Yellow Sky (1948)

***^½
Country: US
Director: William Wellman


One of the great pleasures of my last few years of film viewing has been the rediscovery of the Western, a genre that once had little appeal for me apart from the classics like Stagecoach and High Noon. Reduced to their essential elements of character, uncomplicated conflict, and the starkly atmospheric landscapes of the American West, how satisfying and unpretentious the Westerns made between the end of World War II and the early 1960s seem to me now. Every once in a while I come across one of these pictures that delivers the expected delights of the genre and more. One film that fits this description is William Wellman's Yellow Sky (1948).

In this movie a group of outlaws rob a bank in a small town and then, pursued by a posse, find no means of escape except by crossing a vast dry salt lake, an undertaking that looks certain to end in death for the outlaws. Their leader is the rather coarse Stretch (Gregory Peck), and his main rival for leadership is the dandyish Dude (Richard Widmark). Predictably, under the pressure of blasting heat, no supplies, and only one canteen of water apiece, conflict within the group builds. Just when it seems as though the men aren't going to make it across the desert, they stumble upon a derelict mining town called Yellow Sky inhabited only by a grizzled old man and his tomboyish granddaughter (Anne Baxter). The power struggle between Peck and Widmark is now further intensified by rivalry for the young woman and also by the discovery that she and her grandfather are hoarding a fortune in gold.

I've always had mixed feelings about Wellman. He seemed drawn to powerful subjects, but aside from A Star Is Born (1937), his movies often strike me as rather perfunctory efforts that fall short of their potential. Even so, one thing Wellman was very good at was bringing out the best in his actors. James Cagney in Public Enemy, Loretta Young in Midnight Mary, Richard Barthelmess in Heroes for Sale, Carole Lombard in Nothing Sacred, Henry Fonda in The Ox-Bow Incident—these seem to me brilliant performances that outshine the movies they're found in. In Yellow Sky Wellman gets excellent performances not only from actors we expect to be good—people like Widmark, here playing another of the menacing characters he specialized in early in his career, and in a supporting role Henry (Harry) Morgan—but also from actors who are less consistent but given the right role and director can be quite good, in this case Peck and Baxter.

Another of Wellman's traits as a director is his ability to keep the picture moving swiftly. While this haste to get on with the action can lead to an impression of superficiality in some of his films, it is actually an advantage in a Western, where maintaining a brisk pace is especially important. Working from a story by W. R. Burnett (he wrote the novels that Little Caesar, High Sierra, and The Ashpalt Jungle are based on, so you know this film's plot is well engineered and dynamic), in Yellow Sky Wellman is well served by his talent for vigorous storytelling.

But the thing that for me really distinguishes this movie is the brilliant photography of Joe MacDonald. For years MacDonald worked for Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio that produced Yellow Sky. He was a gifted cinematographer who seemed to have the ability to provide the exact look appropriate to the project, whether it was the Technicolor CinemaScope of slick entertainment like How to Marry a Millionaire (the first picture shot in CinemaScope at Fox), the high-contrast black-and-white of noirish pictures like The Dark Corner or Pickup on South Street, with their urban setting, or the spacious landscapes of Westerns like John Ford's My Darling Clementine. MacDonald might not have had a distinctive style like that of Gregg Toland or John Alton, but surely such adaptability is a virtue that makes him worthy of greater recognition than he has received.

MacDonald's location shooting in Death Valley and on Owens Lake, a huge salt flat in the Sierra Nevada, adds tremendous atmosphere and authenticity to the bleak narrative of Yellow Sky. He really gives us a strong sense of the roughness of the characters and the harshness of their environment. He was a master of nuanced lighting, and isn't that what black-and-white cinematography is all about? That talent is on full display here, making the limpid desert light and searing heat almost palpable.

The denouement of the movie at first seemed to me just a bit pat, a little incongruously upbeat given the grim nature of much of what has come before. On reflection, however, I wonder if perhaps the name of the town is an allusion to "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"—a short story by Stephen Crane set in the Old West in which a misfit's anti-social behavior is curbed by the positive influence of a woman—and if the outcome of the movie is perhaps modeled on the similar outcome of that story. Like Crane's story, this movie has a somber tone with the mounting tension suddenly relieved at the end by an almost whimsical conclusion. The abrupt shift in tone at the end of the picture did initially startle me, but after I accepted it I found Yellow Sky an excellent film, notable especially for its strong character and pictorial values.


Yellow Sky was recently released on Blu-ray by the German company Koch Media.

Top Ranked Films of John Ford

These are all the films of John Ford’s that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. He had ten this time, down from 14 in 2009. [Photos courtesy of Fanpix.net]

Long considered the 'iconic' American director, he made the most revered westerns of all time, and practically defined the genre by himself. Yet, some of his best films are outside that

CMBA Classic Movies of 1939 Blogathon: Stagecoach

****
Country: US
Director: John Ford

"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns." This is how John Ford introduced himself at a meeting of the Directors Guild of America in 1950, as he rose to speak in defense of Guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz for opposing a proposal to require members of the Guild to take a loyalty oath. Ford, of course, made all kinds of pictures besides Westerns during his nearly sixty years as a Hollywood director. But it is the Western with which he is most closely associated and which, according to that statement at the meeting of the DGA, he most closely identified himself. Of the many Westerns he made, several of them masterpieces of the cinema, his 1939 film Stagecoach surely is the greatest of them all. An archetype of the genre, it has just about everything one expects to find in a Western: cowboys, gunslingers, outlaws and lawmen, blood feuds, an Indian attack, a cavalry charge, a climactic gunfight, and John Wayne.

The film opens in the Arizona frontier town of Tonto with the arrival of a stagecoach to change horses and pick up passengers for its final destination of Lordsburg. When the stagecoach pulls out a short while later, besides the driver (Andy Devine) and Marshall Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft) riding shotgun, it carries five passengers, a combination of respectable citizens and not-so-respectable social misfits: the alcoholic Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell); the prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor); Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), a demure gentlewoman traveling to the next stop to meet her soldier husband; a mild-mannered liquor salesman, Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek); and a professional gambler named Hatfield (John Carradine), a genteel but somehow disreputable Southerner. At the edge of town, the coach picks up a sixth passenger, the president of the local bank, Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill).

Doc Boone and Dallas are being run out of town by the Law and Order League, a group of female social vigilantes headed by the bank president's harpy wife. As the tipsy Doc quips to Dallas, "We're the victims of a foul disease called social prejudice, my child." Some of the other passengers are concealing their own secrets and vices. The nearly frantic Mrs. Mallory clearly is driven by something more than just the desire to be reunited with her husband. The gambler Hatfield joins the others at the last minute only after developing a mysterious fascination with Mrs. Mallory at first sight. The banker is absconding with $50,000 he has embezzled. And the whole journey is wrapped in an atmosphere of imminent danger, for Geronimo has just declared war and the travelers will be accompanied on the first part of their route by a cavalry platoon to protect them from Indian attack.

Later the stagecoach encounters the final passenger for Lordsburg standing by the side of the road—the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who has just escaped from prison determined to get to Lordsburg and kill the three Plummer brothers, who are responsible for the death of his own brother. This was John Wayne's first major role in an A-movie, and our first sight of him twenty minutes into the picture—holding a rifle and a saddle, standing absolutely still against the backdrop of the desert with the buttes of Monument Valley in the distance as the camera quickly glides in for a close-up—is an auspicious one. It almost seems designed to announce the arrival of a new star.

