HAIL, CAESAR! GLASGOW
FIlm festival
Did you feel a kinship with D O Brother, Where Art Thou O (2000)? Give it another look ( with Cool Hand Luke (1967) w The aforementioned Sullivan’s T Travels also had a part to play in T the genesis of the Coens’ masterful t D Depression-set quasi-musical: O Brother, Where Art Thou? was originally the title given to Sturges’ i lm-within-the-i lm. our money though, Joel and Ethan’s Deep South riff on Homer’s Odyssey is best paired with the evergreen Paul Newman classic Cool Hand Luke. It might not share a time frame with O Brother (being set in the 1950s as opposed to 30s), but Luke’s chain-gang milieu, fugitives- on-the-lam plot and sinister, shades-sporting uber-villain still stand as signii cant links between the two. For
Do you have True Grit (2010)? Er . . . then have True Grit (1969) OK, so this pairing is a bit more e s obvious, but if nothing else it serves e to underline just how much the g Coens have held back from doing s straight remakes (there’s only this and their unfairly reviled take on Ealing comedy The Ladykillers in the canon). In fact, they prefer to distance their True Grit from the 1969 John Wayne l ick entirely, instead pitching it as a re-imagining of Charles Portis’ original 1968 novel. Still, even if the two i lms
didn’t share the same source material, Wayne’s shadow inevitably looms large over any entry in the Western genre, especially one that explores the macho cowboy persona. It’s worth watching both i lms in quick succession to see the subtle (and not so subtle) variations between Wayne and Jeff Bridges’ versions of hard-drinking US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, not to mention Kim Darby and Hailee Steinfeld’s differing takes on tenacious teenager Mattie Ross. Can you make reference to C Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) I without innuendo? Then do w t the same with I’m Not There ( (2007) Released only six years prior, R I I’m Not There isn’t so much a a cinematic forebear as a c complementary perspective on a an overlapping topic; namely, one Robert Zimmerman and the New York folk scene that spawned him. The Coens’ highly-lauded character study of a i ctional Greenwich Village also-ran only briel y depicts Bob Dylan’s game- changing emergence on the scene, making it a nice counterpoint to Todd Haynes’ 2007 biopic which contains too much Dylan for one actor (Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger are among the six stars tasked with playing him). Fun fact: both Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) and idiosyncratic backing singer Al Cody (Adam Driver) have gone on to greater (or, bigger) things since working with the Coens, battling their way through space in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Hail, Caesar!, Glasgow Film Theatre, Wed 17 & Thu 18 Feb. General release from Fri 4 Mar.
4 Feb–7 Apr 2016 THE LIST 19