Category Archives: The West

RIO BRAVO

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Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, from 1959, is many people's favorite Western, and there has certainly never been one that's more entertaining.  Hawks famously said that it was his answer to High Noon, which he found irritating because its hero sheriff ran around begging the citizens of his town to help him with his job.  Sheriff John T. Chance in Rio Bravo, played by John Wayne, pointedly refuses help from the citizens of his town on the grounds that they're not professionals and would only get in his way.  (He already has two allies — professional but flawed, just to make things more interesting — and picks up a third along the way.)



This dialectic is a little silly — there are obviously situations in which each approach would be appropriate — but Chance's is a lot more appealing, because it's closer to the classic Western idea of the hero.  High Noon is about a town trying (and failing) to make the transition from frontier outpost to civilized community.  Rio Bravo is governed by a different vision of the West, in which community in that sense is irrelevant — individual initiative and responsibility are the central and decisive issues.



Chance's attitude also reflects a recurring theme in Hawks's work — a celebration of professionalism, of people who know how to get the job done and do get it done, however cynical they may be about the job itself.  The small, closely-knit team, dedicated to a particular objective, is important to Hawks, along with the mechanics of teamwork — society as a whole doesn't concern him all that much, and is often presented as indifferent or corrupt, as it is for the most part in Rio Bravo.



Sex in Hawks's work is also more a matter of teamwork than romance — a game for two that has to be played well, and with a certain amount of diffidence.  Hawks's typical women aggressively pursue men they're attracted to, but expect to be amused in return.  Angie Dickinson is the hard-boiled dame “Feathers” who pursues Chance in Rio Bravo, asking nothing more than his engagement and encouragement for as long as things last.  She's a virtual reprise of the Lauren Bacall character in To Have and Have Not, a drifter and adventurer who's intrigued enough by the hero to pause for a while in her wanderings to play with him.



Feathers initiates the first kiss in Rio Bravo, which Chance responds to almost passively.  Then they kiss again and he's more active, at which she pronounces herself satisfied — “It's better when two people do it.”  It's a direct echo of Bacall's famous line in To Have and Have Not in which she tells Bogart that kissing is “better when you help”.



Dean Martin gives a surprisingly strong performance as Dude, a broken-down deputy who has to rehabilitate himself in order to help his friend Chance.  Ricky Nelson plays a hot-shot kid gunslinger whose professionalism impresses Chance and leads them into an inevitable alliance.

Nelson's performance is lackluster — he's in the film for marketing purposes — but Hawks uses Wayne's authority as a star and Western icon to lend Nelson's character “Colorado” substance.  If John Wayne approves of the kid and takes him seriously, who are we to second-guess him?  Colorado has a moment of fancy gun-play in a shootout, but his heroism doesn't really register until Wayne tells the other guys how good Colorado was.



Nelson's presence, and the cheerful tone of the film, let us know that nothing much more than entertainment is at stake in the tale.  John Ford is always interested in exposing the moral contradictions of his heroes, in examining the moral landscape of America itself.  Hawks is just interested in hanging out with some cool people and watching them do their thing.  Rio Bravo unfolds at a leisurely pace but is never dull for a moment — because the company is so good.  The only real suspense lies in wondering if the characters will be cool enough when their big moments arrive.  Of course they always are — and then some.



The spirit of fun that infuses the film is almost tongue-in-cheek — one can see in it a foreshadowing of the Sergio Leone approach to the Western, in which every Western cliché seems to have quotation marks around it, seems to be delivered with a wink.  Unlike Leone, though, Hawks is never interested in subverting or upending the clichés — just in having some fun with them, in the most efficient and elegant way possible.

Molly Haskell has called Rio Bravo “a movie one loves and returns to as to an old friend” — and that's not faint praise for a film which lasts well over two hours and proceeds, as I've said, at such a leisurely pace.  It's a “town Western”, too, one that never strays from the town it's set in, that takes place mostly in interiors and on one street on a studio lot.  But Hawks explores this narrow geography thoroughly, makes us feel at home in it, and his cinematographer Russell Harlan lights it warmly.  The film makes us cozy and comfortable, gives us time to know and savor the quirks and qualities of its characters.

This may make it seem like a simple film, but it's hardly that — the skill required to make something this “simple” so consistently fascinating and enjoyable is hard to value or praise too highly.  It takes the kind of cool and impeccable professionalism that Hawks admires and celebrates so agreeably in his protagonists.

THE WESTERN: REX QUONDAM, REXQUE FUTURUS

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The Western isn't dead — it never was.  It abides, through fruitful times and fallow times — a rich soil always capable of putting up unexpected shoots.



A bestseller, like Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, can inspire a classic Western, which the mini-series based on the book surely was.  A great screenplay, like David Webb Peoples's Unforgiven, in the hands of a great director, can produce a critically-acclaimed box-office hit.

Unforgiven was much more than that, of course — it is now generally recognized as one of the greatest Westerns ever made, one that can stand comparison with the classics of the genre, and with all but the very best Westerns of John Ford.