One of the best things about Stagecoach is its perfect balance of character and action. The passengers may at first appear to be a group of near-stereotypes thrown together by circumstances, yet each is given an individual personality gradually revealed by their reactions to the dangers they must face and by the way they relate to one other. Throughout the film, their individuality continues to grow, and their personalities, far from being static, continue to evolve as they come to know one another better and their mettle is tested by the perilous situation in which they find themselves. In a way, Stagecoach is all about the way a diverse group of strangers are impelled to form an ad hoc community as a response to adversity.

One of the most fascinating episodes in the film is the interlude that occurs at their first stop. In many of John Ford's movies, meals are treated almost as a rite of fellowship, during which people reveal a great deal about themselves by the way they behave toward one another. As the stagecoach passengers prepare to dine, they divide themselves into two camps, the socially acceptable and the social outsiders. When Mrs. Mallory balks at sitting across the table from Dallas, the gambler Hatfield gallantly picks up her dish and silverware and escorts her to the far end of the table, where they are joined by most of the rest of the passengers. Only the Ringo Kid consents to remain with the humiliated and abashed Dallas and even strikes up a conversation with her. He is either too naive or too nonjudgmental or too egalitarian to treat her as a pariah, and as the movie progresses it becomes clear the two are falling in love.

Ford was well known as a lifelong Republican and political conservative. But he was the kind of libertarian conservative who places great value on individualism and has the populist's faith in the ability of ordinary people to detect corruption and power-mongering in their leaders. That his favorite presidents reportedly were Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy shows perhaps that he was more impressed with strength of character and the ability to respond forcefully to crisis than with adherence to political dogma. So it's not surprising that in Stagecoach the great humanist moviemaker who was able to find both noble and not-so-noble personal qualities in his characters reserves his most negative feelings for the banker Henry Gatewood, a thorough hypocrite willing to cheat and rob while condemning the morality of others. Unprompted, the blustering Gatewood succinctly presents his political manifesto in a hilarious monologue early in the movie: "America for Americans. The government must not interfere with business. Reduce taxes. The national debt is shocking, over a billion dollars a year. What this country needs is a businessman for President." Was this character the first Tea Party Republican?

Stagecoach is really an ensemble movie in which no cast member, some of whom worked with Ford many times, is slighted. Every single actor in the film is perfectly cast and does exemplary work. Even so, three particularly stand out. Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in no less than five of the great films of 1939, deservedly won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his performance here. Continually spouting observations on human nature like a boozy Greek chorus, his Doc Boone is a cynic whose profession and Civil War experience have taught him to be unafraid of danger. As he says at one point, "I'm not only a philosopher, sir, I'm a fatalist." Yet when unexpectedly called on to sober up and deliver a baby, he rises to the occasion, and the baby he delivers does more to smooth over tensions and unite the stagecoach passengers than anything else in the movie.

As Doc Boone's fellow social outcast, Claire Trevor makes an equally strong impression. Even her Brooklyn accent, which she takes no pains to disguise, marks her as a social alien. Trevor, who could play tough dames so convincingly—and often did—here plays a sensitive and emotionally vulnerable woman. Her Dallas is one of life's victims, a woman consumed with shame at the role her life's circumstances have forced on her and who has given up all hope of ever overcoming those circumstances. It's my own favorite of her many fine performances.

But standing apart from everyone else in the cast is the young John Wayne. A veteran of dozens of movies from 1926 on—in bit parts in A productions and later as a star of many B-movie Westerns—Wayne got his big break in Stagecoach. The movie made him a star. Producer Walter Wanger originally insisted on casting Gary Cooper as the Ringo Kid (he also wanted Marlene Dietrich to play Dallas), but the strong-willed Ford held out for John Wayne and prevailed. Ford had first met John Wayne more than ten years earlier when Wayne was a student at USC working at a summer job at the Fox studio. Over the next few years the two became good friends and Ford essentially adopted him as a protégé. He got Wayne a few bit parts at the studio then in 1928 gave him a small part in Four Sons, the first of twenty-four movies directed by Ford that Wayne appeared in over the next thirty-five years.

Thirty-one years old when Stagecoach was shot, Wayne seems ten years younger in the film. Yet Ringo's youthful appearance and demeanor belie his firmness of purpose and his idealistic sense of justice, qualities that from this film on became inseparable from the screen persona of John Wayne. Ringo's quest to avenge the death of his brother—even against overwhelming odds, for he must face a showdown with all three of the Plummer brothers—is not only personal, but also rooted in the abstract notion that justice must be done, even if it is up to a lone man to do it and even if it places him in grave danger. "There are some things a man just can't run away from," Ringo says, and that statement might have been the motto of the screen personality who became known as John Wayne.

The climactic sequence of the film is without question the attack on the stagecoach by Geronimo that occurs just before the end. By taking a circuitous route, the travelers, no longer protected by the cavalry, make it almost all the way to Lordsburg before Geronimo attacks. The Indian attack sequence, lasting nearly eight minutes and consisting of almost 100 separate shots, is a model of its kind, the sort of sequence that deserves to be watched and studied again and again. It is a thrilling and seamless combination of location and studio photography, static and traveling shots, longer shots taken from outside the stagecoach alternating with closer shots taken inside, rhythmic editing (some of the shots last more than ten seconds, others only a second or two), and astounding stunt work coordinated by the renowned stunt man Yakima Canutt.

Stagecoach may consist of those archetypal elements of the Western film I spoke of earlier, and its characters may be the familiar cross-section of humanity so often found in movies in which a group of people are placed in peril, yet it is much more than just a collection of brilliant parts. The ultimate satisfaction of this movie lies not just in its individual narrative ingredients, or even in its assortment of colorful characters, but in how organically these things seem to fit together and how masterfully director John Ford uses all the elements of his craft to form a series of images which tell the story in a way that is artful without being pretentious. This movie is living proof that entertainment and art can coexist in the same film. The screenplay, the photography and editing, the acting may all be sublime, as they are here, but it takes a master to put them all together in such a way that the whole becomes this much more than the sum of its parts. Only the greatest film directors are able to do this, and Stagecoach shows beyond doubt that Ford was a member of this select group.

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 2

The Sea of Grass (1947)
***
Director: Elia Kazan

The fourth movie Tracy and Hepburn made together is a Western, a nineteenth-century family saga that will remind many of Giant. As the film opens, Lutie Cameron (Hepburn), a young woman from St. Louis, is engaged to Jim Brewton (Tracy), the owner of a huge cattle ranch in New Mexico. When Jim sends a message saying he can't leave the ranch to come to St. Louis for the wedding, that they will have to be married in New Mexico, it's clear where his priorities lie. Once in New Mexico and married, Lutie finds herself in an environment she has trouble adjusting to. Jim is involved in a legal dispute with homesteaders, the kind of conflict that fuels so many Westerns, and is willing to go to any lengths to prevail, even acts of brutality. When his brutality harms a farming couple with whom Lutie has become friendly, forcing them to abandon their homestead, it becomes too much for her and she leaves Jim and her young daughter and goes to Denver.

In Denver the lonely and emotionally vulnerable Lutie runs into Brice Chamberlain (Melvyn Douglas), the lawyer who represents the homesteaders in court and is Jim's bitter enemy. After a one-night stand with Brice, Lutie returns home, contrite and pregnant, and gives birth to a son, Brock. When Jim accidentally finds out the truth about Brock and Lutie refuses to support him in his illegal range war with the homesteaders, he asks her to leave. She goes back to St. Louis and except for one brief visit doesn't return to the ranch until many years later, after her children are grown. Her daughter Sarah Beth (Phyllis Thaxter) has become a sensible young woman, but Brock (Robert Walker) has grown into a surly, impulsive young man with a hot temper. Out of concern for him she finally returns, only to find that he is a fugitive wanted for murder. Brock's tragic outcome proves to be the act that finally reunites the now middle-aged couple at the end of the film.

