When Movies Collide with Real Life
Last night I had one of the weirdest, eeriest “movie/real life” moments that I’ve ever experienced.
I was watching a wonderful, old Western from 1958, Man of the West. I’m not quite sure how I came across it when browsing the Netflix catalogue (it's possible I'd been searching Westerns) or why I decided to put it in my Netflix queue. My best guess is because Gary Cooper and the great Western director Anthony Mann together sounded too good to pass up. And what a treat when the opening credits rolled, and I saw it was written by Reginald Rose, whose most-famous credit is most likely 12 Angry Men. (And he also created the classic legal drama, The Defenders.) When I saw all them together, I couldn’t imagine it not being wonderful. Especially with a terrific supporting cast, which included Lee J. Cobb, along with Arthur Kennedy, John Dehner, Jack Lord (of all people, as a creepy bad guy, who at one point has a fascinating 8-minute, bloody fight sequence with Gary Cooper) and the singer Julie London who does a solid job. And it was indeed wonderful. (It has a 94% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) Like much of Anthony Mann's classics in Westerns, there a darkness flowing underneath, but also vibrant, insightful and involving camerawork and pacing. And it's as richly written as I expected from Reginald Rose.
Interestingly, the year before, Lee J. Cobb played Henry Fonda's main antagonist in Rose's 12 Angry Men.
(The only funny thing is that Lee J. Cobb is always called “the old man” and is Gary Cooper’s uncle – and he’s 10 years younger. But he’s made up scruffy enough that it works fine.)
But I’m mainly mentioning this because there was a moment in the film that was almost too eerie for its overlap with real life. So much so that I almost stopped watching for a while.
It’s the scene at night in a cabin out in the desert wilds of Texas when Gary Cooper runs into his uncle Lee J. Cobb for the first time in years. Cobb has a long monologue about how crushing it was when his nephew Cooper was still with him in his gang. He rants in a mixture of anger and love, and then talks about a great bank robbery they had together and starts to describe it in growing, enthusiastic detail. To paraphrase --
“It was great," he barks out. "We had it all to ourselves. There we all were. We just rode into Uvalde…”
I couldn’t believe it. I kept watching for about 30 seconds, not sure if I had heard correctly, and it kept nagging at me so much I had to stop the movie and rewind it to make certain I heard the line again. And after it played, and the movie ran on, I still thought maybe I heard it wrong, and it only sounded like "Uvalde," so I reran it once more to be absolutely positive. And it was. “Uvalde.” Of all the towns in Texas they could have used, 64 years ago.
And of all the times to watch the film. I have a friend who lives in Texas and knows the film and love it. I told this story to him, and he said he certainly wouldn't wouldn't remember that Uvalde was mentioned. And added, "No one heard of the place until everyone heard of the place." Of course I wouldn't expect anyone who's ever seen the film to recall it. It's not like that's a classic line that would be remembered. It's an off-handed, quick mention of one word. The name of a nondescript town. Honestly, if I’d watched the movie just one week ago, it wouldn’t have even registered. But to see it now -- days later -- it was almost shocking.
It was hard watching for the next couple minutes. Talking about the robbery with bombastic exuberance. Shooting one of the men dead in the bank, even naming him, Charles Stone, to make it more personal. And how wonderful it all was. I literally almost stopped the movie and turned it off. But eventually I let it pass and move on.
In the end, the movie was great. But that was one of the eeriest “real life” moments I’ve ever had watching a movie.
If you're interested, here's the trailer. The first half doesn't do the movie even the remotest justice, just the normal movie bombast for trailers of that era (filled with exclamation points!), but eventually it does give a reasonable sense of the film. And you'll even see 18 seconds of the Cooper-Lord fight.
One note: at the 40-second mark, Lee J. Cobb is introduced into the trailer, and there's a brief exchange between him and Gary Cooper. ("We were biig, don't you remember?!") I point that out because it's the beginning of the sequence that builds into Cobb's monologue about the bank robbery, so you'll get an idea of the tone of the scene when the eerie moment occurred.
Comments