The Screengrab

"To the left, Wayne has always been close to a comic-book version of American power in all its swaggering crudeness. That his screen persona was neither swaggering nor crude hardly mattered." So writes Charles Taylor in the latest issue of the pinko-liberal publication Dissent. While the above statement can be taken as definitive proof that Taylor has never seen McQ, it'll stand for the performances that Taylor cites as among Wayne's best, such as those in Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, and the one he's here to preach about tonight: Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. As Taylor writes, "The inspiration for Rio Bravo came from perhaps the most praised of Westerns, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon. High-Minded Noon it might have been called. Existing for no other reason than to impart a lesson in good citizenship, High Noon was a transparent metaphor for the failure of Americans to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Hawks hated it. Narratively, Hawks felt it made no sense for Gary Cooper’s sheriff to spend the movie soliciting the townspeople’s help to fend off the killers coming for him only to prove, in the end, that he didn’t need help. Hawks was offended by the idea that a sheriff would endanger the lives of the people he was meant to protect by trying to recruit them to save his skin. So Hawks made a movie in which Wayne’s sheriff turns down the help offered him, and needs it at every turn... Part of the beauty of Wayne’s performance here is the way, even when Chance is refusing help, he never undervalues others.

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Some of the documentaries at Tribeca this year feel like messages in a bottle sent from the recent past, efforts at preserving material that will be useful to those who eventually write the definitive histories. Pray to Send the Devil Back to Hell is a mixture of old news footage and fresh interviews dealing with the fifteen years of chaos and carnage that followed the declaration of civil war in Liberia in 1989. Ragged as the movie is, it makes for an inspiring viewing experience, and its tribute to the "women's peace movement" of Liberia succeeds in taking something that, at the time, may have seemed like a footnote to the big events and making the case that it was instrumental in bringing about many of the happier developments in this story. The women's peace movement grew out of the escalating sense of hopelessness that developed as President Charles Taylor and the "warlords" jockeying to replace him both used violent terror as their main tool in their battle for power. Things finally got bas enough that the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia, for the first time in their history, joined forces to campaign for peace through public protests and more intimate strategies, such as what one of them calls "sex strikes." The campaigners betray no hesitation in declaring themselves the representatives of peace by virtue of their gender, and united as a group against men, who they regard as "guilty" of supporting violence "either by commission or omission." As they see it, the men are the ones with the power in their society, and if they didn't want the bloodshed to continue, they could do something to stop it. Instead, they've used their power to bring war--and to approve the use of rape as a weapon in warfare.

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The illustrator and comic book artist Dave Stevens died earlier this week at the age of 52 after a long struggle with leukemia. Stevens was best known as the creator of the Rocketeer, an adventure character that first appeared in various titles published by Pacific, a short-lived independent comics company in the early 1980s. (After Pacific went out of business, he jumped to other now-defunct "independent" comics publishers--Eclipse, Comico--before winding up at Dark Horse.) Set in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, the comics centered on Cliff Secord, a scrappy young stunt pilot who battles Nazis and performs other acts of derring-do after stumbling across a portable jet pack that turns him into a two-fisted flying fool. The comics inspired a 1991 movie, directed by Joe Johnston, that worked hard to capture the look of Stevens's comics, and with a cast that included Bill Campbell in the lead, Jennifer Connelly as his girl Betty, and Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton (in a role modeled on Errol Flynn), and Terry O'Quinn, of Lost, as Howard Hughes.

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In the New York Times Book Review, Charles Taylor celebrates Anupama Chopra's new biography of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both for its own virtues and for what its existence may say about the spread of interest in popular Indian cinema to the English-speaking audience. "The larger significance of the book," he writes, "is that a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States. And that is remarkable at a time when newspaper and magazine editors and film distributors are increasingly reluctant to offer readers and viewers what they haven’t already heard about." With more and more movies fighter for fewer and fewer screens in America, and with the international distribution system an erratic mess, it may seem a stretch to suggest that Bollywood is about to take the country by storm. "But in a global economy in which India stands poised to play a bigger part, when the Internet and DVD’s are creating film audiences not bound by borders or by the caprices of film distribution, when some American multiplexes are giving over screens to Bollywood releases in order to lure America’s growing Indian population and when the stagnation of Hollywood sometimes makes the survival of movies as a popular art form seem an iffy proposition, Americans can’t afford to ignore Bollywood much longer." At forty-one, Shah Rukh Khan could well be an important tool in breaking into the Western market; two of his recent movies, Veer-Zaara and Chak! de India (which comes out on DVD next month) are among the rare Bollywood movies that have actually played theaters in the States. Taylor describes him as "part leading man, larger part buoyant goofball" who "represents the confident, successful Indian yuppie, the citizen of the world who is nonetheless recognizably Indian." He definitely has crossover potential. But can he do it in pictures as exotically strange to American tastes as his Bollywood hits? The obvious alternative would be Hollywood-style versions of Bollywood movies, similar to the imitation-Hong Kong action knockoffs that Chow Yun Fat got shoved into when he came to America. The very idea may give migraines to Bollywood-lovers and -haters alike. — Phil Nugent