The Sea of Grass was the second movie directed by Elia Kazan, right before his social issues pictures of the late forties and A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. As such, it doesn't bear the stylistic stamp of his later, better-known films. (Kazan was not pleased with the film. "It's the only picture I've ever made that I'm ashamed of," he writes in his 1988 autobiography.) One thing it does have in common with his later work, though, is the quality of the acting, no surprise since Kazan was a former actor and in late 1947 would become a co-founder of the Actors Studio. Attention is often focused on Robert Walker's flavorful performance as the bad boy Brock, and his acting here is certainly an eye-opener, one of his few early performances that hint at the greatness he was to achieve later in his career as the loopy Bruno in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Still, Tracy and Hepburn hold their own against his more showy role.

One hardly associates Spencer Tracy or Katharine Hepburn with the Method, yet both excel under Kazan's direction. Tracy eschews the relaxed affability he made appear so effortless, instead tapping into the hardness of earlier roles like those in Man's Castle and Fury. His Jim Brewton is a man driven by ambition to create an empire and by ruthlessness to hold on to it at any cost. He is obstinate, domineering, and unforgiving, a man who demands unquestioning loyalty from Lutie and when he doesn't get it drives her out, then redirects his love for her to overindulgent affection for his children. Jim isn't exactly an unsympathetic character, but his flaws do make him a hard one to like completely.

Like Tracy, Hepburn also avoids what comes easily to her. In her straight dramatic performances, she often seemed self-conscious and overly earnest. Her brittle acting style—especially as she aged—was better suited to comedy or to seriocomic parts where she turned her screen image to her advantage by poking fun at it. Toning down her mannerisms, she convincingly portrays Lutie, who ages some twenty years during the picture, by skillfully balancing the character's strength and vulnerability. It's one of Hepburn's unsung performances and lingers in the memory long after the film is over. The range wars plot might be familiar and the personal relationships at times close to soap opera, but the acting can't be faulted. Of the Tracy-Hepburn films, this is the dark horse, the film most likely to rise in one's estimation on repeat viewing.


State of the Union (1948)
***^½
Director: Frank Capra

Tracy and Hepburn's next movie, State of the Union, was a political comedy-drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by the renowned Broadway writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Tracy plays Grant Matthews, a self-made millionaire industrialist, and Hepburn his estranged wife Mary. Matthews is having an affair with Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury), a newspaper publisher with a Lady Macbeth complex who wants to use her newspaper empire to promote him to run against Harry Truman as the Republican candidate in the 1948 presidential election. (At the time Truman was considered a sure loser. This is the election remembered for the photo of the triumphant Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.") Matthews is a political amateur running as an anti-politician with an idealistic message of togetherness and cooperation. (Sound familiar?) As Jim Conover (Adolphe Menjou), the slick political adviser Kay hires to mastermind the campaign, puts it, Matthews has the "rare combination of sincerity and drive the common herd will go for."

When his handlers insist they need his wife and children to create the right image for the campaign, Matthews is persuaded to reconcile with Mary. At first she doesn't understand that the reconciliation is a publicity gimmick. After she does, she stays on board to make sure Grant remains true to his political ideals. Matthews soon finds himself in the middle of a complex tug-of-war. He is caught between his wife and his mistress, both of whom want to be the main influence in his campaign as well as in his personal life. He's also caught between staying true to his principles, as Mary urges him to do, and the pandering to special interests that Kay and his advisers tell him is necessary to get the nomination. Things reach a crisis as Grant appears to have sold out to assure his nomination and the film moves toward its climactic sequence, a national radio-television broadcast in which Grant will lay out the policy platform Kay and company have devised for him. When Grant finally sees the toll the betrayal of his principles has taken on a dismayed Mary, what will he do, and what will be the ultimate state of their own union? Integrity or compromise? Mary or Kay?

It's easy to see what drew Capra to this project. An exploitative press, political chicanery, the corrupting influence of money and power, a main character caught in the conflict between idealism and compromise—these are things found in so many of Capra's movies. The hero, Grant Matthews, is an ordinary man enmeshed in a process he doesn't fully comprehend and can't control; the villains are the pompous, the hypocritical, the humorless, the greedy, and the power-hungry. In Capra's hands this material may become another version of his well-worn populist hokum, but it's impossible to resist. Despite all the references to politicians of the time whom few modern viewers are likely recognize, many things in the movie haven't dated at all. References to subjects like tax rates, inflation, economic depression, the dire state of housing and medical care, defense readiness, globalism, and whispering campaigns still seem surprisingly relevant. And the film's cynical view of politics is right in tune with current attitudes.

Of all the Tracy-Hepburn movies, this one seems the least tailored to their familiar screen personalities. Indeed, neither was Capra's first choice. He wanted either Clark Gable or Gary Cooper for Grant, and Claudette Colbert was actually cast as Mary before a dispute over her contract (she insisted that she not be required to work past 5 p.m.) caused Hepburn to step in just two days before filming began. Yet Tracy and Hepburn do great work for Capra. Tracy's everyman quality is well suited to the self-made man motivated more by the desire to serve than by ambition, and he strikes me as more believable presidential timber than the macho Gable or the impassive Cooper. Hepburn's role is clearly secondary to Tracy's, and she seems content to defer to him for a change. Any of a number of actresses could have handled her part capably, but one thing Hepburn puts across more convincingly than another actress might have done is the enthusiastic idealism of Mary, a quality Hepburn was particularly adept at projecting. The cast is rounded out by Lansbury (22-years old playing 40), Menjou, Van Johnson as a wise-cracking reporter commenting from the sidelines, and in smaller parts familiar faces like Raymond Walburn, Margaret Hamilton, and Charles Lane.

TO BE CONTINUED

Firecreek

In any discussion of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time in the West” (1969) there is mention how shocked audiences must have been to see Henry Fonda’s outlaw character gun down a family in cold blood.

But audiences who saw “Firecreek” the year before probably weren’t surprised at all. In “Firecreek” Fonda plays another outlaw who shoots an unarmed James Stewart in the street and lynches a man in a barn. But “Firecreek” is no “Once Upon A Time in the West.”

“Firecreek” was the first pairing of long-time friends James Stewart and Henry Fonda, not counting a short skit in “On Our Merry Way” (1948). It’s odd that it took long for the two American icons to be cast together and even odder that they were cast as adversaries here.

Firecreek is the name of the title town, one of the saddest western towns I’ve ever seen. It’s more a collection of shacks and fallen down buildings – I’m not sure you can even call them buildings. The town doesn’t have a regular sheriff but farmer Johnny Cobb (James Stewart) takes over lawman responsibilities when needed, for an additional $2 a month.

He’s needed when a gang of outlaws led by Larkin (Henry Fonda) ride into town and rest for bit while Larkin recovers from a bullet wound. His gang includes familiar faces like Jack Elam, James Best and Gary Lockwood. They take great interest in the town’s women, and for such a small town, the town of Firecreek is home to more than a few attractive ladies, including Inger Stevens, Barbara Luna and Brooke Bundy.

There’s a lot of discussion about what worth’s fighting for. Sheriff Cobb elects to stand up to the outlaws to the dismay of several of the townspeople. Dean Jagger is the most cynical of the neighbors, calling Firecreek’s inhabitants losers, and such an unattractive town that it only attracts losers and no one else. To his credit, Jagger’s character includes himself in the loser category.

