Category Archives: The West

LONE PINE

Posted on by

My nephew Harry and I, a couple of movie-mad kids at heart, made a pilgrimage last week to Lone Pine, California, to pay our respects to a location where scores of Westerns and other kinds of films have been shot over the years.

Fatty Arbuckle made The Round-Up there in the silent era (1920), and most of the exteriors of Gunga Din were shot there, incorporating some massive sets constructed in the Alabama Hills, in 1938.

Many of the films in the Hopalong Cassidy series were made in and around Lone Pine . . .

. . . and many of the Tim Holt Westerns, too.

The films in both of those series are beautifully shot — they are B-Westerns with first-class cinematography and can be watched over and over again for the aesthetic pleasures of their images alone.



The greatest films shot in and around Lone Pine were the Randolph Scott-Budd Boetticher Westerns, including The Tall T (above), Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station (below), and these films have consecrated the locale for me.  Lone Pine and the nearby Alabama Hills were for Boetticher what Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, were for John Ford.  I wanted to move through that landscape and see the raw material from which Boetticher conjured his enchanted spaces.



I was also doing a very preliminary location scout for a no-budget Western I'm working on, wondering if Lone Pine might be a place it could be made.

We started out our day at the excellent film museum in Lone Pine, which has an amazing collection of posters from the films shot in the area and a number of sublime artifacts — the most sublime of which was a cowboy hat worn by Barbara Stanwyck in a film made at Lone Pine.  My heart skipped a little beat as I stood before it, thinking of the way that woman could sit a horse.

The lane above runs next to the museum.



Like Monument Valley and the valley near Moab through which the Colorado River flows, Lone Pine has a lot of different-looking landscapes concentrated in a small area — which facilitates rapid company moves on a low-budget shoot.  You can get a sense of numerous contrasting locations with minimal logistical complications.



The Alabama Hills are a labyrinth of odd rock formations, passes and basins.  Minutes away to the east the Owens River runs through shady groves and reeds — familiar from the beautiful river crossing scenes in the Boetticher films.



One of the glories of Lone Pine is the range of the Sierra Nevadas looming up to the west of the Alabama Hills.

It makes for some spectacular scenery, but would be a problem for my film, which is set in North Texas, where such mountains do not exist.  Working in the Alabama Hills or along the banks of the Owens, which could stand in quite well for Texas, one would be severely limited in the directions from which one could cover a scene, but it's probably a limitation one could live with.



But that's a problem for another day.  The day we spent in and around Lone Pine was magical — it's ground haunted by galloping ghost horses ridden by ghost cowboys, whose images live on, even in these degraded and ignoble times.

We drove back through the furnace of Death Valley that afternoon . . .

. . . and sped straight to the In-N-Out Burger for sustenance.  That night, inspired by the grand Western landscapes of Lone Pine, Harry watched Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu for the first time.

HIGH COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Posted on by

Before the anti-Western there was the twilight Western — a series of films which seemed to sense that the genre was almost played out, or at least that America no longer looked to it for wisdom and inspiration.  The iconic Western stars were becoming old men in the 1960’s, and no figures of comparable stature were riding in to replace them, with the possible exception of Clint Eastwood (who would start the important part of his journey far from Hollywood) but the older stars still had box-office pull, for some part of the audience.

So we were given Westerns about the passing of the West, the last days of aging heroes.  These Westerns continued to affirm the traditional values of the genre but acknowledged that the world might no longer need them, or if it did need them, no longer understand them.



The twilight Western really began with the last shot of John Ford’s The Searchers in 1956.  Ethan Edwards, a somewhat deconstructed hero, walks off alone, having performed his last heroic deed — there is, at any rate, a suggestion that no more such deeds await him.

Ford continued the deconstruction of the Western hero, and offered a look at the times that made him irrelevant, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence — a film told mostly in flashback.  Budd Boetticher had previously made a series of brilliant films starring the aging Randolph Scott, still noble and implacable in virtue, but always alone — not just a lone wolf, like many Western heroes, but marked with a sadness  for lost times.  The Boetticher-Scott Westerns are uncompromising in their celebration of traditional values, but haunted, too, by a sense of something coming to an end . . . by the idea that Scott’s stoic hero may be the last of his breed.

This idea is made explicit in Sam Peckinpah’s first Western (and second feature), Ride the High Country, from 1962.  Scott (above on the left) plays an aging hero who loses faith, at least for a while, in the code he has always lived by.  Joel McCrea (above on the right), almost as old as Scott, holds on to that code, knowing full well that the world no longer gives it much credit, if it ever did.

