Film Festival Update: Vienna and the Dancing Kid, Plus Ayn Rand.

Ernest Borgnine(Marty the Butcher) as Yeet, going at Johnny Guitar like a whittlin' piece to be demoralized.

The thing about this one--Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, et al--a pissing contest in the opening scene, a big old bar room that transitions into a cave wall, personalities jostling and tumbling and generally roiling around, almost like watching a derby of personalities, each speaking up and trying to lay claim on the spot of the Prime Mover.

Dancing Kid shoots, and does not dance.  To be specific, he has a silver claim, but the townsfolk think he robs and robs and gallivants and all.

Sterling Hayden plays guitar.

Ward Bond as the cattleman pushes the sheriff around.

The puritan woman with the gritted teeth: a vague resemblance to Judy Garland, but that ain't who that is, and well, not seen before, and not seen after, soon to be forgotten like a bad dream.  Her little snarl, and the thing that she had a heart-hold on Dancing Kid, a dead brother, and a hatred for Joan Crawford's Vienna.

It was such that they took their guns off, did Sterling and Ernest, to go outside and fist fight.  That's not House Husbands of McBee type of pissing in the wind, not at all, Cheevers, it got physical, like Olivia Newton John.

Physical, physical, on your face.

In the television presentation, the personality jumble took some 45 minutes, a vast opening scene in big the bar room--each character demanding the center of attention.

As the film ran on, it began to seem like a snuff film, running some two hours, thirty minutes in the television presentation on INSP.

Ayn Rand, and the Virtue of Selfishness and Capital.  A biopic that tells of the biography of her, and the philosophy that she extolled.  A second film chosen to begin the week of the 11th, looking like a woman that went against the grain in her homeland, and came to make money, extolling career as the top priority, even as she made 30 cents a day, but she rose like the cream in the churn generally does--Horatio Alger and all--and she lived her philosophy.

Selfishness: A Virtue, and all, At Last Snugged, We The Eleven, The Spigot, in the dull tongue of the innerweb.  The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and all, writing in fictions, going in circles and all, and what had really grabbed me about Atlas Shrugged, was counting how many men Dagny Taggart slept with, she like a Kimberly Guilfoyle blueprint, and not a Paul Ryan role model, a kind of pookah of the 90th percentile and all.

I felt that, that 30-cents-a-day and putting career above all--Objectivism, and all,  AAA batteries here, and the jump start box and all; in fact, I saw it in lesser writings, "--to rise above it all--", bootstraps and all, that, that they say.

I lived some of that bullsh*t some early day, some 1995, 1996, talking about the ideal of various things, holding that up like a banner, a totem, a rasion d'etre, and all, and doing that, while subjecting, submitting to the everyday, of which the two rarely fed into one another.  The purest Romanticism, merely concepts and all.

And later in the Polksa Cowboy Operas, The French Palace, the hero, head-shot, bleeding, in a cheer, and the defaced saloon girl love interest, and the hero died quietly, off-screen, away from the focus, head fall back, looking through a hole in the roof at the signage higher above--

French Palace.

Not "Vienna's" like in Johnny Guitar, but the fricking French Palace.