Since Unforgiven was made in a fallow time for Westerns, it naturally reflects this.  It is part of a tradition that arose in the Sixties when the Western seemed to be dying off as a viable commercial genre — the twilight Western.  This tradition concerns aging heroes who set off on one last adventure, mirroring a feeling that the Western itself might be heading for the last round-up.  Valedictory in tone, it actually wants to assert that the aging heroes are still with us, that their values still matter.



The twilight Western tends to be revisionist, painting a darker and grittier vision of the Old West than the older classics, and often incorporating a female perspective — these are its nods to modernity, on one level, but also its witness that the Western genre is still alive, still capable of evolving, of reflecting contemporary issues and ideas.



The makers of anti-Westerns, like Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, believed that the Western was played out, and proceeded to deconstruct it, to suggest that the Western myth was all a lie — that was their nod, or surrender, to modernity.  It was a delusion, as the phenomenal success of movies like Lonesome Dove and Unforgiven proved, but a delusion with great cachet for filmmakers and studio executives who came of age in the Sixties and Seventies.  For them, the thrill of killing off the traditions of their fathers festered and metastasized into an industry truism — modern audiences don't like Westerns.

The truth is that modern audiences don't like anti-Westerns, the only Westerns that present-day Hollywood thinks are cool.  Every time a new anti-Western flops, it seems to confirm the truism.  When a new Western that celebrates the classic virtues succeeds wildly, it's seen as an anomaly.



If the Coen brothers' True Grit, opening this Christmas, succeeds, Hollywood will not see it as the success of a Western.  As a Hollywood producer recently remarked to a friend of mine, reflecting on a possible revival of interest in Westerns, “The Coen brothers are their own genre.”  There's some truth in that, of course, but only up to a point, and that point is reached when the Coen brothers tackle a classic Western tale like True Grit.



Eventually, the glamor of the anti-Western will die out, with the rise of new generations of directors and producers untainted by the follies of the Sixties and Seventies.  The Western will still be here, its soil richer than ever from a long fallow time, ready to produce a new harvest of stories and adventures.  The passing of the twilight Western will signal the true renaissance of the form — new, young stars will take up the reins as protagonists of the revived Western, and blaze their own trails into the heart of America's most precious and enduring myth.

TRUE GRIT (1969)

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Henry Hathaway’s film True Grit, from 1969, is a wonderful entertainment, respectful of, if not exactly faithful to, the great Charles Portis novel on which it’s based.

The powerful emotional impact of the novel is achieved by indirection, by characters who don’t speak about what’s really going inside them because they’re rarely aware of it.  We read their inner lives though their actions, which are often surprising, startling, even shocking.  Hollywood is generally afraid of tales told this way, afraid that audiences won’t get the point, so the adaptation of True Grit brings the emotions and motivations of the characters to the surface.  Paradoxically, this leaves the viewer with less to respond to.



It’s clear from the start in the film where the friendship between the teen-aged Mattie Ross and the grizzled frontier marshal Rooster Cogburn is going.  It’s a pleasure to watch it go there, but one can’t fully enter into the journey as a participant.  John Wayne, who won his only Oscar for his portrayal of Cogburn here, is exceptionally good, working against his usual buttoned-up hero’s persona, but reveals the character’s decent and genial side too quickly.



Kim Darby, as Mattie Ross, also gives a fine performance, but because Darby was 21 when she made the film, Mattie’s precocious self-possession can’t help but lose some of its edge.  (In the book, Mattie is 14.)  Glen Campbell, then a popular cross-over country singing star, was cast in the third lead as Le Boeuf, primarily as a marketing ploy one assumes.  He acquits himself well enough, but always looks out of his league among the other fine supporting players like Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper and Strother Martin.



Although Hathaway directs the film in a classical style, with beautifully composed images (discounting a few ill-advised zooms), the film tries in other ways to be contemporary.  Elmer Bernstein’s score, often echoing the one he did for The Magnificent Seven, is generally light and buoyant — it doesn’t enforce the darker emotional currents of the tale.  The script incorporates a lot of Portis’s fine dialogue but emphasizes the cheerful and comic side of the novel, at the expense of its paradoxes and contradictions.  The disturbing undertow of the book is only suggested.



Paramount probably thought it was taking quite enough chances on this film, a Western with a strong female protagonist that featured John Wayne as a slightly less than heroic drunk — but in truth it was only keeping up with the times.  In the 1960s, Hollywood and the culture were becoming self-conscious about the conventions of the Western in an era of national doubt about the American dream, undermined by a controversial war in Vietnam and rowdy social upheavals at home.



1969 also saw the release of The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s savage and cynical deconstruction of the Western genre.  True Grit was a big hit at the box office, The Wild Bunch not so much, but a critical favorite.  The culture was clearly open to a different kind of Western.  It’s a shame that filmmakers chose to follow in Peckinpah’s tracks, instead of Hathaway’s or even Portis’s.  Dark and unconventional as the novel True Grit was, it still managed to celebrate, in its quirky way, the humane and noble values of the classic Western, introducing a convincing female perspective in the process.  Portis’s vision might have led to a renewal of the Western film — Peckinpah’s led to its virtual destruction as a reliable Hollywood genre.

TRUE GRIT

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Mattie Ross, the protagonist and narrator of Charles Portis's 1968 novel True Grit, originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, is one of the great voices in American literature — one that can stand with the voices of Ishmael, Walt Whitman, Huckleberry Finn and Bob Dylan.

