The best of those studio directors who, more or less the same age as Orson Welles, began working in movies within a decade of “Citizen Kane” (1941) represent Hollywood’s “greatest generation.” Survivors of the Great Depression and often veterans of World War II, they fought the good war against assembly-line filmmaking. Robert Aldrich (1918-83) and Nicholas Ray (1911-79) were two.

Both men specialized in unconventional genre movies with larger-than-life antiheroes. Their vigorous melodramas and baroque action films were often self-consciously American. Like other members of the greatest generation, they were influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s emphasis on rites of midcentury existential manliness — although Aldrich’s “Emperor of the North” (1973), out on Blu-ray from Twilight Time, was inspired by the writing of and about Jack London, Hemingway’s precursor in literary swagger.

One of the strongest movies of Aldrich’s late career, “Emperor of the North” (a project originally intended for the mad macho man Sam Peckinpah) concerns the near-cosmic struggle between a laconic super-hobo known as A-No. 1 (Lee Marvin) and an implacably sadistic railroad employee (Ernest Borgnine) called simply the Shack, hobo slang for brakeman. The Shack is a killer who has never allowed a vagrant aboard his train; the ’bo who gets by him will be crowned Emperor of the North Pole, a pointedly meaningless honor that gave the movie its original title.

“The Road,” London’s memoir of riding the rails, was a tale of the 1890s; Christopher Knopf’s screenplay updates the action to 1933. The movie’s tone is post-“Bonnie and Clyde” Hollywood new wave, a scenic outlaw ballad mixing instances of extreme violence with ragtime high jinks. Lyrical passages with the sunlight streaming through the boxcar slats slam up against brawny Soviet-style montages of steel and steam. There are flickers of soft-focus period nostalgia, but the movie’s anti-authoritarianism is as resolute as the snub nose on Marvin’s fist-like face.
“Emperor of the North” opened a year after Martin Scorsese’s underappreciated “Boxcar Bertha” starred Barbara Hershey as a rail-riding union organizer. But Aldrich’s movie — a briefly glimpsed and appropriately hard-boiled young woman aside — plays out in an almost exclusively male world. Romantic interest, such as it is, is provided by a good-looking, aggressively callow aspiring hobo (Keith Carradine) named Cigaret (after London’s on-the-road nom de guerre), who functions as A-No. 1’s unwilling sidekick and pesky nemesis.
A-No. 1 is a canny operator, and so is Aldrich, who manages to spin a yarn at once discursive and streamlined. The action, filmed in and around Cottage Grove, Ore., on the same stretch of tracks as Buster Keaton’s “The General,” never leaves the sylvan Northwest. The ultimate battle, waged with chains, planks and axes between two primeval forces atop a speeding train, caps what finally comes to seem an abstract contest in time and space — a he-man illustration of the Johnny Mercer song “Something’s Gotta Give.”
“Wind Across the Everglades” (1958), directed by Ray from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg, a writer in the Hemingway mode, is another atmospheric, location-rich action film.
Set in the Florida Everglades in the early 1900s, the movie, out on DVD from Warner Archive, pivots on the mortal combat between two equally determined men. That this struggle pits Burl Ives’s brutal swamp rat, a poacher known as Cottonmouth (for the pet water moccasin in his pocket), against Christopher Plummer’s dedicated game warden, mockingly called Bird Boy, provides a backbeat of absurdity.
The movie’s tough-guy writer (brother to the producer Stuart Schulberg) and its bad-boy director were fiercely at odds. Fired before “Wind” wrapped, Ray rarely spoke of the film; Schulberg published his script but regarded the movie as a cobbled-together disaster. Yet in faraway France, the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma saw “Wind” as additional proof of the director’s genius.
The war between Cottonmouth and Bird Boy (and perhaps Schulberg and Ray) makes for a compelling, occasionally brilliant mess. No one’s idea of an auteurist, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that while “Wind” “happens to be one of the most disordered professional motion pictures we’ve ever seen, it also happens to be unusual, robust and picturesque.” Not to mention deeply and perhaps unintentionally idiosyncratic.
The surrealism is heightened both by inserted wildlife footage worthy of the National Geographic Channel and the lacunae left by truncated subplots. Bird Boy gets moral support and a Star of David pendant from a family of Jewish immigrants whose back story is never fully explained. Similarly, the absence of scenes identifying Cottonmouth’s teenage protégé as his son suggests that the boy may be his paramour, adding a possible subtext to the swamp rat brotherhood. Aside from a brief scene in a bordello (run by the retired stripper GypsyRose Lee), there is little preparation for the drunken face-off between Bird Boy and Cottonmouth, which ends with the all-American declaration “Here’s to livin’ free!”
Creepy reptiles share screen space with colorful supporting players. Schulberg may have been responsible for packing Cottonmouth’s gang with the circus clown Emmett Kelly, the jockey Sammy Renick and the heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, as well as casting the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer MacKinlay Kantor as a local judge, although Ray, who once programmed folk singers (including Ives) for the Voice of America, was more likely responsible for recruiting the Florida R&B artist Rufus Beacham (uncredited) as a fancy-house piano player.
Neither “Emperor of the North” nor “Wind Across the Everglades” is “Citizen Kane” (or even Welles’s last studio film, “Touch of Evil”). But both attest to a time when Hollywood often produced unheralded, offbeat, personal works of art.
‘Emperor of the North’ and ‘Wind Across the Everglades’: Fighters in Nature and Showbiz
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JEFF BRIDGES REFLECTS ON CANCER DIAGNOSIS: ‘CAME PRETTY CLOSE TO DYING’