But in the great western tradition of a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, a tentative Cobb straps on his guns and orders the Larkin gang out of town or else.

It’s all pretty cynical, and it makes for a long 104 minutes. Despite my love of the stars and the genre, I had never seen “Firecreek.” It didn’t get good reviews when it came out, with many critics saying it was just another western. Sometimes time has a way of making the once ordinary seem extraordinary today, but alas, for me, “Firecreek” reeks of the routine.

It’s not a total washout. The supporting cast is strong. In addition to the fine folk above, there’s also Ed Begley and Jay C. Flippen, who are always a pleasure to watch. Cinematography is by the great William Clothier who always makes his westerns look gritty while still highlighting the great natural beauty of the countryside.

I was fascinated by that town though. I had to rack my brains to think of a drearier western town than this one, and it came to me, and to my surprise it was another Henry Fonda film. Burt Kennedy’s “Welcome to Hard Times” (1967) offers one of the most depressing looking western towns in movie history, but it’s a much better film than “Firecreek.” Fonda made both a year apart, and I wonder what he thought, going from one decrepit western set to another?

Director is Vincent McEveety, best known for his work on various live action Disney films. There was nothing here that made me notice his contributions. It’s adequate, nothing more.

I guess that’s the word for “Firecreek” – adequate. It passes the time adequately enough, but nothing more. I don’t think I’ll be returning to this one too often.

Stewart and Fonda would fare together a little better with “The Cheyenne Social Club” (1970), a moderately entertaining western comedy where cowboy Stewart inherits a bordello.

The Budd Boetticher Collection

One of the great pleasures of the last couple of years of my film viewing has been the rediscovery of the American Western, a genre that once held little appeal for me aside from the obvious classics like Stagecoach and High Noon. But starting with the postwar Westerns of John Ford and moving to the Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher Westerns of the 1950s and finally on to the lesser known examples of the genre from 1945 through the early 1960s, I've come to appreciate a genre that I once had little regard for. How satisfying and unpretentious these films—stripped to the basic elements of characters in conflict, uncomplicated themes, and the starkly iconic landscapes of the American West—seem to me as examples of the best in American cinema of the time in comparison to the ponderous message and social issue movies that got so much attention and praise.

For the last two years—ever since the box set of Westerns from Columbia written by Burt Kennedy, directed by Budd Boetticher, and starring Randolph Scott, who also co-produced, was released—I've slowly been working toward seeing all five of these films, a task I just recently completed when I watched 1960's Comanche Station (a shot from the opening is pictured above), the last film in the series. The series actually got off to a start with Seven Men from Now (1956), a movie not included in the box set (probably because it was released by Warner Bros, not Columbia.) In that film Scott plays a former sheriff who systematically tracks down the seven men who killed his wife during a holdup. Seven Men from Now introduced many elements that Kennedy and Boetticher would return to in the Columbia movies. Shot in widescreen and color, it deals with a pursuit and revenge theme with Scott as the nemesis of evildoers, features a supporting cast of highly capable character actors, and has as the chief villain an actor not well known at the time but destined to become famous for this type of role, here Lee Marvin. And as in all of the later films, it moves step by step toward the inevitable climactic showdown between Scott and his adversary, what Andrew Sarris describes in The American Cinema as "the deadly confrontations of male antagonists . . . man to man in an empty arena on a wide screen before a very quiet, elemental camera."

AN OVERVIEW OF THE FILMS

The Tall T (1957)
***^½


The Columbia series got off to a strong start with this film, based on a story by Elmore Leonard. Scott plays Pat Brennan, a rancher who hitches a ride on a stagecoach driven by an old friend (Arthur Hunnicutt, in a colorful Walter Brennan-like turn). The coach has been hired by a pair of newlyweds, Willard and Doretta Mims (John Hubbard and Maureen O'Sullivan) to take them on their honeymoon. When the coach stops at a relay station, Scott and his companions are confronted by three outlaws. The cowardly Willard, who has married the middle-aged heiress Doretta for her money, proposes that the outlaws collect a kidnap ransom from her rich father. The leader of the gang, the smooth-talking Frank Usher (played with quiet menace by Richard Boone), rides off with Willard to collect the ransom, sending his two henchman away to their hideout with the two hostages. Once there, Scott must devise a scheme to outwit the gunmen and disarm them before Usher returns, and he must persuade the terrified Doretta, dispirited by her new husband's betrayal, to help him.

With its several unmotivated murders of harmless people (including a child), kidnapping, attempted rape, and coolly sadistic villain, this is probably the most overtly violent of the five movies. Whereas in the later films, violent acts committed against innocent victims have already taken place before the film begins or else exist as a threat that might happen in the future, here that violence occurs during the film, making it all the more disturbing. The film presents a spectrum of Western manhood, from the cowardly, unprincipled fortune-hunter Willard to the fearless but equally unprincipled villain Usher to the courageous man of honor played by Scott. Like most Westerns, these films are male-centric, having few important female characters—typically one in each film—who tend to be rudimentary types lacking the psychological definition of the male characters. The Tall T is distinguished by having in Maureen O'Sullivan's Doretta Mims the most fully developed and most touchingly portrayed female character of the series. The Technicolor cinematography is by Charles Lawton (The Lady from Shanghai), who shot three of the films. Also featuring Henry Silva and Skip Homeier.


Decision at Sundown (1957)
**^½


Sundown is the name of the small town where the movie takes place. At the beginning, Bart Ellison (Scott) and his best friend Sam (Noah Beery, Jr. in a very warm performance) ride into town searching for Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll), the man who Elllison's wife deserted him for before later committing suicide and who Ellison blames for her death. Sundown is one of those Wild West towns run by an unscrupulous strong man, with the sheriff under his control and the townspeople intimidated into a state of collective cowardice, and that man is Kimbrough. The day Ellison arrives, Kimbrough is set to marry a young woman named Lucy Summerton (Karen Steele, who appeared in several other films directed by Boetticher, including one more in this series). Ellison manages to stop the wedding, telling Lucy that he plans to kill her fiancé by sundown that day. When Kimbrough orders his men to kill Ellison, Ellison takes refuge in a stable, where he plans to stay until he meets his foe in the street for the showdown. The rest of the movie details Ellison's efforts to avoid Kimbrough's schemes to have him killed and stay alive for the gunfight at sundown.

I found this, the only one of the five movies not written or co-written by Burt Kennedy, the weakest of the series. One problem I had with it is that Scott spends a large part of the movie holed up in the stable. This, combined with the fact that many other scenes are also set indoors, creates a set-bound feeling. An overreliance on dialogue to put across plot points also gives the film a static quality not associated with an action genre like the Western. I have seen Westerns that rely on interior scenes and dialogue more than the typical example of the genre—I'm thinking of movies like 3:10 to Yuma and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—and in which such an approach doesn't end up being a liability. But those films had the advantage of using interiors and dialogue to pursue a novel situation, and the situation in Decision at Sundown, with a cowardly populace intimidated by a ruthless strong man and his cronies, seems quite familiar, a variation of High Noon. This time the photography is by Burnett Guffey (From Here to Eternity, Bonnie and Clyde). Also featured are many familiar faces—Andrew Duggan as the sheriff, John Archer, John Litel, Vaughn Taylor, Richard Deacon, and Bob Steele.


