1. To my surprise and delight, Debbie drove the Camry to work this morning. I use the Sube to take away stuff I don't want around the house. Yesterday I recycled cardboard at the transfer station and today I cleared the cans, plastic bottles and jugs, and newspapers out of the garage and took them to the recycle station across from the hospital.
2. I was clicking around on the Criterion Channel website today and decided to play a video featuring Sara Imogen Smith reflecting upon the movie Forty Guns, directed by Samuel Fuller and featuring Barbara Stanwyck along with Barry Sullivan and Gene Barry. After listening for a few minutes, I paused the feature (which is also available on the Criterion Collection disc of the movie) and decided to watch the movie itself.
Am I ever glad I did.
3. Forty Guns is the first Samuel Fuller movie I've watched. It won't be the last. Forty Guns tells the story of a powerful land baron in the Tombstone, AZ region, played by Barbara Stanwyck, and the forty men under her sway who ride with her, protect her, carry out her business, and enforce her wishes. Two of her "forty guns", however, need to be served federal warrants and Barry Sullivan plays Griff Bonell, who is a reformed gun fighter now working for the Attorney General, and he comes to Tombstone with his two brothers enforce these warrants.
In the above synopsis, I have simplified what becomes a complicated plot involving lust, love, gun violence, power struggles, reckoning with the past, and moral dilemmas.
The movie, shot in stunning black and white Cinemascope, takes the corruption, simmering sexuality, and moral ambiguities of an urban film noir and relocates them in what the movie presents as the last days of the frontier West.
I listened to more of Sara Imogen Smith's analysis of the movie when I finished it. Most of all, I enjoyed how she illuminated Barbara Stanwyck's movie career, her acting style, and the way this movie was a kind of summation of the decades of Stanwyck's work that preceded it. Her knowledge and analysis of Samuel Fuller's filmmaking style and how he expressed his world view through this movie also impressed and intrigued me.
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