To Build a Fire (Retro)

TO BUILD A FIRE (1969) NOT RATED 52 Minutes Director: David Cobham Writers: David Cobham, Anthony Short, based on the short story by Jack London Ian Hogg, Orson Welles

CAST Ian Hogg…The Chechaquo Orson Welles…Narrator

Our dog Butchie was half dachshund and half terrier, with the long body of one and the stubbornness of both. On especially cold winter nights, when my dad lit the fireplace instead of relying on the heater, he'd climb onto the brick hearth and stretch out so close to the slightly open stove doors that it made everyone nervous. There was no convincing him to back away. All we could do was keep an eye on him and make sure he didn't burn himself. He couldn't have explained the physics of heat or the dangers of hypothermia. He simply knew where warmth was. Watching the dog in TO BUILD A FIRE, I found myself thinking about Butchie.

The first fifty seconds of TO BUILD A FIRE aren't Jack London's at all. Before the man or the dog appears, Welles is reciting real history: George Washington Carmack's 1896 gold strike, the hundred thousand who set out for the Klondike, the forty thousand who made it, many of them unprepared for the winter waiting on the other side. It plays like the cold open of a documentary. Anyone catching this on television without knowing London or the story would have every reason to expect a survival-adventure picture, a Grizzly Adams with worse weather. Then the film narrows from a hundred thousand strangers down to one—a newcomer, a chechaquo, one more casualty-in-waiting from that same stampede—and within another few seconds Welles has delivered the story's actual thesis: this man reads the world in pure facts and never once in what those facts might mean. He is, in London's phrase, without imagination. That's not a hero being introduced. That's a diagnosis. Ian Hogg gets almost no dialogue for the rest of the picture, which makes sense: once you've been told exactly why a man is going to die, there's not much reason to let him talk his way out of it.

What "without imagination" costs him becomes clear as the numbers start arriving. Fifty below zero, then seventy-five, then a hundred and seven degrees of frost—the man logs each figure and files it under inconvenience, never converting information into consequence. London's original goes one step further than the movie does: that same failure of imagination, he writes, keeps the man from ever wondering about his own mortality or humanity's place in the universe—a line Welles doesn't read. By cutting it, the film has to make the point some other way. It does, mostly through the dog, who never once needs a thermometer to know that seventy-five below is a killing cold. The whole story is built on this contrast: a man measuring the world in numbers whose weight he cannot feel, walking beside an animal that feels the weight without ever learning the numbers. It's not a stretch to hear something of MOBY-DICK in London's Yukon, though the two men fail in opposite directions. Ahab loads the whale with more meaning than it can bear; London's man strips the cold of every meaning beyond a number. The dog commits neither error. It doesn't need the cold to mean anything. It only needs to understand what the cold demands.

I've felt my face ache in sixteen-degree weather, and that number matters: it is still ninety-one degrees warmer than what the man in the story is walking through. No production insurance covers a real shoot at seventy-five below zero, and no actor signs that release. Whatever Ian Hogg endures on camera is genuine cold, filmed at a survivable temperature, standing in for one that would kill the crew inside the hour. There's nothing dishonest in that; it's simply the same wall the man keeps running into from the other side. He knows it's worse than fifty and no more, with no way to make his body believe even that much. The production knows the real number and has no way to reproduce it. The man cannot even name it: of the man, the actor, and the audience, he is the only one never given the exact figure. He dies on an estimate he already knows is too low.

