Category Archives: The West

THE ATTACK ON THE SETTLER’S CABIN

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Recently, watching an excellent documentary about Buffalo Bill Cody, from the PBS American Experience series, an image jumped out at me.  It was part of the relatively rare surviving film depicting Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in performance.  It depicted one of the show’s most popular episodes — “The Attack On the Settler’s Cabin”.  A fairly small, square replica of a cabin was set up in the middle of the arena.  Performers portraying a pioneer family would defend this from an attack by mounted Indians until Buffalo Bill and his trusty cowboy compadres rode in to rescue them.  (The photograph of the cabin above gives a sense of its stage-set quality but not of its isolation in the emptied arena, conveyed in the documentary film footage.)

The precise iconography of the image, and not just the dramatic situation, seemed oddly familiar, and I quickly realized where I had seen it before — in the films of D. W. Griffith.  Several times — in The Battle At Elderbush Gulch and in The Birth Of A Nation, for example — Griffith had staged an attack on an isolated cabin that evoked the staging in Buffalo Bill’s arena.  Griffith would start with a long shot of a small, square cabin in a valley that had the theatrical quality of an arena.  He would cut back repeatedly to this long shot during the course of the attack.

Of course, an attack on an isolated cabin would become a staple of Western films, as would most of the episodes of  Buffalo Bill’s show — the attack on the wagon train, the ambush of the Deadwood Stage, the heroics of the Pony Express Rider, the buffalo hunt, Custer’s (or some other cavalry leader’s) last stand against swarming Indians — but Griffith’s iconography was very distinctive and rarely reproduced, the cabin looking too small to hold the defenders later revealed to be inside it, set in the middle of a topographical amphitheater, seen from above, as though from some ideal vantage in the bleachers.

Note also (in the frame above from The Battle At Elderbush Gulch) the curious isolation of the cabin, with none of the outbuildings or stock pens one would expect to see surrounding a real pioneer home.  The cabin has something of the feel of a set, or a prop, as did Bill’s cabin.  Contrast this with the remote homestead attacked by Indians in The Searchers, which looks like a working ranch complex.

I’m sure that Griffith was echoing, consciously or unconsciously, something he’d witnessed in a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West — augmenting the theatrical spectacle with the photographic authority of a movie shot on a real location.  The reality of the location was important — it was part of what made all Wild West arena-show recreations seem old-fashioned to the growing audience of 20th-Century moviegoers — but the evocation of Buffalo Bill’s show was also important, because this was where so many moviegoers had gotten their first thrilling glimpse of the mythic West that Bill had done so much to create or consolidate in the world’s imagination.

SOME THINGS A MAN CAN'T RIDE AROUND

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Director Budd Boetticher started out his professional life as a bullfighter in Mexico.  He knew a lot about bullfighting and made three films on the subject.  Because of this it's become a critical commonplace to discuss all of Boetticher's films in terms of bullfighting, finding parallels to and metaphors for bullfighting in his work.

Wary as we must always be of the critical commonplace, it is in fact almost impossible to understand Boetticher's formal methods without thinking of bullfighting.  On a narrative level, the parallels take us only so far.  Boetticher's Westerns invariably involve a duel to the death between two characters, a good guy and a bad guy, which can be read as an image of the duel between matador and bull — but most Westerns involve such a duel.  The bullfighting metaphor doesn't add much to our understanding of the contest — except perhaps in explaining the conflicted emotions Boetticher often encourages us to feel about the two figures involved.

His heroes are never wholly heroic and his villains are never wholly bad.  Hero and villain often share admirable qualities which, given a slight spin in one direction or another, lead to moral or immoral actions.  This can be said to evoke the conflicted feelings about bull and matador in the corrida.  We root for the matador but we also root for the bull, particularly if he is brave and determined and clever, and part of us resents the matador for killing an especially admirable bull, even though this is what we pay him to do.

As I say, though, it's in the area of formal procedure that bullfighting truly illuminates Boetticher's work.  In bullfighting, space is everything — and ultimately the difference between life and death.  Working the bull in the broad expanse of the ring, focusing his attention on smaller and smaller areas of the ring, finally calculating the distance between the bull and himself down to fractions of an inch during the passes with the muleta — these are the concerns of the matador, on which his life depends.

In the framing of his shots, Boetticher has similar concerns.  A man's relationship to vast empty spaces, the way he does or does not make a place for himself in them, tell us much about his character.  The way antagonists move in a contested space, the way they watch each other and calculate their chances, are always the central focus of Boetticher's action sequences.  Martin Scorsese says that this concern with movement and space in Boetticher's work extends to the subtlest gesture — a hand moving six inches can be a crucial fact.