Buchanan Rides Alone (1958)
***


Scott stars as Tom Buchanan, returning to Texas from Mexico with a stash of gold to buy a ranch. After crossing the border at the town of Agry, he gets caught up in the machinations of the corrupt Agry family who run the town—Simon, a rich rancher who is also the town judge, his squabbling younger brothers Lew, the town sheriff, and Amos, the dim-witted owner of the town hotel, and Simon's debauched son Roy. Buchanan befriends Juan de la Vega, the son of a Mexican landowner, who shoots Roy for raping his young sister. When the greedy family learn about Buchanan's money, they accuse him of being Juan's accomplice and prepare to lynch them both. Only the intervention of Abe Carbo (Craig Stevens), the only man outside the Agry family with any real influence in the town, prevents the hanging, getting the two men a trial in which Juan is convicted and Buchanan exonerated. Spurred by a large ransom offered by Juan's rich father, many complications ensue—bribery, murder, double-crossing, sibling rivalry over the ransom money and Buchanan's gold. Working with Abe Carbo, Buchanan is able to sort things out, reclaim his gold, and restore a semblance of order to Agry before riding away, leaving Carbo in charge of the town.

With its bordertown setting, especially Simon Agry's Mexican-style hacienda, and its Mexican characters, Buchanan Rides Alone has a distinctly Southwestern flavor unique to the series. Some commentators have detected a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the material. Indeed, the cast does seem pretty relaxed given the overall seriousness of the plot. Moreover, there is a certain drollery in the Agry family's degeneracy and infighting, and Buchanan seems a bit of a trickster with his insouciant attitude to personal danger, his confidence in his ability to overcome difficulties, and the cunning way he manipulates his enemies by using their own avarice and hunger for power to play them against each other. The cinematographer is the great Lucien Ballard, a man associated especially with Western pictures. The cast contains no female characters of note but does include film noir and Western stalwart Barry Kelley as the sheriff, Peter Whitney as the hotelier brother (he played the hulking twins Mert and Bert in the 1945 Fred MacMurray black comedy Murder, He Says), and L. Q. Jones.


Ride Lonesome (1959)
***^½


Scott plays Ben Brigade, a bounty hunter who captures the wanted killer Billy John (James Best) and then must survive a number of threats while transporting him back to the town of Santa Cruz. He must fight off Billy John's brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef) and his outlaw gang, who trail Brigade, waiting for an opportunity to ambush him. Stopping at a stagecoach station, he encounters two more outlaws, Boone (Bonanza's Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn, in his first film role), who are after Billy John for their own reasons. Also at the station is Carrie Lane (Karen Steele), whom the chief of a group of Indians wants to claim for his squaw. Brigade and his prisoner, accompanied by the two outlaws and Carrie, head for Santa Cruz, and Brigade must now contend with Frank's gang, hostile Indians, and two rivals for the capture of Billy John. Brigade's strange behavior during the journey soon makes it apparent that he has more in mind than delivering Billy John and claiming the reward. He is in fact using Billy John as bait to maneuver his brother Frank into a trap. Frank is his real prey, for it is Frank who was responsible for murdering Brigade's wife by hanging her from a hanging tree, and it is to this tree that Brigade is luring Frank to get revenge. He does get his revenge in the end, and the film concludes with perhaps the most striking single image in the entire series—Brigade setting fire to the hanging tree and watching from nearby as the flames symbolically consume the past wrongs that have haunted him.

To my mind, Ride Lonesome is the best of the Boetticher-Scott Westerns for a number of reasons. It has the strongest cast of any film in the series. It also has the most intriguing and meticulously organized plot of the five films. From a simple beginning, complications pile on one after the other, and details that initially seem straightforward gradually build in intricacy. The device of having the hero simultaneously imperiled by threats from three distinct sources intensifies and heightens the tension of the situation. In Brigade, Ride Lonesome has Scott's most complex incarnation. The revelation that his apparently mercenary motivation is something altogether deeper and at the same time more primal than we were led to believe at the beginning of the film, that the impetus for his every move is the overwhelming need to avenge the murder of his wife, gives Brigade's actions and character unexpected nuances. His remarkable skills at reading human behavior, predicting the reactions of his opponents, and using strategy to control and direct them exceeds that ability even in Buchanan Rides Alone and The Tall T. All this propels Ride Lonesome to that unforgettable final image, with Scott in the background on one side of the frame dwarfed by the burning tree looming in the foreground on the other side. This was the first of the films shot in CinemaScope, and in this shot Boetticher and director of photography Charles Lawton went all out to use the extreme proportions of the frame to create a summative image that shows not only how bitterness has completely ruled Brigade, but also that it finally burns itself out.


Comanche Station (1960)
***


The film opens with a long shot of a lone man, Jefferson Cody (Scott), riding across a rocky vista leading a pack mule. When Cody is confronted by a group of Comanches accompanied by a disheveled white woman, Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates), he trades the goods on the mule for the woman. It seems he heard that a white woman had been captured by Indians and was actually out searching for her. While stopping at Comanche Station, the two meet up with three men led by Ben Lane (Claude Akins), a bounty hunter, who have been chased there by Indians. Cody and Lane have a history. Years earlier, Cody and Lane served in the Army, and Lane was responsible for recklessly provoking an Indian attack that wiped out the fort Cody commanded. Lane reveals that he and his men are also looking for Mrs. Lowe because her husband has offered a $5,000 dollar reward for her return to him in Lordsburg. Cody was unaware of the reward, but Mrs. Lowe doesn't believe him and loses respect for her rescuer. What Lane doesn't reveal is that the reward was offered for her return dead or alive and that he plans to kill both her and Cody before they reach Lordsburg. On the journey to Lordsburg, Cody must now contend with Mrs. Lowe's uncooperative attitude, the threat of attack by Indians, and, unknown to him, the planned treachery of Lane. It is only toward the end of the film that Mrs. Lowe learns that Cody's own wife was captured by Indians and that he has been searching for her for years, traveling anywhere he hears a report of a captive white woman.

Fittingly, the final entry in the series revisits many of the themes of the earlier films—Scott trying to redress wrongs done to his wife, a journey across barren territory fraught with danger, threats from Indians as well as scoundrels encountered by chance along the way. If it doesn't really cover new ground, it still manages to be a very entertaining variation on familiar themes. After Doretta Wims in The Tall T, the film has in Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates is quite good in the part) the next strongest female character in the series. With the complicated and shifting relationship between her and Cody, and the fact that she is a major character from the beginning of the film right up to the very end, she plays the most important part in the narrative of any female character in the series. Comanche Station was the third of the movies photographed by Charles Lawton, like Ride Lonesome in CinemaScope, and for me the real star here is the rocky landscapes surmounted by vast expanses of cloudless blue sky. (The movie was shot in the Sierra Nevada of California near Mt. Whitney.) Costarring Skip Homeier and Richard Rust (a familiar face from TV and low-budget movies whose best-known role was probably as Cliff Robertson's partner in crime in Samuel Fuller's Underworld, U.S.A.).

THE ENIGMATIC RANDOLPH SCOTT

Of the many recurring elements in the five films, the most commanding is the presence of Randolph Scott, who acts as both the moral center of the film and the force that drives its action. Scott's weathered, impassive face seems almost an icon of resolve to defend a masculine sense of honor under threat. The characters Scott plays in these films have different names and move in different circumstances, yet they might be the same individual. (He even wears the same costume in two of the pictures and in two others merely exchanges a gray shirt and tan kerchief for a blue shirt and tan kerchief.) Impelled by a single purpose, he can become nearly obsessive in the pursuit of that purpose. The nature of that purpose is clear in each of the films. What is less clear is the motivation that drives him, his very inexpressiveness effectively masking the true nature of his motivation.