It's tempting to wonder what happens if the last fire catches—whether the resolve this kind of man is supposed to have would be enough to save him. London had already answered that six years earlier. The 1902 version, published in The Youth's Companion, names the man Tom Vincent, gives him youth and pride instead of a diagnosis, cuts the dog and the old-timer entirely, and finally lets him get a fire going after several failed attempts. He survives with frost-damaged feet and hands permanently scarred by the matches. The 1908 rewrite lowers the temperature further, keeps the same doomed first fire, then removes everything that might let determination rescue him: it adds the old-timer whose warning he ignores, adds a dog whose instinct makes his judgment look worse by comparison, strips his name, and lets every later fire fail. The basic risk is the same—a man alone in weather that can kill him—but what changes is whether resolve can redeem bad judgment. In 1902, it can. By 1908, London had decided it shouldn't, and rewrote the story until it couldn't. The unnamed man on screen is working from the version London ultimately decided was true.

The dog's send-off on the page is a three-part escalation: a soft whine, then a louder one, then—after it catches the scent of death and backs away—one final howl under stars the text describes as dancing, before it leaves for camp. The film's narration skips all three. Whatever whine you hear on screen is Pepper's own performance, not Welles reading London—the movie shows something instead of narrating any of it. But the thing doing the emotional work in that passage was never simple grief. London is precise about the relationship earlier in the story: there was "no keen intimacy" between the two, he writes, and then names exactly what stood in its place—a whip-lash, and the threat of one. The dog stays close to the man for the same reason it stays close to the fire: because distance has a cost. When the provider of both fire and punishment goes quiet, the dog goes and finds the next one. That's the real sadness in it, and it's colder than mourning—not that nothing was ever there, but that what was there was never anything worth grieving. Pepper at least gets a name London never gives the dog. Butchie, stretched across a hearth years before I'd read a word of this, never needed the physics explained to him either. He simply knew exactly where the fire was.

Final Verdict: 84 out of 100

Nobody's Fool (Retro)

NOBODY’S FOOL (1994) R 110 Minutes Director: Robert Benton Writer: Robert Benton (based on the novel by Richard Russo) Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy

CAST Paul Newman...Donald “Sully” Sullivan Bruce Willis...Carl Roebuck Jessica Tandy...Miss Beryl Peoples Melanie Griffith...Toby Roebuck Dylan Walsh...Peter Sullivan Pruitt Taylor Vince...Rub Squeers Gene Saks...Wirf Josef Sommer...Clive Peoples Jr. Philip Seymour Hoffman...Officer Raymer Philip Bosco...Judge Flatt

Here’s something the 4K transfer can’t give back: before NOBODY’S FOOL even starts, the VHS runs its own trailer reel first, a Paramount Home Video ad for its “Classic Romances” line, “Priced to Own,” scored to a needle-drop of “Take Your Breath Away” — the studio repurposing its own TOP GUN song to sell a shelf of unrelated tapes. Then, finally, the “Feature Presentation” card: gold letters, purple gradient, a fanfare doing a lot of emotional work for what is, functionally, a logo screen. None of that exists on the disc. The 4K version starts the movie exactly where the movie starts. What’s missing isn’t picture quality — the VHS looks worse, softer and dimmer — it’s the ceremony a studio used to build in front of its own product, the sense of an event about to happen instead of a file about to play. The tape dates itself before the movie even begins. The movie underneath it hardly does.

There was a time when Paul Newman was far more than those famous blue eyes staring back at you from a bottle of salad dressing or a stone-fired-crust frozen pizza. Yes, he raced cars in real life — not just in that Pixar movie. For younger readers who may know only the brand, Newman was first and foremost one of the great screen actors of his generation. What I remember most is that unmistakable grin in COOL HAND LUKE, equal parts mischief and defiance. Fast-forward fifteen years and he was already playing grizzled veterans. His first performance that truly felt like an old-man role came in THE VERDICT (1982), where he played a washed-up alcoholic lawyer clawing toward redemption. By the time NOBODY’S FOOL arrived in 1994, Newman looked every bit his nearly seventy years, but the goods were still very much there. The charisma hadn’t dimmed, and that famous smile could still light up the screen.