Boetticher's Western stories can seem simple, but they never are — just as a bullfight is never simple.  The meaning is all in the details, and the details require intense concentration to read fully.  Boetticher's use of space to evoke character and relationships is not limited to traditional action sequences, either.  There's a tracking shot towards the end of The Tall T in which the hero and the woman he's trying to protect run from a shack to the shelter of some rocks.  They have just played out a love scene, but the way the camera follows them over dangerous ground, racing with them as they race together towards their destiny, tells us more about what they are to each other than the kiss they've just shared.

She stumbles, he lifts her back up — they get where they need to be.  He tries to send her off to safety alone but she won't leave him — she insists on facing whatever's coming at his side.  The tracking shot has already made us feel what she's feeling.  They're in this together.

In The Tall T the protagonist speaks a line that sums up the code of every Boetticher hero — “Some things a man can't ride around.”  Characteristically, the moral imperative is expressed in spatial terms.  Where you stand, with whom and against whom, the challenge you ride out to meet — these things are character for Boetticher.  They play out in his films like ceremonies in a ritual space, as they do in the bullring.

THE BIG TRAIL

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In the whole history of cinema there is no greater feast for the eye than Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, from 1930.  It cost something approaching $100 million in today's dollars — though in truth it probably couldn't be made today, without CGI, for less than $300 million — and Walsh put all of the budget on screen, creating an epic vision of a wagon train's journey from the banks of the Mississippi to the Pacific coast.  It was shot in a standard 35mm format and in a 65mm wide-screen version, which has recently become available on DVD for the first time.

Because so few theaters were willing or able to refit to show the 65mm version, and because the film was not a hit, Hollywood abandoned the wide-screen format until the 1950s, when it was taken up again in response to the threat from television.  So The Big Trail remained a costly experiment gone awry — but it hardly plays as an experimental work today.  Walsh's composition for the wide screen is as elegant and accomplished as any in the later history of the format — it bears favorable comparison with the best wide-screen work of John Ford or David Lean.

As a film shot almost entirely on location, it also bears comparison with Greed and Ford's The Iron Horse for its pictorial realism, which is downright breathtaking.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that the script for this early talkie is marred by stilted dialogue delivered in a stilted style by almost all the actors, including John Wayne in his first starring role.  The location sound is extremely impressive for a film from 1930, but not impressive enough to hold its own with the stunning visuals.

I can say without hesitation, however, that if The Big Trail had been a silent film, it would today be ranked among the greatest movies ever made.  If you can look past its limitations as a talkie, you can see the masterpiece it might have been — the masterpiece that on one level it certainly is.

Ford, who discovered Wayne, is said to have held a grudge against him for making his starring debut in another director's film.  I suspect, however, that this was in part displaced resentment against Walsh for creating such magnificent images of the American West, which rivaled and sometimes surpassed those Ford had created in his own silent Westerns.  It is perhaps no accident that Ford abandoned Westerns entirely during most of the 1930s, returning to the form only in 1939, with Stagecoach . . . and I'm tempted to suggest that Ford spent the rest of his career as a maker of Westerns trying (successfully) to live up to the visual poetry of Walsh's The Big Trail.

SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD

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I recently finished Joseph McBride's excellent (and massive) biography Searching For John Ford. It tells you everything you want to know about the man . . .
except who the hell he was.  The mysteries and contradictions of his
character simply cannot be sorted out.  I'm sure the same would be true
of Shakespeare if we had massive documentation and testimony about his
life.  The depth of the work in each man's case comes out of the
mysteries and contradictions and transcends them but sheds no light backwards on the
man himself.  Perhaps, to be a truly great dramatist, you have to
abandon all hope of a coherent self in real life.

The biggest revelation in the book, to me, was the extent of Ford's
WWII service, which was far greater than I realized — but even in that
arena, nothing he did seemed to satisfy him.  He told outrageous
lies about his wartime service, even when the things he actually did
were far more impressive.  Reading the book makes one more and
more convinced that Ethan Edwards comes as close to a portrait of Ford
the man as we will ever have — a psychotic searcher who does heroic
things that no one else can do, and then wanders off alone, permanently
lost.

It's a sad tale but also, in some mysterious, unaccountable way, inspiring.

CHEYENNE AUTUMN

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This
was the next to last feature film John Ford completed, in 1964, when he
was 69 years-old.  It doesn't work as a drama, much less a
melodrama, or as a character study or as an historical epic . . . but
it's one of the most sublime visual poems in the history of movies and
a very great work of art.

