Click on the image to enlarge.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Click on the image to enlarge.

A lot of Hollywood directors who earned their spurs in the silent era and survived into the sound era had backgrounds far removed from the picture business.  A number of them were mechanics, race car drivers, pilots.  They were what used to be called manly men, and they brought a traditional masculine perspective to their work in action films.  I’m talking about guys like William Wellman, Howard Hawks and Victor Fleming.

Curiously, these men were also exceptionally skilled in presenting strong women on screen — they seemed to be fascinated and not in the least bit threatened by strong women.  Victor Fleming, who directed Gone With the Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, both anchored by strong female leads, was also the first director to let Clara Bow do her thing on screen in the silent film Mantrap, in which she ran sexual circles around her male leads and laughed at them while she was doing it.

Hawks unleashed Hildy Johnson and Sugarpuss O’Shea and Lorelei Lee on equally defenseless males and made us laugh at their invincible power and wit.

In 1951 William Wellman made the very odd Western Westward the Women about a wagon train of mail order brides making a 2000-mile trek from Chicago to California to hook up with prospective mates on the frontier.  There are a couple of ex-hookers among them, hoping to turn over a new leaf, but they’re mostly “good women” looking for good husbands.

They’re led by the exceptionally competent but distinctly misogynistic trail guide Buck Wyatt, played by Robert Taylor.  He admits up front that only two things in life scare him, and they’re both “good women”.  He says he hates women’s cooking, and doesn’t expect much out of his charges except suffering and perseverance.  He hires a gang of men to provide for their defense on the journey.

But then most of the men desert the train when Wyatt executes one of them for raping a woman.  Wyatt wants to turn back but the women won’t turn back, even if he does.  At that moment they become the heroes of the film, and Wyatt watches as they do what needs to be done to get the train through, at first amused, then a little bit awestruck.

The women don’t turn into men.  Before they arrive at their destination they insist on stopping so they can make themselves presentable when they meet their future partners.  Wyatt doesn’t understand this — it seems a little “girly” after all they’ve been through — but he’s past arguing with them.  They’re his equals as trail bosses now.

Yet when the women show up to meet the men they’ve prettied themselves up for, their spokeswoman makes it clear that the women will do the choosing.  Their passage across the continent may have been paid for by the men, but the women are in charge of the pairing up — they’ll have the last word on that.

Wellman presents all this with little comment — not making a point of female courage and competence, just showing it.  Nor does he patronize the women’s desire to make themselves attractive at the end.  He just respects it without judgment — not suggesting that they’ve turned back into “girly girls” but accepting that they’ve always been girly girls, as well as tough characters, as tough as any man.  They can work like men, and fight like men, and die like men, but they’re . . . different.

Wellman was a tough guy — he won the Croix de Guerre with two palms flying airplanes in France in WWI.  It took a tough man to make a movie like Westward the Women.

Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail from 1930 is one of the most beautiful movies in the history of cinema.  Almost every shot is masterfully composed, lit and choreographed, moving effortlessly between the lyrical and the epic, astonishing at every turn.

It was filmed in an early widescreen process that didn’t catch on but the movie survives in that form, and is now available in a Blu-ray edition that does more than a measure of justice to Walsh’s achievement, which is really amazing.  He made one of the first full-scale widescreen films and it’s as elegant and accomplished as any that have followed it, including the widescreen pictures of John Ford and David Lean.

Unfortunately the film was an early talkie, and though the sound recording on a wide variety of exterior locations is technically impressive, the actors deliver their lines in a stilted, declamatory style, perhaps for the benefit of the microphones, which seriously undermines the total effect of the movie.  It doesn’t help that their dialogue is clumsy in its own right, very badly written.

Once you get past this flaw, however, you’re  treated to a visual feast that’s inexhaustible, a pageant of breathtaking images that are simply unforgettable.

This quirky Western from 1978 got a limited theatrical release when it first came out and then disappeared from sight but has recently been released on Blu-ray by Kino.  It’s sort of an American version of a Spaghetti Western, slightly tongue-in-cheek and occasionally verging on the surreal, with a score that rather deliberately mimics Ennio Morricone’s work for Sergio Leone.

Christopher Walken, looking impossibly young and pretty, does a fair impersonation of The Man With No Name, though his character does have a name of sorts here — Mr. Rainbow.  Margot Kidder, looking equally young and pretty, plays the female lead.

The narrative meanders off the trail aimlessly from time to time, and the tale never gathers much momentum, but the film is always engaging, primarily because Walken and Kidder are so engaging.  It was handsomely shot, apart from a few too many zooms, by the estimable Michael Chapman, uncredited on the film for some reason.

If you like Westerns you’ll enjoy it, and even if you don’t like Westerns you’ll probably find it fascinating for its off-beat charm and imagination.

Click on the image to enlarge.

In Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, when William Munny tries to get his old friend Ned Logan to partner up with him for a hired killing, Logan is uninterested.  Like Munny, he’s left his outlaw days behind, and can’t see the point in killing a man unless it involves a personal grudge — certainly not for the usual crimes, rustling or cheating at cards or insolence.

But when Munny says the men he’s been hired to kill cut up a woman, Logan’s attitude changes — he’s shocked and outraged.  “Well then, ” he says, “I guess they got it coming.”  He signs on for the job with Munny, who seems to feel the same about the deed they’ve been hired to avenge, although Munny himself has the lives of innocent women on his conscience from his days as a drunken thug.  Clearly something in him has changed.

They’re doing it for the money, at bottom, but the horror of cutting up a woman takes the moral sting out of it for both of them.

I like to think that if they were told a scumbag like Pike Bishop, leader of The Wild Bunch, ordered the murder of an unarmed woman during the robbery of a railroad office, they’d feel the same.  They wouldn’t ride off to avenge the murder for the sake of justice alone — they’re not knights errant — but they’d feel entitled to take money to kill Bishop, because he’s got it coming.

This is the difference between real men, however damaged they may be, and frontier scum like Bishop — an innate sense of gallantry and decency towards women that years on the wrong side of the law can’t erase.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Robert Benton’s first directorial effort, Bad Company, from 1972, is a bad film and a bad Western, too.  It’s one of those revisionist oaters from the 70s which takes delight in deconstructing the myth of the frontier, showing it as a sordid and depressing place.

It concerns a gang of young men who light out for the territory during the Civil War, to find fame and fortune and/or evade getting drafted into the Union army.  It takes forever to get them moving west, in a long prelude to the actual adventure which mostly involves their cute antics as petty thieves.

It proceeds thereafter in a series of vignettes — robbing farmyards, getting robbed by bandits.  Some of these episodes are involving, some repetitive.  There’s one really well done scene involving a running shootout in a forest filled with leafless trees.

The dialogue feels synthetic throughout, modeled inexpertly on the vernacular style of Mark Twain.

By the end, the two main protagonists have graduated from a life of petty thievery to a life of armed robbery.  So much for the American Dream.  So much for the sodbusters who turned the desolate plains into a breadbasket for the world.

The film’s one shining virtue is its cinematography, by the late Gordon Willis, who conveys a vision of the plains that is both beautiful and forbidding.  It’s the only real reason to watch the film but, Gordon Willis being Gordon Willis, it’s reason enough.