That wasn’t merely a nostalgic squint backward, either. Newman earned his eighth Best Actor nomination for Sully, losing to Tom Hanks in FORREST GUMP. What makes the nomination interesting is its timing. THE VERDICT had earned him a nomination in 1982, only for him to lose to Ben Kingsley in GANDHI. Then came THE COLOR OF MONEY in 1986, which finally won him the competitive Oscar the Academy had been withholding since COOL HAND LUKE — the sort of makeup prize an industry hands out once it has embarrassed itself for long enough. By 1994, Newman had nothing left to prove and no debt left for anyone to settle. The Academy nominated him again anyway. That wasn’t sentiment. That was a room full of voters looking at a nearly seventy-year-old man playing a construction worker with a bad knee and deciding the work stood on its own.

The construction worker with the bad knee has a name: Donald “Sully” Sullivan, and the first thing the movie tells you about him is how he talks to his landlady. Miss Beryl Peoples opens the film narrating a pattern to someone named Clive Sr.: a birdbath struck by lightning last week, a streetlight the year before, something working its way closer to her house every year. It takes a few lines to realize Clive Sr. is her late husband, not anyone in the room. “I have the feeling this is the year he lowers the boom,” she says, meaning God, meaning herself, not Sully at all. Sully’s response, once he arrives, is to ask if she’s still alive in there. She offers tea. He says no. She asks about his necktie, half worried it means police trouble again. He tells her not to worry unless she’s the one who turned in his parking tickets. Nobody in the scene is in crisis, and nobody is really talking about anything, which is the point: this is two people who have lived above and below each other long enough that mortality and porch railings get discussed in the same tone of voice.

That’s North Bath before the movie has told you a single thing about the plot. Russo built the town out of Ballston Spa, New York, permanently in the shadow of a fancier neighbor down the road, just as fictional North Bath sits in the shadow of fictional Schuyler Springs. Peter and the grandkids haven’t shown up yet. The porch has already told you everything you need to know.

Sully’s first words to his own son, three years since the last visit, are “you need a lift?” Peter has to say “Dad?” before Sully places him, and what comes back is practical, not warm — a ride offered the way you’d offer one to anyone who needed it. Peter, it turns out, has been teaching at the University of West Virginia. He’s arrived for Thanksgiving with his wife, Charlotte, and his two young sons, Will and Wacker. The tension between Peter and Charlotte is audible before anyone’s out of the car — someone calls it “the Thanksgiving from hell,” and someone else tells them to knock it off. Sully’s ex-wife, Vera, Peter’s mother, lives close enough that she’s factored into the weekend too, which makes this less a homecoming than a logistics problem with feelings folded in. It’s the same move Beryl gets on the porch: solve the practical problem, skip the feeling. This time it’s aimed at his own son.

The two boys meet Sully for the first time in the car, and it doesn’t go especially well. Wacker wants to know who he is. Charlotte tells him it’s his grandfather. “Does he always look like that?” Wacker asks, and Sully doesn’t defend himself: “Yeah, most of the time.” Sully asks, in turn, how the kid came by the nickname. Wacker answers by shouting it — “Wacker!” — and slamming a book into Sully’s bad knee, hard enough that Peter has to pull the car over. Sully reacts in the moment, real pain and no attempt to hide it, then lets it go. No lecture for the kid, no grudge carried into the rest of the scene. Will is a different matter: the boy who gets Sully’s attention from that point forward.

Will ends up in Sully’s care almost by accident. Peter has work to do in town, Sully offers to take the boy with him, and that’s it — the arrangement that will define the rest of the movie begins as a logistical fix. It’s Sully himself who worries about the site out loud — what if Will falls into a ditch, what if he steps on a nail — a caution he’s never once extended to himself. Peter laughs. Sully doesn’t let it go: “What’s so funny?” “Nothing.” It’s that non-answer that gets him there: “You mean, I worry about him, and I never worried about you?” Peter doesn’t deny it. “Well, you skipped a generation, didn’t you?” There’s no joke doing the work here, no deflection. Peter means it, and Sully doesn’t argue. The movie never resolves what that means — whether the tenderness Sully shows Will is something new that a second chance unlocked, or whether it was always there and Peter simply never received it. It lets the accusation sit unanswered while Sully takes the boy to work anyway.