It tells the once little-known story of a band of Cheyenne who, in
1879, broke out of confinement on a reservation in Indian territory,
present-day Oklahoma, and made a 1500-mile trek back to their homeland
in Montana.  Pursued and harried by a succession of cavalry
expeditions, starved and near death, the band made it to its old home where
it was allowed to remain.

In his excellent commentary on the wonderful new DVD edition of the film, Ford
biographer Joseph McBride says that Ford originally intended to make Cheyenne Autumn
as a small, black-and-white film, an intimate study of the Cheyenne
pilgrims, but that he was persuaded by the studio to expand it into a
big wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza.  It was, says McBride, a
“Faustian bargain” which led to a film that was neither fish nor fowl,
since Ford lost sight of the Cheyenne characters yet failed to create a
genuine epic.

This may indeed reflect the development of the project but I think it
misses the essence of the film that Ford finally made.  All
of the characters in the film, both Cheyenne and white, recede into the
images, become secondary to the images.  Ford doesn't lose sight
of them as dramatic personae because he has no real interest in them as
dramatic personae.  They're just narrative markers that guide us
through the landscape of the film.

Landscape was always a character in
Ford's Westerns, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the relative
smallness of human intention and desire.  It stood in, one might
even say, for the regard of Eternity, in which human endeavor held an
insignificant place.  It transformed the melodrama of his stories
into tragic
absurdity.

In Cheyenne Autumn, as in
Shakespeare's late romances, the author lost interest in the mechanics
of plot altogether, in the centrality of individual character, and became enchanted by the
mystery of his medium — the magical poetry of words, in Shakespeare's
case, and of images in Ford's.  The
progress of the Cheyenne through the magnificence of the landscape, the
evolutions of mounted cavalry on the march or at the charge, fill
Ford's imagination fully — the characters dissolve into the beauty of
movement itself.  They are elevated into a transcendent glory not
by the specificity of self but by their possession of space.  They
are dancers, sculptures in motion.

This is not an abstract vision, however, a celebration of
technique.  In his old age, disillusioned with the legends of the
West he did so much to reinforce, Ford lost his faith in man's
essential goodness, or at least in that part of it related to his
will.  Primal values, transcending individual human character,
were all he could believe in — the dumb urge to go home, to preserve
community, to do one's duty.

At the center of the film Ford inserted, unaccountably to many critics,
a 21-minute sequence set in Dodge City which mercilessly satirizes the
myth of the Western hero, of the frontier town.  Jimmy Stewart
appears as a corrupt and cynical Wyatt Earp leading the hysterical townspeople on an
absurd pursuit of the phantom Cheyenne, who in truth are nowhere near
Dodge.  The familiar narrative of the old West is deconstructed, revealed as
a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

After this strange interlude, the film switches back to the story of
the Cheyenne, doing what they have to do, and the horse soldiers, doing
what they have to do.  When the Cheyenne are restored to their
ancestral Eden, Ford shows us how much they have lost recovering it,
just as
he shows us how much honor the soldiers have lost in fulfilling a duty
that's been applied to a meaningless and inhuman mission.

The triumph on both sides was only in the journey, the movement, the dream — all of
which vanish in the end, as the eternal landscape looks on impassively.

The
film has a nominal “upbeat” resolution in its penultimate episode in
which
Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, wonderfully played by Edward G.
Robinson, goes to visit the escaped Cheyenne in Montana and promises to
help them stay there.  This scene, oddly, is shot against
cheesy-looking back-projections — such a radical violation of the look
of the rest of the film that it almost seems deliberately surreal . . .
as though Ford was asking us not to take this superficial “climax” too
seriously.  Perhaps it can be compared to the improbable events
that “resolve” the narrative of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale,
in which the playwright seems to be asking us to laugh with him at the
conventions of the stage — to remind us that the true heart of his
work lies elsewhere.

DUDLEY NICHOLS AND JOHN FORD

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With the notable exception of Stagecoach,
I'm not a big fan of the movies John Ford made with screenwriter Dudley
Nichols, even though these include some of Ford's most celebrated and
entertaining films.

Nichols was an extremely skillful writer, with a sound sense of story structure and a good ear (usually) for
colorful dialogue.  But he also had a self-conscious, “literary”
style — he tended to see situations and characters in emblematic,
metaphorical terms.  This aspect of Nichols' work encouraged Ford
to indulge his gorgeous visual expressionism at the expense of what he
did best — create cinematic spaces and places of mesmerizing
specificity.  The images of The Lost Patrol and The Informer
are supremely beautiful but they grow claustrophobic after a
while.  The desert and the fog-bound city are too obviously
surrogates for existential states, symbolic and airless.