The film is an elegy for and affirmation of this old code of
the Western hero — a combination that is both inspiring and poignant.
It’s a new kind of Western, too, in its treatment of its female lead, played by Mariette Hartley (above).  She offers, as in many Westerns, an occasion for testing the gallantry, and thus the true worth, of the male characters, but Peckinpah makes an effort to get inside her head, to let us imagine what the test means for her.  One can’t really call Peckinpah’s perspective feminist, but it’s a step in that direction.

Ride the High Country has taken on a deeper emotional significance over the years, since we now know that the end of the Western genre it seemed to sense was in fact just over the horizon.  Curiously, the most successful revivals of the Western have gone back to the twilight theme — Lonesome Dove and Unforgiven, for example, have aging heroes out for one last adventure.  It’s a pattern also followed in two modern-dress Westerns, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country For Old Men, both starring Tommy Lee Jones, of Lonesome Dove.  The title of the Coen brothers’ film might have served as the title of Ride the High Country as well.  Both films suggest that with the passing of the old men, some hope for the redemption of the new world coming into being has been lost.

WESTERN GIRLS

Posted on by

There is no place for Westerns in modern corporate culture but that doesn’t mean that the form is no longer alive in the American and in the world’s imagination. Any Hollywood studio executive will tell you, as though reciting the Nicene Creed, that audiences don’t want Westerns, and publishers will say the same of Western fiction. Both are craven lies.

When a traditional Western manages to slip through the cracks in Hollywood, it invariably meets with success. Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven, Tombstone, Open Range and the Coen brothers’ True Grit all turned a profit, and a few of them, True Grit conspicuously, made a very great deal of money. Non-traditional, cynical Westerns, the sort of Westerns that appeal to the collapsed males who run Hollywood, invariably flop. These dreadful men make their case from the latter type of Western, and ignore or explain away the former type. It may be that they don’t even know the difference between them.

Larry McMurtry’s great Western novel Lonesome Dove was a huge bestseller, and was made into a tremendously successful television mini-series. McMurtry’s other Western novels have sold well, too. Publishers find ways of believing that these facts don’t count. Westerns remain anathema in the world of fiction.

Part of the problem, it must be admitted, lies with the creators of Westerns. Many of them did not notice how the Western was evolving in Hollywood, just before it lost its credibility with the studios. In the Sixties and early Seventies, the Western was starting to incorporate the female sensibility into its generic concerns. This could be seen most clearly in Charles Portis’s novel True Grit, made into a somewhat compromised film by Henry Hathaway, but also in the early works of Sam Peckinpah, like Ride the High Country and The Ballad Of Cable Hogue. Peckinpah would eventually self-destruct as an artist and a man, indulging in his personal nihilism and misogyny to the detriment of the Western genre, taking it down an apparent dead-end street and leaving it there for dead.

Curiously, it was around this same time that McMurtry, long before he wrote Lonesome Dove, recognized where the Western needed to go—into the female experience, into the female psyche. This, he saw, was the great undiscovered country of the genre, the path to a renaissance of the form. In discussing the future of regional Texas literature he wrote, in 1968, “Literature has coped fairly well with the physical circumstances of life in Texas, but our emotional experience remains largely unexplored, and therein lie the dramas, poems, and novels. An ideal place to start, it seems to me, is with the relations of the sexes, a subject from which the eyes of Texas have remained too long averted.”

McMurtry, writing here in a book of essays about Texas called In A Narrow Grave, was not talking about the Western itself as a genre, but he might as well have been. And he was certainly not talking about making Western literature responsible and inclusive, incorporating female experience out of sociological or feminist obligation. Elsewhere in the book he bemoans the idea of movie Westerns becoming “responsible”, obliged to convey any particular political or sociological messages. This was part of what killed the Western in the Sixties—the idea that the national myth had to reflect modern guilt over things like Vietnam and civil rights, had to own up to the fact that America was always rotten, its heroes always fraudulent.

As if Westerns had ever tried to sell their visions as historical fact! Westerns have always been wisdom tales, not history tales. They deal, as writer Ray Sawhill has observed, with issues of shame and honor, as opposed to modern film stories (and non-traditional Westerns) which deal with issues of guilt and therapy.

It’s a crucial distinction. Shame incorporates a perception of personal failing, honor a sense of self-worth restored through action, action that can just as easily involve sacrifice and forgiveness as gun play. Guilt, on the other hand, can be seen as something imposed unfairly from without, by parents or priests or society, curable by therapy, which can be bought and consumed passively.

