Last night I watched a 1951 B-Western called Little Big Horn, which was a story of heroism in the face of overwhelming odds, similar to The 300 Spartans and 300. It's on a new double-feature disc from VCI Entertainment called Western Film Noir Vol. 1; the other feature is a 1949 Western mystery called Rimfire.

Little Big Horn is about a group of cavalrymen who ride 250 miles to warn General Custer about the Sioux, who are preparing to attack him and his men at the Little Big Horn river. This was really a Western war film, when you remember that cavalrymen were soldiers, not cowboys. A terrific cast includes Lloyd Bridges as a stern commander, John Ireland as his second in command--and lover of Bridges' character's wife, played by Marie Windsor. There is also a sterling lineup of character actors including Jim Davis, Wally Cassel, Hugh O'Brian, Reed Hadley and King Donovan. O'Brian, who later became famous for playing Wyatt Earp, is particularly good here in a very tragic role. The film was a solid mix of action and characterization. As a depiction of soldiers and their feelings as they face a bad situation, it was superior to both 300 and The 300 Spartans; and the end was powerfully moving in a way those two other pictures were not.

The other feature, Rimfire, was about an innocent man (played by Reed Hadley, he of the great deep voice) railroaded to the gallows in a corrupt Western town. After his hanging, the men responsible for framing him are murdered, one by one. I kept guessing until the very end about who was the serial killer; and the movie had the great bonus of Mary Beth Hughes in a small role that, while it didn't give her much to do, put her in some nineteenth century frocks that set off her blonde good looks to perfection. This woman was so sexy it's a crime she didn't become a major star; but after starting strong at 20th Century Fox in the early 40s, she ended up mostly in B-pictures at smaller studios. Nothing wrong with B-pix, I love 'em, but it's just that it would have been great to see her do more elaborate productions too and have a more lucrative career and more ambitious filmography. I think I wrote on this blog previously how she would have been an improvement on Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. I wasn't kidding! This gal was a real minx...I was actually getting turned on watching Mary Beth walk around in those high-necked Western dresses...what a dame!! There was eroticism even in her dimples.

VCI Entertainment, in conjunction with Kit Parker Films, did a real good thing by releasing these two obscure but enjoyable movies to DVD.

It was a DVD weekend, not one for strippers. With tax time approaching, this freelancer's money is really tight. Anyway, I caught up with the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, which had a big influence on Frank Miller, the writer of the graphic novel on which the current hit 300 is based. The cinema scholar in me couldn't wait to compare the two...

In contrast to 300, the earlier movie was a straightforward Hollywood narrative about the same battle between the Greeks and the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. While The 300 Spartans doesn't have the physical savagery or the bizarre visual hyperreality of the current movie, it does have a more noble characterization of King Leonidas of the Spartans, well-played by Richard Egan. It may well be that Gerard Butler's Leonidas in 300, monomaniacal and dogmatic, is probably closer to what the king may have been like back in those harsh days, but Richard Egan is more accessible as a regular human being, yet still rigidly focused on his duty. And instead of being the near-drag queen of 300, Persian king Xerxes is portrayed by David Farrar in The 300 Spartans as a heterosexual megalomaniac with a taste for dancing girls, a conventional characterization for this kind of film. In the part of the Athenian politician Themistocles, a character who, if memory serves me, was completely left out of the script of 300, Sir Ralph Richardson brings his trademark touch of refined oratory and eccentric thespian detail.

According to the scholarly book The Ancient World in the Cinema, The 300 Spartans was a fairly accurate portrayal of both the circumstances of the battle and its historical context. While it lacks 300's brawny rhythm of sword and javelin into flesh, it provides a sense of what the battle was really like from tactics to terrain. Instead of the brooding and dreamlike near-Gothic mountains of 300, the earlier epic shows us sunlight, water, and grass as the setting for the fight against tyranny. The last images in The 300 Spartans are strangely mundane, but haunting because of it: surrounded at the pass of Thermopylae by the Persian hordes, the Spartans seem like a small bunch indeed as they are summarily slaughtered by the arrows of the Persians. But these images of smallness are ironic, because they belie the Spartans' refusal to surrender and their willingness to face death, a gigantic feat of courage which inspired the rest of the rest of the Greeks to an ultimate victory against Xerxes and his colossal army.

So, although not a great film--some of its dialogue is awkward and its pacing is sometimes lumbering--The 300 Spartans gives us a more documentary sense of the event, whereas 300 is pretty much a fever dream which mixes a dash of history with vistas of visual fantasy.

Some enterprising programmer should schedule both one day at a revival house, although of course when 300 comes out on the DVD, you can view this double feature on your home screen.