Mattie embodies the contradictions and the mystery of the American character as no other figure in our literature does, quite.  How is it that a people so hard-working, tightfisted, materialistic, imbued so deeply with a fun-killing Puritan ethic, nevertheless manages to create characters and legends of such wildness, such free-spirited exuberance, such eccentric moral beauty?  There is no answer to that question, ultimately, no way of resolving the contradictions, explaining the mystery.  All we can do is observe it, as we observe Mattie, and marvel.



Mattie is 14 when her father is murdered and his murderer flees into the ungoverned Indian Territory of Oklahoma.  She hires a hard-bitten U. S. Marshall with a vicious side to go bring the fugitive back, and she determines to go along on the trek to make sure the job gets done.  Mattie is a ruthless bargainer in the negotiation, cold-blooded in her determination to see her father's murderer dead — hung by the law, if possible, but dead one way or the other, by any means necessary.



In this she is driven by the ethos of the Old rather than the New Testament — and she is a dogmatically religious person — but her passion is actually more personal than dogmatic.  She does not seem to mourn her father, or show a lot of sentiment over losing him — but this is a misdirection.  Vengeance is her way of mourning, heroic effort is her way of showing love — and on this unspoken truth the novel turns.  For she has found in the man she hires, Rooster Cogburn, a person exactly like her — a seemingly cold tracker and killer of men who has no other way of expressing his values, his profound if often misdirected decency, than by acting as an agent of the law.



In the miracle of finding each other, however, the cold abstraction of the law is overturned.  Cogburn becomes a surrogate father, one who will not leave Mattie, either by getting killed or by dereliction of duty.  She becomes a surrogate daughter, someone he can love by protecting.  They are both redeemed by their love for each other, and the climax of the novel is not the final confrontation with the murderer, but Cogburn's super-human race to save her life.

They remain tragic figures — redemption is not the same thing as satisfaction, as happiness.  They have met each other by chance in the only situation in this world in which either of them could truly love another person.  But it's enough — more than enough.  On their remarkable adventure, they live intensely enough to last a lifetime.  They create a story together that transcends their own personal limits as human beings, just as it transcends time.  In telling this story, Portis adds another episode of paradoxical grandeur to the American legend.

The novel was of course made into a famous film starring John Wayne, in 1969, which has now been remade by the Coen brothers, who reportedly have stayed more faithful to the book.  The new film will be released on Christmas Day this year.  My guess is that it will be a blessing to our culture, if only by steering people back to a magically profound novel.

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — ON SILENT AVENUE

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Another report by Paul Zahl from his recent trip to the area around Paducah, Kentucky:

This is one of the main avenues of the ancient Oak Grove Cemetery in
Paducah.  Here Irvin S. Cobb is buried, here is where John Ford came in
1961, while shooting his section of How the West Was Won nearby, to pay his respects to his old friend, and here is where the prototype for Cobb's (and Ford's) “Judge
Priest” (i.e. Judge William S. Bishop) is buried, right beside Silent Avenue.

This is Cobb's grave in Oak Grove Cemetery:



The inscription
reads, “Back Home”.  A dogwood tree, as per his dying request, shades the
grave.  He wanted only the Twenty-Third Psalm read at the grave,
together with the choir of a local African-American congregation to
sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Deep River”.  Cobb's wishes were
honored.



Mercy Avenue is another of the main axes of Oak Grove Cemetery.  I
got up high on some crumbling steps leading into a mausoleum in order
to get this one.  I think if we could all spend some time on “Silent
Avenue” and then perhaps forever on “Mercy Avenue”, we would be in
excellent shape.

Just a few “blocks” down Silent Ave from Cobb's grave is this one — the grave of John Scopes, the
teacher of evolution in the Tennessee public schools who was prosecuted
in the famous “Monkey Trial” of 1925:



This is the man whom Clarence Darrow (or
Spencer Tracy, for those of you who remember the movie about the trial, Inherit the Wind) defended, and who won, after a fashion.  He was found formally guilty and
fined $100, but the judgment was regarded by everyone at the time as a
victory for free speech, and even evolution itself.  In the film, Frederick March played William Jennings
Bryan (below), who stumbled in attacking this man, and never fully recovered from
the moral defeat which the trial was for him.



What a picture of
Twentieth Century America, in one acre of ground — Cobb, now no longer
famous, with a big grave near the entrance; his prototype for “Judge
Priest” buried nearby, on Mercy Avenue, a man who kept on getting elected
because the Confederate veterans of the county were “Yellow Dog”
Democrats — that is, people who would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for Republican; and then, after all that, down the way, the simple memorial
to John Scopes,  “A Man of Courage”.

TEN MINUTES OF EXQUISITE AGONY

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Paul Zahl's thoughts on the episode of How the West Was Won directed by John Ford (a few spoilers here), with some photographs he took recently of the filming locations:

JOHN FORD'S “CIVIL WAR”


Right after the Intermission in How the West Was Won comes
John Ford's part.  It is his conception of the Civil War, in which Carroll
Baker bids farewell to her son forever as he marches off to war, the Battle of Shiloh rages, during which her husband, the
Jimmy Stewart character, is killed off, then her
character dies (off screen), and George Peppard comes home to find only
his brother still there, lovingly watching over the family farm and
also the family graves.  Peppard's character leaves, again, and his
brother weeps with desolation and resignation.



