Midnight Oil:Movies and More

"Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955) INDb Spencer Tracy shows up as a mysterious one-armed stranger in an isolated desert town.  It soon becomes clear that people have something to hide. Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin and Walter Brennan are just some of the shady (or should we say "in shades of grey") characters that inhabit the town.  An interesting study of group dynamics and social problems in the post-war era.

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Cheyenne Autumn (1964) IMDb , billed as John Ford’s final Western masterpiece, is a film that pricks the conscience of North Americans about “the Indian problem”. Richard Widmark plays the conflicted Captain Archer in charge of retrieving the “delinquent” Cheyenne band who has escaped their deathtrap Indian reservation in the desert. Carroll Baker plays his love interest, a Quaker woman caught between the native culture and the whites. While Sal Mineo, Ricardo Montalban and Dolores Del Rio might not be entirely convincing as Cheyenne tribes people, they get the job done in portraying the plight of the native Americans in a sympathetic light.

“Shenandoah” (1965) IMDb with James Stewart playing the lead role provides a less than usual perspective on the American Civil War. The film tells the story of a well ensconced Virginian farming family caught up in the latter part of the Civil War. Stewart, as Charlie Anderson, vehiculates a pragmatic pacificism about a mean and dirty war that now encroaches on his land and his family. Anderson himself is not undergirded by a particularly robust morality about the war nor about his position on pacificism. He finds himself fighting a losing battle even though he technically remains “out of the war”.

The Uncivil War episode offered by Saturday Night at the Movies pairs “Ride with the Devil” (1995) IMDb with this movie classic from 1965. SNAM’s interviewed guests bring out the relationship of “Shenandoah” with American sentiments of the day concerning young American men snatched up into the war in Vietnam and the accompanying anger, confusion and sense of helplessness on the part of those at home.

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See the SNAM preview for The Uncivil War here. Dig in to the background for the films through the Interviews on The Uncivil War with experts on the period.

Catch the video trailer for “Shenandoah” (1965) here.

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"The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943) INDb is quite an unusual Western looking at some of the social, psychological and ethical problems arising from rough and ready frontier justice. Dana Andrews along with Anthony Quinn are ordinary folk who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as victims of a lynching party. Henry Fonda and his sidekick Harry Morgan give voice to the doubts that ordinary folk caught up in the mob madness  might have while at the same time being powerless to stop "the course of justice".

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Catch the video preview of "The Ox-Bow Incident" from TVOntario here.