Technicolor Dreams

Rancho Notorious
Directed by Fritz Lang
USA, 1952

This was the first of two back-to-back movies I saw last Monday night as part of the Harvard Film Archive's Technicolor Dreams series. While not without some snappy dialogue and the occasional artfully-crafted scene, Lang's garish-looking, extremely melodramatic western is basically a dud when it comes right down to it. Some of the material's datedness is to be expected, of course, but Arthur Kennedy is horribly miscast as the whiny, revenge-minded "tough guy" Vern and then there's this annoying cowboy song on the soundtrack called "The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck" that goes on and on about "hate, murder and revenge" with very little subtlety. Marlene Dietrich and Mel Ferrer are kind of amusing as troubled lovers Altar Keane and Frenchy Fairmont, but this is easily the least interesting/worst acted work I've seen in quite a while.

Madigan

Directed by Don Siegel

USA, 1968

After that Lang letdown, Siegel's Madigan was quite a lot of fun. One of the canonical late-60s/early-70s NYC cop movies in which all the police and criminals still seemed to know each other by name, this film is aided and abetted by an excellent ensemble cast, a high-energy pace with the requisite dialogue to match ("Can I fix you a drink?" Detective Madigan is asked. "Yeah, easy on the water."), and the urban decay of the Big Apple captured in all its technicolor glory. Adultery, police corruption, and race relations all intrude on the story without overwhelming it, but this is basically a hard-boiled buddy movie about a pair of semi-dirty detectives (played with panache by Richard Widmark and Harry Guardino) trying to keep the bad guys off the streets and their wives off their backs. Recommended.

• Viewed at the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge, MA) on 7/7/08.