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Reviews
Peter Gunn: Streetcar Jones (1958)
All (Except) That Jazz
A fine second episode of the noirish series, all good here except its landscape: the jazz. It's 1958, and we're told that Lodi and Streetcar Jones are the cutting edge of jazz. Yet they're playing a version of Dixieland -- so out of date by the late '50s -- when hard bop and cool ruled the day and free jazz was starting to rear its head.
That may seem a minor detail, but it's not. This is an episode about jazz, its musicians, and ethics in creating art, and although "Peter Gunn" is hardly realist programming, there is an authentic core to its noir approach. Missing badly on so central a plot point damages that claim of authenticity.
That aside, it's a decent 26 minutes, fits in with one of the finest series of late 1950s television.
Led Zeppelin: Dazed & Confused (2009)
Not the Zep doc you want
What's in "Led Zeppelin: Dazed and Confused" is worthwhile, especially the Peter Grant interviews. It's what's missing that dooms this failure.
It starts off wonderfully, with a decent analysis of the Yardbirds-to-Zeppelin transition, then mostly glosses over the band's history while leaving out the kind of detail that is necessary for this to work. More time is spent on hotel-room destruction -- and, the film's highlight, the myths surrounding that -- than on any particular album nor the details that go into the music that the band created.
Then we get a hugely insufficient roundup of the band members' post-Zep activities, and,voila, we're done.
Any doc on Zep is watchable, but this isn't the one you're looking for.
Oxygen for the Ears: Living Jazz (2012)
For jazz hardcores only
Those who already love jazz will find plenty to like in this mish-mash of a documentary, but it struggles to maintain focus, covers arbitrary subjects in a random manner, and has some technical issues with sound, never a good thing when music is what you're about. Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and John Coltrane get attention, and the early years of jazz in New Orleans is covered nicely, but this isn't a history lesson and the connections between "chapters" are tenuous at best. Not nearly in the class of "The Girls in the Band," a wonderful documentary on forgotten women in the music's history, and not particularly worthwhile for the uninitiated.
Red River (1948)
Trilogy of Great Westerns
Howard Hawks' "Red River" might be the greatest of cinema westerns, although John Ford's "My Darling Clementine" and "The Searchers" give it a good run. I would consider these the great-western trilogy. If you consider cavalry films to also be westerns -- I'm not sure where I stand on that -- then add Ford's "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" to the list.
"Red River" deals with a cattle drive from Texas to Missouri, and although the threat of Indian attacks is present, this isn't a cowboys vs. Indians film. It's a power struggle between John Wayne's and Montgomery Clift's characters and what they represent.
I'm going to be brief here and leave the in-depth analysis for others. Wayne is outstanding -- this is among his best performances -- and Clift is superb.
The great flaw is Joanne Dru, who is pretty but can't act. She stands out, and that's not good. She mars an otherwise wonderful film and brings my grade down a full point, to 8.5. Since the IMDb scoring system doesn't allow half-points, I've boosted my score to 9 in homage to this film's standing among westerns.