Above is the exact spot where John Ford filmed the bracketing scenes on the farm.  I photographed it from
the bank of the Cumberland River at Smithland, Kentucky, with Georgian and
early 19th Century houses — inns, churches, warehouses, and one “plantation” house called “Strait” — on both sides of me and behind
me.  Just beyond the trees on the spit of land across the river is
where the farm house of Carroll Baker and George Peppard and his little
brother was constructed.  That area is now farmland.  Also, just
behind the trees, they constructed the log fence along the road down
which Andy Devine rode at the beginning of scene one, and down which
George Peppard walked at the end of scene one, the family dog trying to
follow him, plaintively.

Although the river in front of the spit of land is the
Cumberland, on the other side of it, in the far left background, is
the Tennessee.  Baker and the other actors would be ferried across to
the location each morning, from the spot where this photograph was
taken.  The place is still and wonderfully quiet.


The two scenes on the farm are
distilled emotion in the classic Ford manner.  Carroll Baker carries a
black scarf as she says her dense and underplayed
farewell to Peppard and as she addresses the dead in the family
graveyard.  The second scene on the farm is like a silent movie, with
almost no dialogue, and Peppard plays this particular part — his
discovery that his mother has died — laconically and therefore
movingly.  The director's use of the Cinerama process seems
instinctive, with Ford hiding the screen lines by means of poles and
posts mostly.  I find these two short scenes on the “Rawlings” farm to be
as mighty as any he ever did.



The middle sequence of “The Civil War” represents
the Battle of Shiloh.  It includes a somewhat cynical exchange between
General Grant and General Sherman, and a contrived encounter that
George Peppard, slightly wounded on the Union side, has with Russ
Tamblyn, a Confederate soldier.  They are both quenching their burning
thirst at “Bloody Pond”, until they realize that the water has an odd color . . .



Above is Bloody Pond as it looks today.  It has changed little since the
night of April 6th, 1862, which is the night depicted in the middle section of
Ford's Civil War sequence.  You can't
park anywhere near the place today, due to improvements being made by
the Park Service to the loop road; so you have to approach Bloody Pond
through the woods on the other side of the Pond (from this angle).  You
walk about a third of a mile through woodland, then come right out on
the clearing where the Pond is.  Now it is muddy and yellowish-brown.
 That night it was red.



Ford also depicts the battlefield surgical station, as well as the tiny Shiloh Church — above, as it is today.  This is where the fighting reached its apogee on the first day of the battle.  It is a reconstruction (but on the exact site) of Shiloh
Methodist Church, which was destroyed during the battle.  It is
depicted at the top of the frame at the beginning of the nighttime
section of Ford's Shiloh sequence.



They weren't able to
have church that Sunday morning April 6, 1862 . . . but . . . the day I was
there, a couple of weeks ago, I went into the current United Methodist
Church of Shiloh, which is the active church, located to the right of what you
see in the photograph, and peered through its glass doors.  Behold!: a
dead woman was there.  There had been a “viewing” the night before, and
there, right below the altar, in an open casket surrounded by bouquets
of flowers and waiting for a late morning church service, was a
peaceful person of middle years, lying in death, for all to see.  It
was as if the entire scene were crying, “This is not abstract, what you
are seeing.  It's not re-enactment time.  These things really
happened.  And they still do.”

Ford's Shiloh sequence feels “staged” to me, and I've felt
this ever since the days when Lloyd Fonvielle and I saw this movie in
its first run at the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue, not so many
blocks from the Obama White House.


For me the summit of How the West Was Won is reached during John Ford's “Civil War”.  But it's the home front that moves you, and moves you mightily.

[See my thoughts on the rest of the film here.]

HOW THE WEST WAS WON

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How the West Was Won is not really the frontier epic it aspires to be but a curious sort of Western-themed variety spectacle, a cavalcade of “attractions”, something like Buffalo Bill's Wild West.  On its original release, the central attraction was the Cinerama process in which it was presented — a three-projector system which wrapped a super-widescreen image nearly halfway around a theater for a grandly immersive experience.



It was genuinely enthralling, as I can attest from having seen it in that process twice, once as a kid when it came out and once nearly forty years later as an adult.  On both occasions I got lost in the hallucinatory beauty of the images, and didn't think too much about the intertwined narratives they served.



The vertical seams between the three strips of film which made up the Cinerama image were apparent in the original process, although one tended to ignore them after a while.  Recently, though, the film has been transferred to DVD with the seams digitally removed, more or less completely, which allows one to experience the images in a new way.  Of course on a TV screen they don't have the visceral impact they did in the theatrical Cinerama presentation, but one can still appreciate how beautifully they are composed, and the film's narrative content assumes a new prominence.



The film is episodic, covering a wide range of locales and time periods, but the episodes are all linked by characters established in the opening section (above) whose descendants carry on the drama through time.  The script, which won an Academy Award, is very skillfully constructed in this regard, so that the sweep of the narrative never feels chaotic.  It does fall apart at the end, though, in the final of the five major episodes, “The Outlaws”.

