The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 2: It's a Tower Built to the Heavens. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The foundation was built, and it seemed like a decent enough place already to just skip building the new couple of floors, planting an aerial, and calling it a home. The list had already taken me about a month to create, and in my excitement, I had already started watching films in earnest. The first film I watched under the sway of this fresh delirium was 1965's Sean Connery army prison flick, The Hill, directed in truly brutal fashion by Sidney Lumet. If I had started going through the multitude of films on my list by encountering a true dud (and not one where I went in expecting vileness), I may have given up the entire project then and there. But The Hill so captured my attention that I knew straight off I had made the right choice.

But, the list itself did not seem robust enough to me. There were still films that I loved missing from the list, and films I had always wanted to see which were not appearing yet. I began to think about what was influential in the mid-60s. in the dawning of my youth, and it didn't take me long to figure out where to find a major dose of relief: the Cannes Film Festival. Yeah, yeah, ugly Americans, hate the French all you want. Myself, I don't hate them, not even for easy comedic stereotyping. I love watching their films (equally as much as I love watching films from all over the world), and I love how purely they (as a nation) used to commit themselves to cinema. And yes, there are other major film festivals out there from which I could have chosen to cull more choices for my Tower of Film, but how many are as famous or as influential for such a long time as Cannes? Unlike most other festivals, except perhaps Sundance, Cannes still makes the news every single year, perhaps more now for the antics that take place there more and more than for actual film presentation. But, Cannes still looms large in the international cultural atmosphere. And, speaking solely of a certain period in time, how can one such as I deny its mix of foreign releases from nearly every corner of the world?

It was a natural for me, and so I started adding Cannes years to the list. This took far longer than I had anticipated, considering that I tend to format as I go along and I wanted things to be as perfect as possible. (Again, that possible OCD kicking in...) Cannes added a huge amount to each year, sometimes 30-40 more films, sometimes even more. I didn't take just "in competition" films, but outside award winners, "out of competition" films, and all of the films in the multitude of Cannes' special categories of which they seem to be so fond. The list truly began to bulge to elephantine proportions, and I actually did start to worry about whether I would be able to see even half of these films in my lifetime. (More on that later...)

While I was zipping through each year of Cannes, I started another side project: queuing all of the available films up on Netflix, or marking whether I owned the films or had already seen them. Because I wanted the list to remain fresh, I had to decide on a cut-off date for where I would consider my current critical decree valid to the purposes of the list. I decided to choose the moment of my arrival from Alaska into California, which was when I started writing, reconsidering my film philosophy, and critiquing full-time: April 2005.

Any film that I had seen since that date and of which I still had decent recall could be marked as "SEEN" on the list, unless I truly wished to watch it again even in the midst of thousands of other films. (Surprisingly, in many cases, I chose to go this route, if only because it would probably be a while until I encountered them as I went through the list.) This enabled me to check off many of the films I had seen in the past four years, even in the last six months. (I chose to make the current year more of a checklist of everything I had seen within 2009, to keep it fresh and because we won't know the Oscar nominees for a couple of months yet.)

However, as I went through Netflix, looking up every single film, I ran into far more films turning out to be unavailable than I thought. Some of the missing films weren't just relative obscurities either, but Oscar nominees, and occasionally, an actual Oscar winner. And by adding the Cannes lists, largely composed of films of foreign extract (most, but not all, more popular Hollywood films tend to get shown out of competition, if they showed up at all), the problem got even worse, with each year's list (now grown to around 60-75 films per year) ending up with a range between 20-25 films per year unavailable. Not just unavailable on Netflix (which is actually surprisingly robust in its catalogue), but not even for purchase on Amazon. With so many of the foreign films not even available in their home countries, I realized that I needed to rethink my goals in this endeavor, as it was becoming very clear that a solid quarter of my ultimate list would be unattainable towards the completion of my new project.

[To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 3: Things Start to Get a Little Wonky...]

Rixflix A to Z: Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950)

Director: Charles Lamont

Universal, 1:20, b/w

Crew Notables: Bud Westmore (makeup)

Cast Notables: Abbott and Costello, Patricia Medina, Walter Slezak, Douglas Dumbrille, Leon Belasco, Tor Johnson, Wee Willie Davis, Marc Lawrence, Henry Corden, Candy Candido (voice of skeleton), Jeff Chandler (narrator)

TC4P Rating: 5/9

Somewhere in my head is a map of the world as drawn by where I think things are... On that map, the Rolling Stones, a band well-known to be from England, live in Chicago, along with Cheap Trick, Warren Beatty, and for some strange reason, Margaret Trudeau (don't ask...). I place things and people where they seem to be according to the news that I hear and sometimes for the strangest reasons imaginable. I could go on forever with the mixed-up inhabitants of this only slightly plausible map, but I won't at this time.

But there is one thing that is clear: the French Foreign Legion, who operate all about the world, but most famously out of Algeria, don't on my map. They operate out of France. This is actually partially true nowadays, but I don't mean their headquarters is stationed there, or that they bivouac there. On my map, they fight their battles there... in the deserts of France. Yes, even in a film where I am told flat-out that they are fighting in a desert in the middle of Africa, somewhere in my head, I believe that they are actually about an hour outside of Paris (which actually is placed in France on my map.) So, in Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, even when the title says "Algiers" once the desert action starts, my head tells me that the Legionnaires are back in France.

Average Abbott and Costello, but even average Bud and Lou can still yield some good laughs. Lou's verbal battle with the French word "oui" is amusing, and numerous sight gags pay off well, including an extended mirage sequence (bad backdrops and all) which concludes when they encounter a spitting fish that has stolen a set of false teeth from one of the desert tribesmen. (Once again, don't ask...) There is also a bit where Bud believes that Lou has been blown to smithereens, and the pathos that Abbott wrings out of the by-the-book lines is actually quite touching. At least, until he discovers that Lou is still alive -- boy, does he turn on a dime. But, for a moment, even to someone who has always sided with the pushed-about Costello, I really felt the friendship that had to be at the base of their long partnership, no matter how tired they may have been of each other. It's a feeling that you get from Laurel and Hardy in droves, but that comes rarely in the Abbott and Costello series, and usually from Lou, at that; but there it is, fleetingly, for the taking.

You also have some wrasslin' action with the bear-like Wee Willie Davis and that monstrous icon of Woodsian (Ed, that is) ineptitude, Tor Johnson. Seeing this sequence a day removed from viewing Borat and its nude hotel wrestling shock-a-thon, I couldn't help but flash on the newer film when these two de-shirt and throw down with Bud and Lou (who play fight managers who are trying to locate Davis' Abdullah, cousin to the sheikh that is out to kill them). For those not obsessed with homoerotic affairs of the mat, there is the lovely assemblage of harem girls who become the focus of Lou's attention through much of the film.

My attention? Sorry, it was squarely drawn towards France, and just where the hell they are hiding all those deserts there...

RTJ

[This review was edited and updated with new photos on 11/14/2016. This piece was written before I learned about Le Grande Dune du Pilat.]