In his best work Ford found ways of imbuing interiors and landscapes
with an uninsistent symbolic quality — we read them as real spaces and
feel their emotional resonances on a subliminal level.  We have a
sense of discovering and exploring these spaces on our own, no matter
how many times we come back to them.  The shadowy streets of Gypo
Nolan's Dublin in The Informer, the merciless desert that swallows up The Lost Patrol, are places we visit with a guide, always reminding us what these environments “mean”.

The streets of Tombstone in My Darling Clementine,
the unfinished church on the edge of town, the maze of the O. K.
Corral, are every bit as charged with meaning and significance, but
Ford lets us tease them out for ourselves — he lets us inhabit them at
our ease, until the places seem to speak to us in their own voices.

3 BAD MEN

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[Caution — this post contains plot spoilers.]

In
modern-day Hollywood it's fashionable to analyze drama in terms of
“character arc”.  A character starts off a tale with a problem
which he or she must then develop the skills and inner resources to
solve, and this development follows a chartable arc.  I think
corporate executives are drawn to this model of storytelling because it
reminds them of the charts and case studies they used in business
school — it reduces human experience to something resembling the
problem of growing a business or maximizing profits.

The model is useless, of course, for understanding the actual life
experiences of human beings or the great stories and dramas in the art
of the past.  Achilles has no character arc, neither does
Hamlet.  They both undergo various experiences which sometimes
reveal their characters, and sometimes make their characters seem
hopelessly mysterious.  Neither of them “solves” anything.

The character arc model is particularly useless for analyzing the films
of John Ford, which are full of characters who suddenly do complete
turnarounds, often without the slightest explicit motivation — the
most famous case in point being Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. 
Their “arcs” are unchartable, mysterious — they raise more questions
than they answer, but the questions are ones of profound interest . . .
they provoke moral thought in audiences.

In 3 Bad Men, a silent film by
Ford from 1926, three criminals are suddenly converted into saints by a
young woman who mistakes them for heroes, and from that moment on they
behave like heroes, and in the end sacrifice their lives for her. 
Such a tale would never make it past the first story conference in
Hollywood today.  The film would have to spend most of its length
working up to that moment of conversion, showing the conflict within
the men as they struggled with the decision to be good.

Instead, Ford presents us with a mystery up front, and lets us spend
the rest of the film wondering what it means.  For Ford, the
answer lies somewhere in the realm of the moral, the spiritual, the
religious.  This is a realm not studied in business schools, not
relevant to ordinary business practice, and thus meaningless to the
corporate executives who run Hollywood today.  In modern corporate
culture, which is Hollywood's culture, moral issues are covered by
charitable contributions, perhaps by a dedication to ethical behavior
or to worthy political causes.  The issue of saving souls does not
arise.

But the saving of souls is what Ford's films most often concern, which
involves positing the existence of souls in the first place.  3 Bad Men
suggests that the worst of men have souls and are just waiting for a
chance to save them — just waiting for a call to goodness.  And
it further suggests that goodness is not always approached on paths
with chartable arcs.  Sometimes goodness descends on men like a
dove and changes them in an instant.

We may cheer when the hapless nerd grows his business or maximizes his
profits against all odds — but the bad men in Ford's movies,
unaccountably redeemed, make us cry.  It can be argued that they
also make us wise in the actual ways of the human heart.

[With thanks to the Silents Are Golden web site for the images above.]

THE IRON HORSE

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You can look at John Ford's The Iron Horse
in two ways — as a silent melodrama set against the epic backdrop of
the building of the transcontinental railroad, or as an epic poem about
the building of that railroad with some melodrama woven through it to
give it a more coherent structure.

In truth the film is both these things, simultaneously or alternately
— the two halves of its nature are never entirely reconciled.

The melodrama isn't at all bad — it's entertaining and sometimes
moving — though it has one of the lamest lovers' misunderstandings in
all of movies.  (Interestingly, the international version of the
film tries, through rewritten intertitles, to make the misunderstanding
more plausible but just succeeds in making it even lamer than it already was.)  The real
problem is that the epic poem which hosts
the melodramatic narrative is one of the most sublime achievements of
the silent cinema.  It's hard to imagine any melodrama which could
holds its own with such poetry.  (It should be noted that Griffith
faced the same dilemma with The Birth Of A Nation, and similarly failed to solve it.)