This section of the film had script problems and was revised and re-shot in parts during production.  What's left is a halfhearted reprise of High Noon, culminating in a shoot-out on a moving train, which mixes stunning location work with crappy backscreens in which the principal actors do daring things in a studio.

It's an unfortunately underwhelming end to the big show.



The film has an all-star cast, with actors that are often not really suited to their roles, chosen instead for their iconic stature as stars of the Western genre.  Jimmy Stewart is way too old for the role he plays as Carroll Baker's love interest, and Gregory Peck is way too staid for his role as a feckless gambler.  But it doesn't matter — these stars are just being paraded before us for nostalgic purposes, the way an aging Buffalo Bill was driven around the arena at his shows in a carriage when he was no longer able to sit a horse comfortably.



Debbie Reynolds is given several song and dance numbers which are stylistically closer to scenes in a musical than to musical interludes in a Western drama — but again, it doesn't matter.  This is, as I say, a variety show, not a coherent epic.



The biggest problem with the casting is that George Peppard, bland and unconvincing as a man of action, must take the baton for the final dash to the film's finish line, and he's not up to it.  He is asked to carry the anti-climactic climax — something a star of real charisma might have done — but instead only contributes more mediocrity to the perfunctory conclusion.



Still, all in all, it's a most unusual and entertaining variety show, elevated often to a higher level by the stunning images of classic Western iconography — river rafts and steamboats, wagon trains, Indian attacks and a buffalo stampede, steam locomotives and galloping bandits — all brilliantly shot in the real wide-open spaces of the real American West.  In those rare moments when the drama works on its own terms, the combination of spectacle and emotion is thrilling.

[In a follow-up post, here, Paul Zahl reflects on one of those rare moments, in the John Ford-directed section of the film, with photographs of the location where it was filmed, which Paul recently visited.]

THE BIG COUNTRY

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William Wyler’s The Big Country, from 1958, could almost serve as a
textbook on how to shoot a Western — it has some of the most amazing
images in the history of the genre.  Unfortunately, it’s not a very
good Western, not a very good film of any kind, and ends up being
terribly depressing.

Like John Ford, Wyler started out in the silent era directing
low-budget Westerns at Universal.  He graduated to more prestigious
material in the sound era but returned to the Western occasionally for
A-pictures in the genre, and made some fine ones, like The Westerner
with Gary Cooper.



The Big Country was a prestigious Western all the way, co-produced as
an independent film by Wyler and the film’s star Gregory Peck.  It had
a first-rate supporting cast including Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons
and Burl Ives.

Its story strove for the grandeur of a saga, and that perhaps was the
cause of its downfall as a film.  It proceeds at the stately pace of an
epic and clocks in at over two and a half hours, but it doesn’t have
the power or range of an epic, being a somewhat stodgy melodrama about
a feud between two ranching families over access to water for their cattle.



Peck plays a peaceably inclined Easterner who’s about to marry into one
of the families and isn’t impressed by the code of honor behind all the
violence he sees.  He gets mixed up in a couple of inconvenient love
triangles as the range war rages and eventually proves his manhood on
his own terms.

These are all familiar Western themes but they seem to have been
cobbled together without much conviction.  The central love story is
satisfying but takes a long time to get under way.



We are left with . . . the big country, shot magnificently by Wyler in
his usual elegant style, with stunning tracking and deep-focus shots in
spectacular scenery recording beautifully choreographed action playing
out in vast spaces.  It’s breathtaking, visually, but since we’re not
deeply invested in the story, the visuals have a limited impact.  We’re
seduced into magical spaces where nothing all that exciting happens
emotionally.  Big country, big production — little movie.

THE RETURN OF THE WESTERN

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America, having lost its way in the 21st Century, is in desperate need of the Western, which it cast aside too heedlessly and too cynically in the 60s.  The Western keeps coming back, successfully when it celebrates the old values Americans are hungry for — the traditional, unifying national myth — disastrously when it tries to peddle the old 60s cynicism one more time.

The Coen brothers understand this if any filmmakers working in Hollywood today understand it, which gives me hope that their remake of True Grit, coming this Christmas, will offer a way back into the Western for modern audiences.



They've chosen the perfect vehicle.  When the Western was buried prematurely it was just starting to expand its horizons, just embarking on the next logical phase of its development, which was to incorporate a female perspective into the myth.  Charles Portis's novel, the story of an alliance between an aging lawman and a 14 year-old girl, may not offer a mature female perspective, but it's on the right track — it suggests a future.  14 year-old girl heroes grow up eventually into women heroes.

Portis's novel also deals with a social phenomenon that has only grown more pronounced since the book was published in 1968 — fatherlessness.  In the tale, Mattie Ross's father has been murdered, and she hires a broken down gunman to help her get revenge.  The gunman, Rooster Cogburn, must reconnect with his heroic youth in order to fulfill his mission — an image of manhood in need of redemption, of a kind of surrogate father given a second chance to do his duty.