Scott makes it subtly apparent how fine a line exists between the righteous duty to achieve justice through retribution and the selfish desire to exact personal revenge through destruction. But even if you can occasionally see the dark side of the man peeking out from behind the mask, he never surrenders to the darkness that runs like an undercurrent through his character, always remaining at heart an honorable man. Even though he must overcome his opponents by matching their ruthlessness and exceeding their cleverness and calculation, he never abandons his sense of fair play. And at the end of the movie, when the foe has been defeated, there is little sense of triumph, only the feeling that the man's duty is at last completed and that he can now move to whatever lies ahead.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973): 2005 Version

***^½
Country: US
Director: Sam Peckinpah

After many acrimonious disputes between the notoriously difficult Sam Peckinpah and his producers both during and after production, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was taken out of the director's hands by MGM, edited without his participation, and finally released in 1973. Savaged by critics as a botched failure and disowned by Peckinpah, it was, predictably, a flop at the box office. A preview version edited by Peckinpah, about 20 minutes longer than MGM's theatrical version, was released on home video in 1988 (Peckinpah died in 1984), followed in 2005 by a "Special Edition" prepared by film editor Paul Seydor. This last was the version I watched, although I did refer to Peckinpah's 1988 cut for comparison. (More about this later.)

The crux of the film is the relationship between the two title characters. The two begin as friendly acquaintances meeting up again at Ft. Sumner in the New Mexico territory in the 1880s. But in the interval their relationship has changed, for the amiable Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), with his history of robbery and gunfighting, now finds himself on the opposite side of the law from his old friend Pat Garrett (James Coburn), who has been elected sheriff of Lincoln County by the cattle baron John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) and other powerful economic interests. The two are now adversaries, and Garrett arrests Billy for a robbery committed a year before. After Billy escapes from Garrett's jail, the sheriff is summoned to Santa Fe and instructed by the territorial governor (Jason Robards), at the behest of a couple of political wheeler-dealers, to recapture Billy. A full pursuit is now on, and the rest of the film is the episodic account of how Garrett goes about hunting down his onetime friend.

If Garrett feels conflict between his personal feelings and his professional duty, he doesn't show it, and the conflict in the film remains externalized, the opposition of the hunter and the hunted. Garrett, who is older than Billy, seems weary of his former way of life and yearns for the stability of a more settled existence. Beyond that, he is motivated not by any personal animosity towards Billy or any adherence to a moral code, but strictly by the fact that he has been hired to do a job and intends to see it through. His tenacity is that of the professional who puts aside personal feelings to get the job done, not unlike the narrow dedication to purpose of the hard-boiled detective of film noir.

Billy, however, seems to take the situation differently. He doesn't see himself as a dangerous outlaw, but as someone who does what he needs to in order to survive comfortably in a harsh environment that offers little opportunity to a man of his willfulness and independence and lack of means. He's not the romanticized noble outlaw of Western fiction, but neither is he particularly a menace to the safety of ordinary men and women. He is actually a bit of an overgrown boy trying to avoid the boredom and staleness of conventional middle-class life and have a good time without putting too much effort into it, an attitude Garrett seems to have outgrown as he approaches middle age. If for Garrett the chase is a serious matter of duty, for Billy it seems more like a game, and the deadly consequences of losing that game don't really bother him much. At one point Garrett explains that this is precisely why he believes Billy won't manage to escape: "There's too much play in him."

Peckinpah places the personal conflict between Garrett and Billy in the context of a larger historical and political-economic conflict—the populist one between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. The territorial governor and his cronies represent the interests of those who desire to control land, resources, and human lives, openly acknowledging that they press for Billy's capture because they view his actions as a threat to political stability and commercial investment in the territory. Peckinpah shows these establishment figures as the corrupt, arrogant forces of control and conformity, while Billy represents the relative purity of personal freedom and individuality. Caught between these two opposing sides is Pat Garrett, allowing himself to be used as a cat's paw while repressing any natural sympathy he might once have felt for Billy and his way of life. It's clear which side Peckinpah stands on in this clash of values and equally clear that he allows this side little chance of prevailing against the juggernaut of power and influence and of changing times.

The film has much going for it in addition to its potent themes and focused examination of characters in conflict. Photographed by John Coquillon, this is a beautiful movie. The iconic landscapes of the American West have always been inseparable from the Western film genre, and here the clear, warm colors, limpid quality of light and air, and uncluttered widescreen compositions have the feeling of openness and space one associates with the Old West. The music score by Bob Dylan, largely spare arrangements based on simple guitar-and-harmonica harmonies typical of vintage Dylan, adds a lot to the film without sounding overbearing or dated like so many film scores of the time and includes his great song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." Then there is that wonderful cast. James Coburn has never been better. Kristofferson is cheerful and likable although perhaps a bit too mature and on the bland side to be ideal for the role. I couldn't help wondering if a younger, more dynamic actor like the young Jeff Bridges might have brought a greater sense of impulsiveness to the part. (This might also have suggested more of a father-son transference between Garrett and Billy, who was actually in his early twenties.) The supporting cast is like a gallery of familiar character faces: R. G. Armstrong, Chill Wills, Jack Elam, Gene Evans, Harry Dean Stanton, an apparently bewigged Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, and for me best of all, Slim Pickens. And Bob Dylan gets his first fictional film role. It's a pretty limited one, requiring him mostly to pose for reaction shots in close-up, but with his benign expressions and almost angelic features, he is quite effective.

Peckinpah's cut has adamant supporters who insist it is superior to Seydor's slightly shorter 2005 version. Coming to the film fresh, I didn't have any particular allegiance to either. Inclined to watch a movie more for its major points than for its minor details, I perceived few differences between the two versions—a few seconds, a line or two here and there, a brief scene shifted to a different place, but nothing that for me derailed the thrust of the film's themes or characterizations or altered the overall mood. To my mind, though, Seydor's Special Edition has two major differences that clearly improve the film.

For one thing, the opening and closing of Seydor's version are better. The opening of both versions consists of sepia-tinted scenes of Pat Garrett nearly thirty years after the main action of the movie, now retired and a rancher, being ambushed and killed, intercut with color scenes of Garrett and Billy's reunion at Ft. Sumner much earlier. But in Peckinpah's cut, this opening proceeds in fits and starts, awkwardly interrupted by freeze frames and shifts of the color shots to sepia to accommodate the credits that, unless a film opened with a "teaser" sequence, were obligatory at the beginning of a movie at the time this one was made. Seydor's version opens with no interruptions for credits, the longer sepia shots intercut with shorter color shots that gradually take over as the past bleeds into the present, sustaining a level of dramatic continuity the 1988 version doesn't have. And rather than returning at the end to this intercutting of the sepia present and color past as the 1988 version does, Seydor's cut simply has Garrett riding away towards the future we already know awaits him, for me a more concise and melancholy finale than that of the 1988 version.

More importantly, Seydor's version has a crucial sequence, entirely missing from the Peckinpah edit, in which Garrett goes home for dinner before setting off on his initial pursuit of Billy. The sequence, beautifully shot and edited, ends with Garrett's Latina wife tearing into him for what he is about to do, telling him, "You are dead inside. I wish you'd never put on that badge." The brief sequence not only further defines Garrett's character, but also broadens the scope of the film with its domestic details and its glimpse of a strong-willed female character in what is an otherwise male-dominated movie. The 1988 version does have one sequence, though, that I wish had been left in the later version. This involves Garrett's chief deputy Poe (John Beck) brutally extracting the fact that Billy is at Ft. Sumner from a group of old cowboys that includes Dub Taylor and Elisha Cook, Jr. What a wonderful addition they make to those other familiar character actors, and the scene does explain how Garrett learns where to find Billy for the final showdown.