Stories based on guilt and therapy are not really stories—they’re self-help case studies, often entirely delusional.

But imagine a new frontier for the Western, a territory in which it might be possible to deal with the relations of the sexes in terms of shame and honor, without political correctness, aiming only to entertain and inspire, not gratify and instruct.

The Western will go there some day, and when it does we will forget the time when it seemed to have vanished into thin air before our longing eyes.

BUCKING BROADWAY

Posted on by

Bucking Broadway, a John Ford silent Western from 1917, is included as an extra on the new Criterion DVD edition of Stagecoach.  It's a real revelation.

One of the earliest films Ford directed, it has a rather lame plot.  A cowboy in Wyoming loses his girl to a visiting Easterner, who takes her back to New York to marry her.  The girl has second thoughts about the guy and sends for the cowboy, who shows up in New York with some of his cowboy pals to rescue her and thrash the Easterner, who turns out to be a drunk, a lout and a creep.

The New York sequences were shot in Los Angeles, so Ford doesn't get to have much fun visually with the idea of cowboys on Broadway.  Most of the city action takes place in a big hotel, and the donnybrook between the cowboys and the swells at a big society party there is clumsily staged and unsatisfying.  There are a few iconic shots of the cowboys riding horses down the middle of a city street, but there's no more action than this in the urban exteriors.

It's the first half of the film, before the scene switches to the city, that offers the revelation.  It's made up of a series of stunningly beautiful images of ranch life, dynamically composed shots that have real poetic power.  Even back then, when Ford was just getting started, he had an eye for cinematic composition, for the choreography of movement within a frame that rivaled Griffith's.  One could even make a case that his eye surpassed Griffith's by then, just a year after the master directed Intolerance.

Certainly the first half of Bucking Broadway is one of the great achievements of silent cinema, visually speaking.  It transforms a simpleminded tale into a lyric poem about the West as lovely as any passage in any film Ford ever made.

PURSUED

Posted on by

Niven Busch was a crucial figure in the development of the Western after World War Two.  He was a New York magazine writer before moving to Hollywood in the 1930s to work as a story editor and screenwriter.  He supplied stories or wrote scripts for a variety of genres, including two conventional Westerns, The Westerner, for William Wyler, co-written with Jo Swerling, and Belle Starr, on which he had a co-story credit.

In the early Forties, Busch began writing novels — his second, Duel In the Sun, set in the Old West, was a bestseller and became the basis for David Selznick's notorious film of the same title.  This was the film that began to change the nature of the post-WWII Western.  Its adult sexuality, which caused it serious problems with the Breen office, its dark Gothic tone and its neurotic or twisted characters marked it as new kind of Western — one more in keeping with the noirish mood of the nation after WWII and Hiroshima.

Busch's own script for Duel In the Sun was discarded, but he was soon at work on an original Western screenplay, Pursued, which many consider the first true noir Western — that is, a Western which deliberately mirrored the themes and forms of the post-war crime thrillers we would eventually call films noirs.  Pursued starred Robert Mitchum, who had made a lot of Westerns but was about to become, with Out Of the Past, a true icon of the classic film noir.  Busch himself had recently done the screen adaptation of James M. Cain's noirish thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Pursued was directed by veteran Raoul Walsh, who had made some fine pre-war crime thrillers, like High Sierra.  These weren't films noirs, exactly, but they were part of one tradition from which film noir emerged (another being the hard-boiled detective thriller.)

Walsh seems to know, though, that in Pursued he's venturing into new territory.  Walsh had a spare, no-frills visual style, but the visual style of Pursued is anything but spare.  It's dark and moody, almost expressionistic at times.  In High Sierra, Walsh's style has a documentary quality — he's looking at a desperate man colliding with a desperate destiny in an almost clinical way.  In Pursued he's trying to get inside the psyche of his haunted protagonist.

Pursued is structured as a series of flashbacks, which wasn't a common device for Westerns but became a very common one in the classic film noir.  The Western landscape in Pursued is not a symbol of freedom and redemption, as it is in most Westerns.  It has an ominous, threatening aspect — like the urban labyrinth of the film noir.

It's almost as though the neurosis and existential anxiety of the urban noir has infected the Western genre — and in truth I think that's pretty much what happened.  The atomic-era crime thriller, what we now call the film noir, was a very popular genre, and Duel In the Sun was a big box-office hit.  There was commercial calculation as well as artistic daring in the move to darker and more adult Westerns.