The house Sully takes him to is his childhood home, the one Miss Beryl will later save by sending Wirf a check for the back taxes. Sully and Carl go inside to look it over and completely forget that Will is waiting alone in front of what must look to a child like an abandoned, faintly frightening house. When Sully finally remembers and comes back out, Will is scared and trying not to show it. Asked if Sully forgot him, his answer is “I didn’t mean to” — not an accusation, an apology, as if the failure were his own. Sully gives him an actual choice — come inside or go find his dad — and Will chooses his dad.

Peter’s response, when he hears what happened, is one of the harshest lines in the movie: “You’re never going to change, are you?” Sully doesn’t defend himself this time either. He finds Will alone and admits it plainly, without a joke: “Kind of messed up today, didn’t I? You were pretty scared, weren’t you?” Then he tells him what he used to do at Will’s age whenever he got scared: try to be brave for exactly one minute, then two. He hands Will his own watch to time it. It’s the same translation Sully always makes, turning a feeling into a task and then doing the task, except the task this time is teaching a frightened boy how to count out his own courage.

Rub finally says what has been bothering him: “There’s not enough work for the three of us.” Sully brushes past it, tells him not to worry, and when Rub says he doesn’t like it, Sully doesn’t soften: “You don’t have to like it.” It’s about as blunt as Sully gets with anyone in the movie, and it’s aimed at the one person who has never asked much of him beyond a job and a little attention. Rub quits on the spot. Sully chases him down anyway, up onto the sidewalk to keep pace, Peter along for the ride. “You ever seen anybody that stubborn?” Sully asks. “Yes, I have,” Peter says, and doesn’t say who he means.

Rub’s jealousy of Peter never gets explained beyond that apparent math problem: three workers, not enough hours, and Rub is the obvious one to remove. But the work probably isn’t what frightens him most. Peter has a claim on Sully that Rub can never earn, however long he carries the tools or follows him from job to job. What Rub sees shifting toward Peter is not merely employment but something resembling a father’s attention — the little bit of belonging Sully has given him, and perhaps the closest thing to it Rub has ever had.

Hoffman gets maybe four scenes as Officer Raymer, and he’s already refusing to play the role at the level the script would allow him to. Raymer’s whole character is trying to enforce something and failing: the same broken taillight, cited three separate times, threats to impound a truck that never get followed through, a “Sully, you’re on the sidewalk!” answered with an immediate “Up yours, Raymer.” It escalates all the way to an actual firearm — Raymer fires a warning shot at Sully, and gets punched in the face for it — and even that doesn’t buy him any dignity. Afterward, in Judge Flatt’s chambers, Raymer gets asked what he usually does when somebody throws a punch. “Duck,” he says. “Next time, do that,” the judge tells him. Nobody in North Bath takes him seriously, including the camera, including the judge.

What Hoffman brings to the part is real, specific frustration — not comic-relief incompetence, but the exhaustion of a man losing a battle he cannot win against people who decided years ago that he doesn’t matter. This is 1994, well before the Philip Seymour Hoffman most audiences came to know, and the thing that would define so much of his later work is already visible: the instinct for locating the bruised, lonely, very real person underneath a role that could have remained a punchline. Even in a part this small, he can’t help himself.