The 1970s were not a notable decade for the Western film. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid—with its deft balance of kinetic action sequences and quieter, more reflective episodes—is one of only a handful of really good ones from that decade that I've seen. If it doesn't quite attain the stature of Peckinpah's earlier Westerns Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, it still comes close, resembling those masterful films in several important ways: its highly watchable pictorial values, its continued exposition of Peckinpah's recurrent theme of loyalty and betrayal in which onetime friends become adversaries, and especially its lamentation of the changes in the West as older ideals give way to harsher political-economic realities and to a more rigid social structure that leaves little room for individualism.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 4

An Elegy for the Western

The fifth American masterpiece of 1962 is another Western, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (which I wrote about in Part 3 of this series), this is a movie that emphasizes theme more strongly than the traditional Western, and that theme is strikingly revealed in its very first scenes. The movie opens with Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) ambling down what seems to be the typical street of a town in a typical Western movie. But Judd, gazing intently all around him, is clearly puzzled, for something is wrong here. The street is deserted; there is no traffic on it, no horses, wagons, or people. The sidewalks, though, are crowded with people expectantly watching the street, and the buildings are festooned with flags and bunting. It almost looks as though the whole town has turned out to welcome Judd.

Suddenly a uniformed policeman hurries up to Judd, shouting, "Get out of the way, old man. Can't you see you're in the way?" And a few moments later a camel bearing a cowboy comes thundering down the street, followed by several more cowboys on horses. The circus—or in this case, the Wild West show—is in town and Judd has just witnessed the end of a race between a camel rider from the show and a group of local cowboys. When Judd is then nearly run down by a primitive automobile, the point of the movie becomes clear: This is not a movie glorifying the Old West, but a lament for its passing; what for Judd is a way of life has become for everyone else a sideshow. Ride the High Country is not just another Western, but an elegy for a movie genre that has lost its relevance.

Judd, a retired U. S. Marshall, has come to town to do a job. He has been hired by the local bank to travel to Coarsegold, a mining camp in the Sierras and bring back $250,000 worth of gold bullion from the miners there. But he needs help to do that, and he finds it in an unexpected place. While visiting the Wild West show, he encounters an old friend, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who is performing as a sort of imitation-Buffalo Bill Cody sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid. Westrum volunteers himself and his young friend and fellow performer (he was the camel rider) Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to accompany Judd on his mission to the Gold Country.

When we next see Westrum, he looks completely different. Gone are the long hair and beard he wore in the show. Has he gotten a haircut and shaved? Or, which seems more likely, has he simply shed a long-haired wig and false beard along with the elaborate buckskin costume and stage make-up he was obviously wearing when we first saw him? Either way Westrum's whole Wild West persona was plainly just a disguise used while performing as part of a nostalgic Wild West fantasy. This pretense seems an appropriate touch, for it is quickly revealed that Westrum and Longtree plan to rob Judd on the way back and take the gold for themselves.

Within fifteen minutes of the first scene, the men are on their way. From that point on, the movie follows a classic structure dating back to Greek mythology: the two-part, mirror-image division into a journey in and a journey back, like Orpheus descending to hell and returning. When the men spend their first night in the barn of a ranch, they unexpectedly pick up a traveling companion, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), the ranch owner's young daughter, who wants to escape her puritanical and overly protective father to join her fiancé, who lives near Coarsegold.

Arrival in Coarsegold reveals that nothing is what the travelers anticipated. It is clear that Elsa's fiancé and his brothers are a family of lascivious degenerates who plan to share Elsa and use her essentially as a sex slave. Coarsegold itself is a hellish place, a tent city run by the owner/madam of the local saloon/brothel, Kate, and her crony, the alcoholic Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan, who is terrific). And the expected $250,000 in gold turns out to be only $11,000 worth.

The "marriage" ceremony the drunken judge performs for Elsa is a surreal farce, taking place in the scarlet-walled saloon/brothel with Kate as Elsa's "bridesmaid" and the prostitutes as her "flower girls." Judd, Westrum, and young Longtree (who has developed a crush on Elsa) cannot allow the sham marriage to be consummated. Judd coerces the judge into invalidating the marriage, and the three men and Elsa leave Coarsegold, pursued by the angry bridegroom and his brothers, and begin their return journey, passing the same landmarks they had encountered previously.

When Westrum and Longtree make their move to seize the gold, Judd overpowers them and now has to contend not only with the vengeful pursuers but with two prisoners as well. After one shootout with the pursuers, they manage to make it back to Elsa's ranch, only to find that the surviving pursuers have reached it first, killed Elsa's father, and are waiting to ambush them. Westrum uses his sharpshooting skills to help Judd overcome the remaining pursuers and redeems himself by promising the dying Judd, who has been wounded in the shootout, to complete their mission and deliver the gold to the bank.

Ride the High Country was hardly the first anti-romantic Western. The demythologizing of the Old West in movies began at least as early as 1948 with John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (although admittedly that film is set in Mexico). This reappraisal of the genre continued with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns and the Budd Boeticcher-Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s. These were tough, cynical movies whose main characters were no longer unambiguously heroic, but had paradoxical and sometimes outright undesirable qualities and motivations. Happy endings in which unequivocally good people defeated unequivocally evil people were no longer a given of the genre. Desirable outcomes, if they occurred at all, came at a high price and were balanced by sacrifice and loss. And sometimes, even when bad people were overcome, the victory was a hollow one that left an unpleasant aftertaste.

In John Ford's Westerns most people are decent and peaceful. Ford doesn't deny the existence of villains like Liberty Valance who seek to victimize these decent people, but the villains are the exception and are subject to control by the collective resistance of ordinary people and the heroic actions of extraordinary people like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Mann and Boetticher Westerns begin to blur the distinction between hero and villain, with each of these opposing forces sharing some traits of the other. The villains have their own warped code of honor while the heroes are ruthlessly dedicated to achieving their aims at any cost, and ordinary people are often unfortunately caught in the middle of this conflict.

In Ride the High Country Peckinpah takes the concept of the Old West as idealized myth and gives it his own slant. He darkens the Western genre even further than Mann and Boetticher by superimposing on the traditional formulas of the John Ford-style Western his own unrelentingly bleak view of humanity, in which people are almost without exception driven by their most ignoble qualities. His characters are motivated by greed, revenge, the desire to exploit others, or just plain self-interest rather than conscience, a sense of right and wrong, or a belief in justice, as Ford's characters are. He doesn't seem to be denying altogether that idealistic people and selfless actions existed in the Old West, but rather that they were the rare exception. In Ride the High Country there are precious few morally neutral people. Judd and the innocent Elsa are the only unalloyed forces of honor and truth in the entire movie. Everyone else is, if not openly corrupt, then false and covertly corrupt. And Peckinpah seems to be saying that the force of their corruption makes them juggernauts able to smash nearly everything in their path.

Peckinpah also seems to be suggesting that in addition to the baser human motivations, time and change are destructive forces as well, a theme he further explored in 1969's The Wild Bunch. Judd is a man out of time, a noble but quixotic figure whose adherence to a code of honor makes him an anachronism. In his Westerns Peckinpah's brand of cynicism is expressed in the belief that any potential for good in the Old West was swept aside by the passage of time before it was able to be fulfilled. This strikes me as the cynicism not of the born nihilist, but of the disillusioned idealist. Perhaps that explains the one bit of hope he allows in this dismal view of humanity: the rare instance when someone like Westrum is inspired by the example and self-sacrifice of someone like Judd to undergo a transformation for the better and, at least temporarily, master his most unethical instincts and impulses.