The Coens are also among the few filmmakers working in Hollywood who understand how to use cinematic space for emotional effects — an understanding which is crucial to the success of any Western, which depends so profoundly on the truths about themselves people reveal in the ways they move through space, through iconic American landscapes, on foot or on horseback.

If the Coens pull this one off, it will be a grand Christmas present to cinema, and to the nation.

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE

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This is one of the saddest films ever made, but the depths of its sorrow don't reveal themselves on a first viewing, when we have the tension and suspense of the narrative to distract us.  But it's a tale told in retrospect, beginning with the death of one of its protagonists, and it's best appreciated, or most fully appreciated, on a second or third viewing, when you know what's going to happen — when you can relish all the small details layered into it to reinforce its melancholy, elegiac mood.



In 1962, when the film was made, the twilight Western was becoming a regular form of the genre, telling stories about the passing of the Old West and its heroes and their values.  It signaled a suspicion that the Western itself was almost played out as a commercial form, and an acknowledgment that the great stars of the genre were aging and not being replaced by younger stars of equal stature.



Ford was the only director who had the grace to try and give the Western a proper burial, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that burial.  Sam Peckinpah, who made one of the great twilight Westerns in Ride the High Country, was driven by his demons to mutilate the corpse of the Western (in The Wild Bunch) before throwing the sod o'er it.

As with The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has at its tragic core the story of a love that might have been but never was, regret for which consumes the female lead here, as it consumed the male lead in The Searchers.  This is what gives the film its emotional power, in a way that a tale of the civilizing of the West, the passing of an old way of life, would not have.  What might have been an exercise in nostalgia or sociology becomes something much deeper.



Hallie, played by Vera Miles, is the key to almost every scene in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  As a general rule, if you want to know what Ford is interested at any given moment, watch her.  Watch especially the early scene in which Link, the old retired sheriff, played by Andy Devine, drives her out to the desert.  His delicacy in knowing what she wants to see but not speaking of it, her reliance on his unspoken understanding and sympathy, evoke something far more momentous than the passing of old times.

What we are seeing is the wisdom of age, a celebration of consideration, of the potent, consoling force of etiquette in human affairs.  It's the passing of chivalry, gallantry, self-sacrifice which the movie grieves over — not the rowdy freedom of the old days, but their silent and graceful formalities of mutual respect.

The idea is even more poignant now than in would have been in 1962, when it was genuinely prophetic.  There isn't a director working in Hollywood today who's wise or grown up enough to create a scene like that one between Link and Hallie, and even if there were, there isn't a producer or a studio with the guts to let a director create such a scene.  Ford was mourning more than the death of the Western in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — he was mourning the death of humane cinema.

Ransom Stoddard, played in the film by Jimmy Stewart, embodies the logic of the law, right and true and admirable in every respect, but Tom Donophon, played by John Wayne, embodies the spirit of grace.  It's a spirit Hallie has come to cherish too late, but she pays due respect to it as it's laid to rest.

Stoddard once taught her how to read, but Donophon gave her a flowering plant, bearing cactus roses.  She never repaid the gracious gift in his lifetime, but she knows, with his death, what she owes him, has always owed him, and repays it symbolically, the only way she can.

The director Paul Schrader once said that Sam Peckinpah's contribution to the Western was carving its tombstone.  John Ford, by contrast, had the decency and the humility to lay a cactus rose on its grave.

THE WESTERN ARIA

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Westerns used to be referred to sometimes as “horse operas”.  The term was slightly dismissive but has a kind of logic.  In good Westerns — good A Westerns and good B Westerns — the drama is punctuated and often driven forward by passages of action which have a musical quality.  For lovers of the genre, these passages are like arias, the great memorable numbers in the classic operas that you walk out of the theater humming.  In some ways they're what the show is all about.



The makers of most modern Westerns have forgotten this basic organizing principle of the form, if they ever understood it at all.  Horses in modern Westerns, as I've remarked elsewhere, are props, accessories, means of conveyance — not tenors or sopranos with a vital function to play in the show.  Phoning in the horse action in a Western is the equivalent of an opera director playing the great arias as recorded background music while the performers get on with the serious business of speaking the dialogue of the libretto.



Some Western “arias” don't require horses — these are the shoot-outs in which enemies face off and battle to the death.  These arias are all about space — about the camera making clear what spaces the combatants are in and what problems it confronts them with.  Their negotiation of these spaces becomes a kind of violent dance — like the violent dances that take place in a boxing ring or a bull ring, which become legible and beautiful only when the limits of the arenas are clear to the spectators.



The spaces can be intricate, as with a running gun battle through rocky terrain or through the streets and between the buildings of a town.  The spaces can also be very simple, as in the ultimate Western aria — the face to face showdown between two small groups of men or just two men in an empty street or corral or farmyard.  The dance here is usually very stylized and formal — from the challenge to the slow walk towards the meeting to the lightning-fast denouement.



In all these arias, the director needs to know how to elaborate and arrange “the kinetic melody of movement”.  When the directors of Westerns forgot how to do this, it was like that development in modern opera when composers forgot how to incorporate, or lost interest in incorporating, memorable melodies in their scores.  Opera ceased being a popular art form with this development, and Westerns will never again be a popular film genre until the modern directors of Westerns re-learn the art of the Western aria.

THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE

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Just a few months after he delivered The Wild Bunch, in 1969, Sam Peckinpah started work on its unlikely follow-up, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue.  Hogue is so sweet and sentimental that one is tempted to read it as an attempt to atone for the brutishness and meanness of the preceding film.

It’s a film that defies category.  Part revenge saga, part love story, part romantic comedy, part sex farce, part elegy, it’s a work that delights mostly in telling stories, in the slow rhythms of a good yarn spun out before a fire on a chilly night.  Audiences of the time were baffled by it and uninterested in a sweet and sentimental film from the director of the The Wild Bunch.  The studio that made it seemed equally baffled and uninterested and did not promote it aggressively.  It was a colossal flop at the box office in 1970, but its reputation has grown steadily over the years, and rightly so.  It’s a really wonderful film.

Like Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch it’s a twilight Western, a film about the passing of the Old West, but it’s neither tragic nor savage on the subject — more bemused and fatalistic.  It has none of the nihilism and bitterness of The Wild Bunch, and one is further tempted to ascribe this to the fact that Peckinpah didn’t write the script, but that would be unfair — his commitment to the material is absolute.  In his later years he called it his favorite film, and it was the one work he wanted young people to see when he lectured on college campuses.

The love story is the heart of it, and it’s one of the best and most powerful love stories ever told in a Western — all the more so for the fact that it starts out so conventionally, even crudely.  Cable Hogue, visiting a nearby town to file a claim on some desert land where he has improbably found water, catches sight of Hildy, a cheerful whore with a heart of gold.  She’s lovely and magnificently sexual, and Peckinpah concentrates his camera on her cleavage — pointedly, almost obsessively.



Hildy is presented as a sex object, something to leer at, and Peckinpah leers at her with gusto.  But that changes.  It changes because of the way Cable, played with charm and intelligence by Jason Robards, treats Hildy — with respect for her humanity — and because of the way Stella Stevens, in an equally fine performance, expresses that humanity in Hildy.  By the end of the film, one is not ogling her boobs — one is studying her eyes to see what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling.  These things have become matters of paramount importance.



It’s an amazing bait and switch, turning this sex object into a complicated woman we care about, and it’s almost unprecedented in the Hollywood Western.  It becomes unbearably moving.  The climax of the relationship, and in some way the climax of the film, occurs during a scene in which Hildy visits Cable’s cabin on his claim.  She slips into a nightgown in the cabin and then opens the door for Cable, who’s waiting outside.

Cable looks at her, half-silhouetted in the lamplight behind her, and says, “That’s a sight for sore eyes.”  “You seen it before,” she reminds him, but he shakes his head and replies, “Nobody’s seen you before, lady.”  To her, it means being seen as someone reborn, with her shady past gone, irrelevant.  To lovers of the Western genre, it means looking at a woman as a full person, not just a reward for male heroism or an occasion for male gallantry.

It’s a tentative venture into territory the genre might have explored more fully if cynical Westerns like The Wild Bunch hadn’t sounded its death knell.  John Ford, for all his courtliness towards women, only created one female character in a Western as rich as Hildy — Maureen O’Hara’s Kathleen Yorke in Rio Grande.



The Ballad Of Cable Hogue is full of fabulous incidents and subplots, but in the end they all really serve to set off the story of Cable and Hildy — and the love of Cable and Hildy irradiates the rest of the narrative.  It leads to an act of unexpected forgiveness between mortal enemies, and seems to be the real source of Cable’s love of the desert, and even of his country.



When Cable signs a contract with a stage line to make his spring a station on their route, assuring his fortune, one of the stage drivers presents him with an American flag, which he flies proudly over his lonely outpost.  He’s lowering it one evening when Hildy shows up to stay with him for a while, whereupon he runs it up the pole again, as a kind of salute to the woman.

Hildy becomes by implication the spirit of the nation — the Eternal Feminine that leads it on.  Ford’s work often suggested this idea, but rarely personified the feminine as acutely as Peckinpah and Stevens managed to do in this film.  It’s a startling achievement.



The image of the flag flying over Cable Springs at twilight in a beautiful wide shot is grand and iconic, worthy of Ford.  The film is filled with such images, but cluttered with stylistic tics like split screens, zooms and extreme telephoto shots.  “This is a modern film, totally up to date!” they scream, in the language of 1970.  In the language of today they have another message — “This is an old film!”  Hogue has dated on this score to a far greater degree than other films made around the same time in a more classical style, like The Godfather.

This is the only thing that keeps Hogue out of the front ranks of the Western, but it doesn’t vitiate the radical humanism and deep emotion that drive it.

THE WILD BUNCH

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[Note:  If you’re a big fan of The Wild Bunch, please don’t read this post — it will really piss you off.]

I know that The Wild Bunch has a lot of cool stuff in it, a lot of cool lines and situations and scenes.  I know how startling a film it was when it first came out, because I saw it when it first came out and was startled.  I know its historical importance in inaugurating the era of the anti-Western.  I know that it was made by a filmmaker of genuine genius and has one set-piece action sequence that’s very close to being brilliant.

