folks to be among their worst (citation not needed). That’s why a lot of people have never heard of it and even fewer have seen it. Of course, just because a movie doesn’t work as well as the other movies in a director’s or actor’s oeuvre doesn’t mean it’s bad or unwatchable. Maybe it’s just not what we were expecting. In fact, in several cases, the movie that’s considered the nadir of one artist’s career is often the movie I consider the most interesting. Three example follow: Disagree at will.
Orson Welles did Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil, and all three are considered to be near the pinnacle of American filmmaking. His MacBeth, on the other hand, has never fared as well. It was giving middling to bad reviews upon release with oh-so-pithy quips about the Scottish accents “doth stinking” up the proceedings. Which, they didn’t. In fact, I have always been more than a bit baffled by the reception that MacBeth received and am somewhat heartened by the good reviews it now generally gets. The primary concerns of the bad reviews seem to be that the budget was low (Variety) and that the play was condensed (Hollywood Reporter, Life, Variety again) and if those are reasons to call a movie bad, then, let me just express my gratitude that none of those people are still around reviewing movies. Or that attempting to use the proper regional accent for a Shakespearean play is a bad idea. I find Welles’ MacBeth quite good and you can go this clip of Act 3, Scene 4, where MacBeth sees the ghost of Banquo to see a little of what I’m talking about (and, yes, they spell his name wrong). The whole scene plays like something from The Twilight Zone, years before that show even existed. It’s eerie and haunting and done under the vale of light and shadow that many other versions, even the great ones, miss. It uses the conventions of the stage, including scrims and flats, to evoke the feel of watching a staged production of MacBeth. Still, it didn’t have the intended result Welles wanted and he never tried to do a Shakespearean play that was stage bound. So he learned from the experience except that he shouldn’t have had to. In other words, it did work, it just wasn’t what people were expecting.
Let’s leap ahead now to one of my favorite directors when it comes to making movies that a lot of people think are bad while many others take the opposite approach: Francis Ford Coppola. The movie I’m talking about this time is One from the Heart and I’ll be up front about this: If you don’t think this movie is one of his best, I think you’re crazy. I also think every critic who panned this film (if they’re still active) should have their film critic club card revoked. I’ll admit, I’ve got problems with it but only minor ones, the biggest being that I think the songs work so much better than the dialogue that I think Coppola should have made it a 100% musical, like Tommy, where singing is all of the dialogue. But that’s minor when considering that, like Welles’ MacBeth, One from the Heart goes to great pains to look like it’s stagebound. And like Welles’ MacBeth, one of the main criticisms seemed to be about budget, but this time that it was too high. Many along the lines of “how dare he spend so much money building Las Vegas when he could just go there and film on location!” That would have changed the whole look of the movie and the look of the movie, working with the soundtrack by Tom Waits is the whole thing! I’m telling you right now, this is Sunrise for the modern era minus the murderous subplot. No, it’s not on the same cinematic level necessarily, but the core of it – a couple finding that the heart of the city revolutionizes their understanding of who they are – is the same. Coppola learned the same lessons as Welles with this one and, like Welles, he shouldn’t have had to have learned them.
Finally, the big one: Heaven’s Gate. This is the one that ruined Michael Cimino’s career, the one that took the Oscar winner for Best Director just two years earlier and turned him into a Hollywood pariah. Personally, I think Heaven’s Gate has many problems but I don’t think any of them are as big as the critics at the time made them out to be and after rewatching The Deer Hunter a couple of years ago in the same week, couldn’t help but feel that Cimino had grown between the two and made, in Heaven’s Gate, the better film. What I also did a few years ago was take on many of the criticisms leveled at Heaven’s Gate that I felt had no validity. Focusing on the review by Roger Ebert, whose bad review of it was probably the most famous (or infamous), I noted that he complained about Christopher Walken not being seen until several scenes in (not true, he’s seen quite clearly through the hole of a flapping in the wind blanket right off the bat). He complains that John Hurt’s character “wanders through various scenes to no avail.” As I wrote at the time, “John Hurt’s character is a commentator on the action, a chorus so to speak. And he is a pointed type: The overly intellectual and thoroughly ineffectual elitist. His actions and comments to ‘no avail’ are the point. The real war must be fought and won by men of action, not men of sarcasm.” There are also very strange criticisms that the widow Kovich is mentioned repeatedly (she is not), that the terms of payment for the mercenaries are endlessly repeated (they’re not, just three times, all three of which make perfect sense in context), and finally, criticisms of Walken’s character, the real life Nate Champion, writing a note about being in his burning cabin while it’s burning, which is exactly what he did in real life. He did this to run out of the cabin with the note, get shot, and know that his document would survive, which it did. This is painfully obvious in the movie and, like I said, it happened in real life. These criticisms made the critics making them (and there were a lot of them) look almost unnaturally stupid. It’s a bit like taking off marks for A Night to Remember because they show the Titanic hit an iceberg (“Oh come on, that’s ridiculous! I’m supposed to believe a ship this big and expensive would hit an iceberg?!” – Well, yes, actually because that’s what happened.) Heaven’s Gate has its problems. Like The Deer Hunter, its scene drag on a bit too long and the pacing is rather sluggish. But it’s not awful and the lessons that Cimino learned – never touch a historical story again – may have worked out in the long run but I don’t think it was anywhere near the disaster it was made out to be.
The movies don’t always work the way their creators want them to. Sometimes they have a great idea, poorly executed. Sometimes they’ve mismatched their talents with the premise. Sometimes, simply nothing works. But on a few occasions, the movie considered the worst, or most troublesome is anything but and the director ended up being a little more cautious and, as a result, never taking the same chances again, chances that might have produced much more interesting work. A bad situation for everyone and something from which we can all take a lesson.