My post of two days ago, "Vanessa Williams in Double Indemnity?" was actually about the television show Ugly Betty. I expressed an opinion there about how gorgeous cast member Rebecca Romijn is too obviously a "genetic girl" to be believable as a male-to-female transsexual, and my musings elicited comments from a couple of readers in the transgender world.

Both these readers, Kelly Shore and tlover, directed me to photo links of very beautiful "t-girls"--transgendered gals. The links are in the comments section of that post.

I didn't mean to imply that some t-girls are not as beautiful or passable as genetic girls. That would be a ridiculous statement. I just felt that since Rebecca Romijn is a genetic girl, she does not demonstrate just how beautiful or passable transgendered women are. I know that Rebecca Romijn is simply playing a role. Just as James Cagney wasn't really a gangster, and George Reeves wasn't Superman, I know that Rebecca is not a male-to-female transsexual; nor does she have to be one in order to play the part. But since the point of the episode I saw the other night was that her character was a champion of transgendered glamour in the mainstream fashion world, I felt it would have been better if the program didn't use a beautiful genetic girl in the role, but a beautiful t-girl instead. I didn't make this point fully because I regrettably jotted too hasty and brief a post. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

The comment by tlover has directed my attention to the transgendered porn star Danielle Foxxx--and she's what I would have preferred on the show. Danielle actually IS what Romijn's character is supposed to be. She is beautiful and feminine and shapely and could easily be on the cover of a mainstream mag. She is a real example of transgendered allure, as are the other t-girls in the links Kelly Shore and tlover indicated.

Obviously, Rebecca Romijn is a marquee name, and that's important to a top network program, and I'm sure that's one reason she got the part. But someday a real t-girl will also be a marquee actress of note, and will get to play such roles.

Finally I saw a new movie that I think has the quality of lasting greatness. Breach, starring Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe, really haunts the mind. It is the true story of Robert Hanssen, the top FBI intelligence expert who was also a mole for many years and sold classified information to our enemies until he was caught in 2001 and sentenced to prison.

Breach, directed by Billy Ray, is a low key film that lets the characters live their lives in front of you, and gives you enough telling detail to allow you to draw your own conclusions about why Hanssen did it. Cooper plays a Hanssen who is obsessed with his Catholicism to the point of near mania, but who also secretly videotapes his wife during sex; and who stews in a resentful perception of the FBI as a macho gun culture that only promotes the action-oriented agents to the limelight. The clues to Hanssen's motivations are given in intimate scenes of dialogue and confrontation that make you think back to those scenes days after you see the movie in order to explain to yourself what might have compelled this man to betray his country. "I do matter!" he cries out drunkenly in one scene, where his ego is threatened. "I matter!" Cooper portrays a dangerous adult, but gives us also a boy still inside Hanssen, unceasingly angry at his strict, disapproving father.

Ryan Phillippe is understated and effective in his role as Hanssen's clerk, who helps set up Hanssen to be caught in the act of passing information. The film gives you a real sense of the personal toll of this kind of undercover work as Phillippe's character strains not to tell his young wife what his job is really all about.

The only weak link in the film is Laura Linney, who plays the agent in charge of the operation to catch Hanssen. I liked her "I-am-woman-hear-me-roar" bite in the recent domestic drama The Squid and the Whale, but in Breach she plays it so tough as nails that she's almost a caricature of the female overseer. She's like a feminist Dracula, sucking the testosterone out of all the men in the room. I hope I'll be able to blot this performance out of the Linney resume in my mind or it will be hard to enjoy her in other films. But Chris Cooper is so good in the part of Hanssen, makes him not simply an evil figure but one of emotional scars and gigantic hubris, that the film stays solidly on course. Breach is well-balanced; even though Cooper's portrayal of Hanssen vividly shows us the emotions within this enigmatic figure, we never forget the treason Hanssen committed.

A friend out at my freelance client's office in New Jersey urged me to give the show Ugly Betty a try, so I did tonight. A number of things struck me. One was the absurdity of the gorgeously undeniable GG (or "genetic girl") Rebecca Romijn playing a male-to-female transsexual; if there were surgeons who could perform miracles like that, I would consider the operation myself. My life would certainly be a heck of a lot easier with everybody wanting to be my slave and lick my heels.

America Ferrarra was funny and sweet in her sentimental good-hearted role as the braces-wearing fashion victim Betty; but the revelation to me was Vanessa Williams as the evil magazine editor. A scene in which she tempts an alcoholic with a glass of vodka shows that Vanessa has the chops to play a real out-and-out testicle-chomping femme fatale. How about a new version of Double Indemnity with Vanessa in the Barbara Stanwyck part? I'm sure any number of actors would enjoy matching wits with her in that classic noir story of male-female sparring. And I would enjoy watching her shake that butt as she led her victim to prurient purgatory across a forty foot screen.