The smirk arrives half a beat before the line. The deflection comes dressed up as a joke. It’s Bruce Willis playing Carl Roebuck, and he wants you to know he’s smarter than the room he’s in. None of it reads as a tic at the time — that happens only in retrospect, after watching him run variations on the same play across dozens of later pictures. What complicates the read is what Willis gave up to appear here at all. He was commanding something like fifteen million dollars for action movies at the time. NOBODY’S FOOL paid him Screen Actors Guild scale, roughly fourteen hundred dollars a week, because he wanted to work opposite Newman badly enough to take the cut. He wasn’t coasting on the persona, though he couldn’t entirely escape it even while trying to do something smaller. Willis retired from acting in 2022 after an aphasia diagnosis that was later specified as frontotemporal dementia. A movie filled with bodies beginning to send their owners overdue bills plays differently with that knowledge sitting beside it.

Wirf delivers the news like a subpoena: “You own the house on Bowdin again. She paid the back taxes.” Sully’s first reaction isn’t gratitude. “I told you I didn’t want anything to do with that place.” Wirf doesn’t let him off the hook. This isn’t about what Sully wants, he says, and he doesn’t care what Sully wants. “This is about need.”

Clive Jr. has skipped town by this point, and Wirf spells out what that means for Beryl in a single line: she needs this gesture to matter, and she needs Sully to be grateful for it, whether or not he wants a dilapidated house loaded with memories he has spent his life avoiding. The movie never tells us what becomes of the place. We’ve already seen the inside, run-down enough to require far more than a few weekends of repair, and nothing in the remaining runtime suggests Sully has suddenly developed the follow-through to restore a house he never wanted back. Ownership isn’t the same thing as a plan.

Sully’s version of a Christmas present is a coin. “It occurs to me I forgot to give you your Christmas present. Call your wife. Telephone’s right there.” No wrapping, no sentiment — just a quarter and a nod toward the pay phone. It’s the same translation that has run through the whole movie: the ride instead of an embrace for Peter, the watch instead of comfort for Will. Except this time, the gift isn’t really an object at all. It’s an opportunity, disguised as an errand so neither man has to acknowledge what it means.

We never hear the call. What we get is the aftermath: Peter finds Sully and asks, “Could you and Rub spare me for a couple days?” The request doesn’t explain itself, and the movie refuses to fill in the blank. Something happened on that phone call — some opening, perhaps even the beginning of a reconciliation — and Sully’s fingerprint is all over it without his ever having to say a word about marriage, fatherhood, or any feeling he can’t disguise as practical advice.

Jessica Tandy died on September 11, 1994, at eighty-five, three months before NOBODY’S FOOL reached theaters. She had been living with ovarian cancer since 1990 and continued working through it. This was the final performance she gave the camera. She never lived to see the film reach an audience. None of that appears on screen exactly — nobody could have built it into the editing — but it is difficult to unknow once you know it, and it recolors a performance that begins with a joke about mortality. Beryl’s opening scene, delivered to a husband who has been dead for years, imagines God closing in on her house one lightning strike at a time. Tandy knew she was seriously ill when she spoke those words into a camera, for a film she would not live to see released.

The tea offer isn’t merely an offer, and it turns out the movie says so explicitly. Right after Sully’s “No, and how many times do I have to tell you?” Beryl doesn’t drop it: “Other people change their minds occasionally. I keep thinking you might.” Sully answers with a surprised “You do?” So it isn’t a ritual with a foregone conclusion on either side. She can recite his answer before he gives it, and she keeps asking anyway. Somewhere underneath the routine, she means it: some real, if modest, hope that today might be different. His surprise suggests he had filed the whole exchange away as a bit they do, never recognizing it as a standing invitation. The tea was never really about tea, but it wasn’t nothing either. It was Beryl checking, one more time, whether the door was open even a crack, dressed up as a beverage so neither of them had to admit what they were doing.

The final spoken line belongs to Sully, looking toward his dog, still waiting outside in the cold: “You may as well come in, too.” Nearly all of this closing exchange — the forgiveness, the tea, “I keep thinking you might,” the dog — tracks the final page of Russo’s novel with barely a change. Benton didn’t so much rewrite the ending as carry it across. Some things, apparently, don’t need translating twice.

Final Verdict: 85 out of 100.