However, for all its importance as a milestone in the development of the post-war Western, Pursued is not a very satisfying film.  The noirish elements haven't been fully integrated into a consistent tone — as they would be in the later edgy Westerns Anthony Mann made with Jimmy Stewart.  Pursued lurches from mood to mood and style to style, sometimes playing like a standard Western, sometimes like a Gothic romance.  Busch's attempt to tell a tale of dark destiny feels mostly contrived, without the psychological persuasiveness of The Furies, for example, based on another of his Western novels.  Pursued has its moments of perverse power but is more interesting as a stage stop on the way to the genre-bending Western territory that lay ahead.

THE WESTERNER

Posted on by

A color publicity still of Gary Cooper in The Westerner by William Wyler, which was shot in black-and-white.  Cooper injured his hip as a child in a car accident and had a kind of crooked seat in a saddle, but his balance and grace were uncanny — it's always beautiful to watch him ride.  He does some terrific riding in this film.

SHOT IN THE BACK

Posted on by

In a review of Legends Of the Fall, which he called “the Monty Python version of Bonanza“, Terrence Rafferty said that making a cynical Western was the equivalent of shooting someone in the back.

Westerns got very edgy and borderline neurotic in the 1950s but they didn't get cynical until the 1960s, reflecting a deep distrust of American government and a sweeping re-evaluation of American values, centered around the war in Vietnam and made keener by the assassinations of several key progressive political leaders.  It seemed like a good idea at the time to question whether or not the American dream had always been a lie.

The Western, of course, had always been a genre in which basic American values — self-reliance, common decency, gallantry, justice — were tested and found to be both worthy and enduring.  But it was also a genre in which the subjugation of Native Americans was generally celebrated, and obvious parallels could be drawn between that and what we were doing to the Vietnamese people — as they were, for example, in Arthur Penn's Little Big Man.  The Western was thus a natural place to start the deconstruction of the American dream.

The irony is that by turning the whole myth of the Old West into a lie, American movies lost part of their ability to endorse values which might have aided America in rescuing itself from the perversities of the 60s.  Cowboy heroes were, after all, honest, independent and defenders of the weak and the wronged, who often enough in Westerns were exploited and oppressed Native Americans.

The lost myth of the cowboy hero was not replaced by anything even remotely comparable.  The anti-hero, who expressed his bona fides only in opposition to establishment values, was an unreliable guide to moral behavior.  The free-spirited hippie was not a creature of action but of solipsistic ecstasy, of sensual indulgence.

Both these figures were useful cultural icons, channels for feelings that needed an outlet, but they were mythological dead-ends.  They didn't nourish the American spirit.  When Ronald Reagan rode a horse back into the center of the American dream, even people who didn't care much for his policies succumbed to his imagery.  They were just glad to see somebody, anybody, back in the saddle again.

The cowboy hero, however, did not return to the movie screens of America, at least not as a regular player.  In Hollywood, the cynical, revisionist or tongue-in-cheek Western was too firmly established as a mark of modernity.  When the genuinely heroic cowboy hero did on rare occasions appear, he was greeted warmly.  Films like Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven and Tombstone, and the TV mini-series Lonesome Dove, which paid due homage to the traditional Western values, were commercially successful.  Dark or satirical or cynical Westerns, like Silverado and Wyatt Earp and the recent The Assassination Of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, were not.

Hollywood drew the erroneous conclusion that people weren't really interested in Westerns anymore — whereas the truth was that they were no longer interested, indeed had never been interested, in dark, satirical, cynical Westerns . . . Westerns which projected modern despair and anxieties back into the American past.  Americans have always looked to Westerns for images of redemption.

The Assassination Of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford offers at its center a brilliant study of collapsed, insecure manhood.  It's a timely subject but the one subject a Western cannot embrace.  We still look as we have always looked to Westerns for images of an authentic, non-neurotic manhood.  A genuine cowboy hero can start out insecure about his manhood, or neurotic about it — like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers — but if he doesn't find redemption, of one sort or another, by the closing credits, we feel cheated, just as we'd feel cheated by a mystery thriller in which the mystery is never solved.

The Western genre was far from exhausted when the cynicism of the 60s shot it in the back.  Women, for example, had never been fully integrated into the form, incorporated into the myth.  They served as occasions for men to demonstrate virility or gallantry — which are fine things as far as they go — but Westerns rarely showed us the frontier from a woman's point of view, at least not with any consistency.

I would suggest that the role of the Western in the myth of America is hardly played out — it's just been ambushed on the trail.  And like any cowboy hero worth his salt, it will get back up on its feet eventually and do what needs to be done.