Now, don’t get me wrong—I loved Steven Spielberg.
I could argue that “Jaws” figures as one of the great “programmers” (or genre movies) of all time, up with, say, Paul Muni’s original “Scarface,” from 1932, 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon” or the ‘80s “Top Gun”,entertainment so pure that it transcends its genre.
Similarly, in the ‘80s when I was writing about movies for a living, I put “Raiders of the Lost Ark” up with John Huston’s “Treasure of Sierra Madre” as the best action films of all time: “Badges, we don’t need no stinking badges….”
And, of course, who could refute such obvious labor’s of love as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (starring Spielberg fave director, Francois Truffaut)or “Schindler’s List”? Then again, like any director, we have to deal with such fiasco’s as “The Color Purple” or, as it was described at the time (I think by me): “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for the Yuppie Generation,” A sanitized version of history that attracted audiences but informed none.
Or “Amistad” which, while dealing with one of the most horrific periods of human history, drew nary a tear? Or “Minority Report,” perhaps the least insightful of all recent sci-fi movies….it made “Total Recall” seem as deep as Sharon Stone’s cleavage!. None of the above having prepared me for the absurd “Boy’s Life” fantasy that is “War Horse.”
Again, I like Steven—and have said so in print many times.
But what overtook him when he tackled this bit of Brit treacle I have no idea. I know I’m getting older and not quite as sharp as I was in my 20s (just last year!), and Steven is still as facile with the camera as he ever was…but there’s more to directing than just shooting a good scene.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had in 1984 with then-producer ( now “Lord”) David Puttnam, who was on his way to a sweep of Academy nominations with “The Killing Fields.” I asked him, having just discovered such young British talents as Alan Parker (“Midnight Express,” “Fame”) and Adrian Lyne (“Flashdance”), what he thought of the crop of American directors then emerging including Spielberg, Lucas (who had already quit directing following “Star Wars”), Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola, William Friedkin and the like.
While he admired them, he mentioned over tea at the Bel-Air Hotel, he hoped they all wouldn’t like, so many American directors before them, “think they have to remake (John Ford’s) ‘The Searchers’” to prove themselves. Unfortunately, most of them have and foundered on the shoals of trying. This time it’s Spielberg’s turn.
To begin, it’s hard to fathom why he chose such an ethnocentric Brit fantasy—WWI as seen through the eyes of a horse—to make his John Ford-like stand.
Second, as Puttnam would have bemoaned, it’s not only an homage to ‘The Searchers”… with in some weird way the horse substituting for Natalie Wood as the girl captured by Indians! (In “War Horse,” the horse becomes a lead stallion for German artillary slaughtering Brits before being saved by the Englishman that raised him (John Wayne in “The Searchers,”) It virtually channels John Ford visually.
