The highlight is a Ku Klux Klan convocation, at once sinister and absurd, choreographed like a Busby Berkeley production number crossed with a Nuremberg rally. A Cyclops-eyed salesman (John Goodman) stomping the territory selling the Good Book treacherously demonstrates how he can thump suckers like them as readily as Bibles.Ī wonderfully manic-depressive bank robber (Michael Badalucco) rips off Jimmy Cagney at white-heat temperature by scooting from one raid to the next in a ram-shackle Ford, leaving a paper-chase of Treasury bills in his wake. Posing as an all-black group called the Soggy Bottom Boys, they cut a folk record: it fast becomes a hit, making folk legends of them.Īround them, Roger Deakins's camerawork tones the woodland, riverbanks and tobacco fields of the Mississippi delta into an ochre glow, so that the landscape looks like the fabric of a tapestry fairy tale.Ī soulful group of scantily clad maidens doing laundry in a creek seduces them with Siren lullabies Ulysses and Delmar awaken to find Pete apparently turned into a toad - a transfiguration more appropriate to swampland than the porcine fates that Circe inflicted on the crew of the original Ulysses. They pick up a lively black guitarist (Chris Thomas King) waiting at a crossroads to sell his soul to the Devil. He's played by George Clooney as a dapper fugitive from a rock-breaking chain-gang.Īlong with shifty Pete (John Turturro) and sweetly dumb Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), Ulysses encounters some Homeric figures and a bushel of Hollywood ones, all life-size (and some oversize), and all as rigorously styled as cartoon cut-outs.Ī blind old feller, who could be the classical seer Tiresias, now propelling a railroad flatcar, warns them of future dangers. In the Coens' odyssey, one Ulysses Everett McGill is the traveller through a mythical landscape.
What starts as a spoof of a Warner Bros chain-gang social melodrama quickly turns into a "road" caper, and ends up as an intermittent musical whose period melodies knit its episodes into a harmonious whole. In homage to Sturges, the Coens borrow the title of Sullivan's aborted movie, then serve their own parodic impulse by devising an inventive and entertaining take on the genre films of the 1930s set in the out-back of Mississippi, among carefree tramps, predatory con men, political demagogues, redneck white trash, megalomaniac bank robbers and rope-twitching Ku Klux Klansmen.
#Oh brother what art thou juniper lee movie
Instead, dropping into a movie house, he finds the world laughing. In a hobo's get-up, he tries to find out what the Little People want, aiming to turn their aspirations into a socially conscious drama with the working title O Brother, Where Art Thou? "The world will weep, humanity will sob," he boasts. Preston Sturges, 60 years ago, made the point in Sullivan's Travels, the story of a top comedy-film director (Joel McCrea) who goes on the road to see life in the raw.
0 kommentar(er)