Over three years after his lymphoma diagnosis, Jeff Bridges reflected on a harrowing set of circumstances that left him on death’s door.

“It’s amazing the way the mind can forget all that stuff,” the 74-year-old actor told Page Six. “I don’t think too much about the past.”

Bridges revealed that during one of his bouts of chemo, he ended up contracting COVID, leaving him hospitalized for five months with extreme pain and very little hope.
“I was pretty close to dying. The doctors kept telling me, ‘Jeff, you’ve got to fight. You’re not fighting,’” he told People in May 2022. “I was in surrender mode. I was ready to go. I was dancing with my mortality.”
“I had no defenses,” he added. “That’s what chemo does—it strips you of all your immune system. I had nothing to fight it. COVID made my cancer look like nothing.”
Thankfully, the chemo session before contracting COVID was his last one, and he was able to go into remission while beginning this new fight. This allowed his body to fully focus on recovering, and with help from a procedure that used blood from other patients who had already beaten the disease, Bridges was finally able to make progress.
Over three years later, the actor is now “feeling” great and fully back into the swing of things, returning to film his upcoming show THE OLD MAN. It was while he was filming this show originally that he discovered he had lymphoma.
“I was doing those fight scenes for the first episode of THE OLD MAN and didn’t know that I had a 9-by-12-inch tumor in my body,” he told AARP Magazine. “You’d think that would have hurt or something, when they were punching me and stuff. It didn’t.”
Jeff Bridges recently walked the red carpet for the premier of his FX show THE OLD MAN, and fans were overjoyed to see the actor back after a series of health struggles.
While filming the show, doctors diagnosed Bridges with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The actor underwent chemotherapy, and during treatment, contracted COVID-19.
“I was kind of surrendering to the idea that I might die,” Bridges said of his illnesses. “That this might be the end of the race kind of thing, because that’s what’s going to happen to all of us at some point and maybe this was my time to go through that and I didn’t know.”
However, Bridges began to recover. The TRUE GRIT actor said that he realized that he still wanted to fight to stay alive.

Yellowstone’s Kelly Reilly may have won herself a global fanbase as Beth Dutton but not everyone may realise this isn’t actually her real name.

Yellowstone star Kelly Reilly, unlike her counterpart Beth Dutton, shies away from the spotlight, keeping details about her personal life under wraps, including her name.

Beth Dutton is the violent, foul-mouthed, feisty only sister of the Dutton family in the Western Paramount Network drama who certainly is one to fear.

Nevertheless, she has shown her soft side with her desire to protect her dad John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) at all costs, as well as express her love for Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser).
Fans have loved watching Beth’s development since the show launched in 2018, although Reilly did have a number of other starring roles before its existence.
Some of which included True Detective, Flight, Sherlock Holmes and various appearances in theatrical productions, one of which she received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for.
Despite all of this fame and success, some fans may be surprised to learn that Kelly Reilly isn’t actually the actress’ real name.
Yellowstone actress Kelly Reilly is actually called Jessica Kelly Siobhan Reilly but chooses to go by one of her middle names, rather than her first.
It isn’t known why she was named Jessica but with Irish grandparents, her other middle name Siobhan is thought to have been passed down to her.
The star’s mum was a hospital receptionist, her dad Jack Reilly a police officer and her older brother Neil works as a professional golfer.
It’s quite common practice for celebrities to use their middle names for their stage name.
Other famous faces who have done this are Reese Witherspoon, Brad Pitt, Rihanna, Dakota Fanning and Ashton Kutcher.
But she is believed to be the only member of the Yellowstone cast to do this.
Unfortunately for fans of the award-winning drama, the number of Beth scenes to come is few and far between.
Yellowstone was cancelled last year with the network announcing that season five would be its last.PROC. BY MOVIES