The epic poem within The Iron Horse
has themes and developments peculiar to itself.  Ford is
interested, as he often was, in the process of things, which in this
case centers on the land, the physical fact of the land, which
determined the challenge the road builders faced.  Ford is also
interested in the moral development this challenge prompted —
specifically the uniting of diverse peoples in a national consciousness.

The inclusiveness of the film is notable, and notably modern. 
Building the railroad unites former antagonists in the civil war
between
North and South.  It unites Eastern engineers with Western scouts
and hunters.  It unites ethnic groups — most specifically the
Irish
and the Italians, though there are a few scenes demonstrating
good-natured camaraderie between Europeans and Chinese.  It unites
women and men, who at one point take
up arms together to rescue some besieged track layers . . . and in the
climax of that scene, a band of light cavalry rides to the rescue —
not U. S. soldiers but Pawnee Indians, allies of the train
workers.  The only people conspicuously absent from this American
mosaic are blacks — probably to avoid alienating white Southern
audiences of the time.

The epic poem of America that's at the heart of The Iron Horse unfolds
at a stately pace, even though it's brimful of incident and exquisite
lyrical images.  (There's enough pure cinema in this picture to
supply a dozen ordinary movies)  Unless you surrender to its
rhythms, are willing
to just sit back and enjoy the sheer spectacle of it, you are likely to
find The Iron Horse tough going.  If you're primarily interested in the
melodrama, wanting Ford to get on with it already, you'll find it even
tougher going.

On the other hand, if you let Ford take you at his own pace, show you
want he wants you to see, you'll be deeply rewarded.  Here is the
vernacular lyricism of Leaves Of Grass
applied to a truly epic subject and translated into visual terms that
transcend its melodramatic armature.  It's an imperfect but genuinely awesome work.

The film is part of the new Ford At Fox
box set, where it's presented in two versions — the American release
and the somewhat abridged international release, derived from a
separate negative made up of second-camera shots and alternate
takes.  The American version is far superior but apparently better
print material survives from the international version.  You
really need to be familiar with both to appreciate the film fully.

The international version on the set has a first-rate commentary by
Robert Birchard, filled with a wealth of information about the
personalities involved in the making of the film and about the
production.

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA

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Tommy Lee Jones, one of the great actors of his generation, has, with this
film, become one of the most important contemporary directors.
It’s just miraculous.  The wonderful performances by the ensemble
cast and by Jones himself might have been expected — but the brilliant
script and the brilliant filmmaking testify to a sensibility at home within the whole range of cinematic expression.

The sense of place that the film communicates, via Chris Menges’s stunning
cinematography, reminds one of John Ford.  Jones, like Ford when
he was shooting in Monument Valley, is working here in a landscape he
clearly loves and knows well.  It’s important to him, as it was to
Ford, to make us feel what it’s like to be in and move through that
landscape — and he does.



One notes with particular pleasure Jones’s use of horses in the film.  Just watching Jones
sit a horse brings back by itself the whole tradition of the American
Western, in which horses aren’t props but a means of establishing the
authority and conveying the subtler nuances of character.  The horses themselves are
given their own moments — all memorable.  We see a steady old cow
horse try (successfully) to master its hysteria as a man fires a rifle
next to its head.  We see a horse react emotionally as another
horse rides off into the distance — violating the compact of the herd
instinct.  It reminds me a bit of Tolstoy, another serious
horsebacker, who always lets you know how the horses in his scenes are
feeling.



The tale Jones tells, written by Guillermo Arriaga, the author of Amores Perros, is
dark, comic and moving.  It’s set on the Texas border and asks us
to travel imaginatively backwards on the route of the illegal
immigrants — to enter into the memories and dreams the immigrants leave
behind, and so see them more fully as human beings, as opposed to mere
statistics.

The tale is inflected with the sardonic, broadly comic Mexican view of death — Posada’s calaveras ride with Jones here — and the film’s visuals reflect the bold colliding colors of Mexican folk art, all blended seamlessly with the shabby commercialism of American
culture that also defines the world of the border lands — what Carlos
Fuentes calls Mexamerica, in many respects a nation unto itself, which
no wall will ever cut in half, just as no wall could ever really cut Germany
in half.



As in Ford’s great films, the landscape itself finally subsumes human contradiction
and tragedy — infuses a sense of transcendence which expresses itself
as hope.  Irrational gringo optimism and sardonic Mexican resignation transform each
other, merge into one deeply humane vision.