---

Next week I'll be concluding my series on the year 1962 in American films.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 3

Fact vs. Legend in the Old West

In my two previous posts on the great American films of the year 1962, I discussed a historical epic, Lawrence of Arabia, and two brilliant adaptations of stage plays, Long Day's Journey into Night and The Miracle Worker. The fourth American masterpiece released in 1962 was a Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Directed by the undisputed master of the genre, John Ford, the movie was at the time dismissed by most critics as a throwback, a relic of an outdated genre. Since then the reevaluation of the films of Ford and his recognition as one of the major American auteurs have led to the reevaluation of this movie. It is now rightly regarded as his last great work, and of the same caliber as his greatest Westerns: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Searchers (1956).

The film begins with the arrival by train in the small Western town of Shinbone of a distinguished U.S. Senator, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), who have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend—and onetime rival of Stoddard for Hallie—Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is known as the man who first gained fame for killing the notorious gunman Liberty Valance in a gunfight in Shinbone, an event that launched his political career. When newspaper reporters pressure Stoddard into giving an interview, he agrees in order to set the record straight about his own history and his friendship with Doniphon. Most of the rest of the movie consists of a flashback that begins with Stoddard's arrival in the town decades earlier as a recent graduate of law school.

It is on the stagecoach ride into Shinbone that Stoddard has his first encounter with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) when Valance and his cronies rob the stagecoach. Valance, a vicious sadist, not only robs the passengers but also humiliates Stoddard and vandalizes his most prized possession, his set of law books. With this irruption of violence and cruelty into the orderly world of Stoddard, the thematic concern of the movie is immediately established (and will be elaborated on in many variations for the duration of the film): the conflict between might, represented at this point by Valance, and right, represented by Stoddard, the enduring conflict between anarchy and the rule of law.

In the restaurant/saloon in Shinbone, Stoddard first meets his future wife, Hallie, who works in the kitchen, and Tom Doniphon, who comes there to visit her. When he hears of the encounter with Valance, Doniphon offers Stoddard a pistol and tells him, "Out here, a man settles his own problems." Stoddard refuses the gun. Amused by the naiveté of Stoddard and his idealistic belief in the power of the law, Doniphon nicknames him—half-affectionately, half-condescendingly—Pilgrim. Is he alluding to the self-righteous innocence of Christian Pilgrim in The Pilgrim's Progress, or perhaps to the Pilgrims of New England, who came to settle a new continent and encountered more difficulties than they had ever imagined?

Lee Marvin, James Stewart, and John Wayne

Embarking on a campaign to civilize and bring democracy to the Old West, Stoddard quickly gains many followers. He founds a free school in the town to teach literacy to both children and adults. He organizes a town meeting to discuss the territorial convention to petition Congress for statehood. He befriends the local newspaper editor, the alcoholic Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), and persuades him to write articles and editorials in support of statehood.

But Liberty Valance is hired by the big cattle ranchers, who feel threatened by the regulation that statehood would bring to their industry and by the Constitutional rights that the people of the territory would gain. The school is destroyed, the newspaper editor Peabody savagely beaten after he writes in support of statehood, and the town meeting disrupted. The cattle barons and their hired gun, Liberty Valance, have set themselves in opposition to the most hallowed institutions of democracy: the rights to universal education, free speech, a free press, and free elections.

This is all too much even for a pacifist like Stoddard, who declares, "When force threatens, talk's no good any more," arms himself, and goes looking for Valance. It is this decision that leads to the nighttime showdown between the two men in the streets of Shinbone. It seems certain that Stoddard, no match for a practiced gunman like Valance, will be killed, but he miraculously manages to shoot Valance dead. In the rowdy town meeting that follows, Stoddard, treated like a hero, is elected to be the town's representative at the territorial convention.

At the convention Stoddard, whose reputation as the man who shot Liberty Valance has preceded him, is nominated to present the convention's petition for statehood to Congress. However, appalled at being lionized for committing an act of violence, an act that in retrospect he feels went against his conscience, he declines the nomination and walks out of the convention. Outside, he finds himself face to face with Doniphon, who has followed him, and who drops a bombshell: It was he, hiding in the shadows, who actually shot Liberty Valance, and we are shown the true version of events in flashback from Doniphon's point of view, Rashomon-style. Stoddard is at first stunned and then, relieved at last of the guilt he felt over killing Valance and becoming a celebrity for committing an act that violated his personal ethics, he returns to the convention and accepts the nomination.

As the film returns to the present, Stoddard has finally told the truth to the newspapermen and acknowledged that it was actually Doniphon who was the hero. He is unprepared for their reaction. They refuse to print the story, preferring to preserve the false version of history that has become accepted as the truth. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," they tell Stoddard, a line that itself has become almost legendary.

The truth behind the legend

One of the reasons this movie was dismissed when it was released is that much of the black-and-white picture was shot in the studio and very little on location. Because of this it lacks the pictorial grandeur of Ford's other Westerns shot in the Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, an essential element of those movies and one of the things that give them their distinctive character. But to make up for its lack of spectacular scenery, Liberty Valance has a far greater emphasis on theme than any of Ford's other Westerns. In his last great movie, Ford chose to explore larger issues than the character-centered conflicts of his earlier Westerns, specifically the question of the proper role of force in a democratic society. One critic, Richard Brody, writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a recent issue of the New Yorker (Oct. 26, 2009), went so far as to call it "the greatest American political movie."

Doniphon's revelation at the territorial convention causes Stoddard to modify his position on the use of force. Stoddard learns that where force is concerned, things are not as simple as he thought. He learns that force is in itself neither right nor wrong, but that it is the application to which force is put that makes it right or wrong. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Ford suggests that force is necessary to create and maintain order, that force and the rule of law must work together to defeat anarchy and deflect destructive violence. Without force, the rule of law is powerless, but the controlled use of force and the rule of law working together can create an environment in which democratic institutions are able to flourish and civic stability is assured.

And Ford the storyteller seems to argue that the element of meaning created by mythology is just as important in forging a sense of community and civic identity as the facts of history. No matter how an individual viewer reacts to Ford's views—if indeed this is Ford's view, for equating the ideas of Ford with the ideas expressed by the characters in his movies can be a risky thing for a viewer to do—he makes a reasonable case that at the least must be given serious consideration. And as Peter Bogdanovich, perhaps the greatest Ford scholar and interpreter, points out, in Liberty Valance Ford does expose the facts behind the mythology, and one could argue that the idea that the facts don't always correspond to the myth is actually another important theme of the film.

In casting John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford achieved a real coup. The familiar screen persona of each makes him the ideal embodiment of the attitude his character represents. As the embodiment of force, the ultra-masculine Wayne is the ideal Tom Doniphon, a realist, a stolid loner who lives outside society but uses his strength to protect its most cherished values. As Doniphon's opposite, the embodiment of the rule of law, Stewart (the man who played Destry, the sheriff who refused to carry a gun) is the perfect Ransom Stoddard, an idealist who longs to establish and become part of a community based on order and democratic values.

Each man represents one of the elements essential to the maintenance of a civilized community: the power of reason sustained by the power of physical strength. And perhaps most important, by the end of the movie each man comes to see the philosophy of the other as complementary to his own and to incorporate in his own philosophy.

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In the next installment of this series, I'll be examining the final American masterpiece of 1962.