But I also know that, overall, it’s badly written, badly shot and badly edited.  It’s a mean-spirited, crappy little movie, for all its reputation, and its commentary on the Western genre, its revision of that genre, is puerile and meretricious.  It was made by a man who understood and loved the genre but sold his birthright for a mess of porridge.

If your positive feelings about the film are based on viewing it as a young person, then I can understand them — when I was a child I spake as a child, too.  But when I became a man, I put away childish things.  If your positive feelings about the film are based on a recent viewing and careful consideration, then I either don’t respect your judgment or I don’t like you.

There are some things a man can’t ride around, and for me The Wild Bunch is one of them.

This was Sam Peckinpah’s fourth Western feature.  The second, Ride the High Country (above), was one of the great twilight Westerns — a tale of the passing of the West and of the men who tamed it and of the code they lived by.  Peckinpah didn’t write that film.  He did co-write The Wild Bunch.  It has elements of the twilight Western.  Its protagonists are aging outlaws off on one last adventure just before WWI — but these men have only the crudest sort of code, which basically boils down to the idea that there should be honor among thieves.

They think nothing of murdering innocent bystanders to get what they want.  They tolerate one of their band murdering a former lover because she’s left him for a crud.  They’re content to murder U. S. soldiers in order to steal weapons for a corrupt Mexican tyrant, in return for cash. They’re not above using unarmed women as shields in a gunfight.

Yet somehow Peckinpah sees honor in these men — because they like to do things the hard way (why?) and because they stick together.  In a famous scene, the leader of the outlaw band played by William Holden says, to quell an argument in the ranks, “When you side with a man you stay with him.  If you can’t do that you’re just some kind of animal — you’re finished.”  But if you side with a man in order to do bestial things, what the hell does a code like that add up to?  Nothing much, really.

The film ends on a note of sacrificial bravery, or suicide by Federales, if you want to look at it that way, and it summons up enough of the old Western imagery to make you forget for a moment the real character of these men, brave but unprincipled by any conventional or admirable definition of the word, sort of like modern-day terrorists.  Peckinpah offers an image of redemption that may fire the blood but cannot convince the heart.

It being 1969, Peckinpah the screenwriter offers other apologies for the brutality and cynicism of his protagonists.  The bystanders they kill are part of a hypocritical and corrupt society.  The soldiers they kill are incompetent and of course, by implication, wear the uniform of the country that was at the time ravaging Vietnam.

It’s all crap of course — an attempt to burnish male violence and misogyny with some sort of vague social criticism.  The outlaws make crude jokes amongst each other and then laugh really hard over them — when you hear that totally unconvincing laughter, you know it’s just a cue to the young men in the audience to approve their own lowest locker-room sensibilities.  In the paean to the men that ends the film, Peckinpah offers this rough-house laughter as a kind of transcendent image of the life force of the outlaws.  It still rings hollow.

Peckinpah indulges his own adolescent insolence frequently in the film.  He knows how to make beautiful shots of horses moving through landscapes, but his big equestrian stunts are all about tormenting horses and making them look awkward and ugly.

He seems to take a special delight in degrading the aging icons of the Western genre, having them do shameful things — Holden occasionally but Ben Johnson often . . . Johnson who had been for John Ford the symbol of grace in the saddle and moral grace as a hero.  To show Johnson’s character drunk in a tub of water pawing a half-naked Mexican whore is to direct a gob of spit straight into Ford’s one good eye.

There are many beautiful images in the film, but many more which are turned into mush by telephoto lenses and zooms.

This style of shooting made the film seem new — in 1969.  Today, it simply dates the work, making it look cheap, like something shot for television.

There is one almost wholly admirable set-piece involving a train robbery, which is well staged and well shot and well edited — it’s the work of a filmmaker who knows what he’s doing.  But other action sequences are incoherent to the point of being unreadable, with fast cutting and shock zooms that give the impression of excitement by purely cosmetic means.

The film does have a few gracious moments — crepuscular mood pieces in which the nostalgia for past times is almost touching . . . would be touching if we could imagine that these men had ever been more than thugs.  And there’s a mystical love for Mexico, for the sweetness of certain aspects of Mexican culture, that really is touching, even if it hasn’t got much to do with the rest of the film.

After an initial robbery gone wrong the “wild bunch” retreat south of the border and have a brief idyll in a small Mexican village.  As they ride out of it the next day the villagers serenade them, and Peckinpah films their mounted procession in beautiful slow tracking shots.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense — why do the villagers seem to worship such men as departing gods? — but it’s very sweet.

The Wild Bunch got its juice when it came out from its graphic violence and its swaggering nihilism — for its daring in deconstructing the myth of the old West created over generations in the movie Western.  That sort of frisson has a short shelf life, though.  The anti-Western cycle that this film inspired exhausted itself very quickly, and soon the Western was more or less finished as a commercial proposition.  How many times can you deconstruct something that’s already lying scattered around in pieces on the ground?

Guys who thrilled to this film in their youths may have a certain nostalgia for its crude, chaotic energy, like the crude, chaotic energy of adolescence itself — and we can’t very well begrudge them this.  But it’s no movie for grown men, and it was a calamitous event in the history of the movie Western and thus in our culture at large.