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

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.

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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.

Brief Reviews

GUN CRAZY (1949) ***½
Film noir is one of my pet genres. I've been waiting years to see this one, a highly regarded work from the era when the genre reached its fullest expression, and it didn't disappoint me. Director Joseph H. Lewis spent years directing B-movies for various studios before gaining attention for a stylishly directed, noirish little thriller called My Name Is Julia Ross (1945). Gun Crazy was made the same year as Nicholas Ray's similar They Live by Night, and those two films were huge influences on Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which traces of each are plainly visible.

Gun Crazy is a crime-spree movie, the story of a young man (John Dall) and woman (Peggy Cummins) who throw off all societal inhibitions and go on an anarchic binge of bank and payroll robberies. The thing that first brings them together is a clearly erotic obsession with guns. The thing that distinguishes them from each other is his refusal to use his gun to kill, and her barely controlled impulses to use her gun for violence against others. Once they start on their spree, there is no turning back, and there is little doubt that they are ultimately doomed. It's no wonder Gun Crazy was such an influence on early films of the French New Wave like Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows and Godard's Breathless.

The photography by Russell Harlan is full of striking visual flourishes including asymmetrical compositions and unconventional camera placement. The numerous scenes shot from the back seat of the getaway car create a perceptible sense of heightened realism, especially one very long, unbroken take of a robbery in the middle of the movie, where Cummins gets out of the car to distract a policeman. The film's atmospheric finale, on a small island in a reedy, fog-shrouded marsh, is a model of achieving maximum effect with minimal means. The British Cummins—with her Bonnie Parker beret, full, sensuous lips, snub nose, insolent expression, and slightly lock-jawed speech—is the epitome of the alluring femme fatale, and Dall, as the maladjusted but sensitive young sharpshooter in sexual thrall to her, expresses just the right amount of internal conflict over their actions. The screenplay, co-credited to Millard Kaufmann, was actually co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using Kaufmann as a front. Highly recommended to all devotees of film noir.

DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) **
To make a truly terrible movie is not an easy thing to do. The movie must be intended to be taken seriously, made with reasonable care and an adequate budget, and involve respected and talented film artists. But for some reason, often a series of misguided artistic choices, it simply misses the mark completely, its only interest the mystery of how something with so much apparent potential turned out to be so dreadful.

Duel in the Sun, a Western directed by King Vidor and written and produced by David O. Selznick, is spectacularly bad. Its every element self-consciously inflated, the film is paradoxically both boring (as a narrative experience) and fascinating (as an example of cinematic awfulness). The unrelenting bombast of the movie is obvious as soon as it starts, with a seemingly interminable section titled "Prelude" that consists of a frozen image of a reddish desert landscape with symphonic music playing over it, followed by another section titled "Overture," consisting of another frozen image of a desert landscape with more music and a pompous voice-over by Orson Welles. The gaudy opening sequence, which takes place in a gambling den, is so lavish in its over-the-top decadence that it resembles a scene in a Roman epic by Cecil B. de Mille. It's all downhill for the next two hours until the movie reaches its labored and improbable conclusion.

So many normally capable performers (Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall) give such terrible performances in their one-dimensional roles that it must surely set a record of some kind. Only Walter Huston, chewing the scenery as a lascivious evangelist called The Sinkiller, seems to be having any fun. As the main character, a feral, sexually-charged, half-Caucasion, half-Mexican wench (there is no other word to describe her adequately), Jennifer Jones—with her absurd bronze makeup, wild, unkempt hair, lowcut peasant blouses, and bare feet—easily takes the bad acting prize in this marathon of terrible acting. Before Johnny Guitar, before Lonesome Cowboys, before Lust in the Dust, there was Duel in the Sun. If I had to use one word to sum up the overall effect of Duel in the Sun, that word would be camp (and not in the entertaining sense, because it is apparently wholly unintentional).

CROUPIER (1999) ***½
The British director Mike Hodges was in his late 60's when he made this film, but it doesn't seem like the work of a man of that age. The highly accomplished direction, unshowy and unfussy, is rightfully respectful of the taut, focused screenplay by Paul Mayersburg and has a hip sensibility that seems right in tune with the material. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a former croupier from South Africa now living in London, is a man at loose ends. Unemployed, he wants to be a writer but is not interested in the project his publisher proposes, a tale about soccer players with lots of sex. When his father calls from South Africa and says he has found Jack a job at a London casino, Jack accepts the offer because of the very large salary and because he immediately sees the job in terms of research for a novel about gamblers and gambling.

The film has lots of philosophical voice-over narration by Jack about being a participant in events and at the same time a detached observer gathering material for his book. In these internal monologues Jack also ruminates on how gambling and odds permeate so much of life. Although adamant that he is not himself a gambler, he obsessively calculates the odds on his every action, seeing all of life as one gamble after another. Later an attractive woman (Alex Kingston) who comes to the casino fascinates Jack. When she says she is deeply in debt to dangerous people and proposes that Jack be the inside-man in a robbery of the casino, he reluctantly agrees.

The movie is above all a character study and thus relies heavily on Owen's brilliant performance for its success. Looking leaner and hungrier than in Gosford Park or Children of Men, he makes Jack aloof but fascinating. Beneath a still, calm, nonreactive exterior, this is a complex man in constant thought, a silent internal observer and interpreter of external events. It is because Owen projects this aspect of Jack's character so thoroughly that the large amount of voice-over narration with its almost Dostoyevskian slant works so well. The movie builds to a tense outcome that results in several unexpected turns, an ending consistent with the film's theme that the outcome of a bet cannot be accurately predicted in advance and is by its nature the result of randomness.

ADAPTATION (2002) **½
In the late 1990's, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean wrote a series of articles about the Florida wild orchid collector John Laroche, published in 1998 as the book The Orchid Thief. For some reason the book, which is more a profile than a narrative, was bought for adaptation as a movie and assigned to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose sensibility would seem wholly unsuited to such a project. The resulting movie is a real curiosity.

The first two-thirds are divided unevenly between two interwoven plots—Kaufmann's (Nicholas Cage) personal insecurities and his professional struggles writing the screenplay (the predominant thread), and a straight account of Orlean's (Meryl Streep) experiences with Laroche (Chris Cooper) while writing the book (the secondary thread). The latter plot line is fascinating. The other part, about Kaufmann, is not. As Kaufmann himself says of this narrative strategy, "It's self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic." Not content to transform the film into his own personal vanity project by making himself the main character, Kaufmann even gives himself an alter ego, a fictitious twin brother (also Cage). The most embarrassing scene in the movie: the one in which Kaufmann masturbates to a photo of Orlean on the dust jacket of the book. One can only wonder how anyone connected with this movie, having read the script, agreed to participate. The last third or so of Adaptation veers in an altogether different direction as a response to the suggestion of a screenwriting guru (Brian Cox) who advises Kaufmann to write a knockout "last act" to disguise the flaws of the rest of the film. This preposterous last act has Laroche deriving a psychoactive substance that looks like green cocaine from his orchids and mailing some to Streep, who snorts it, has a psychedelic experience, then rushes off to Florida for a tryst with Laroche. The Kaufmann brothers follow, and the movie becomes an outlandish crime thriller with Orlean and Laroche trying to murder the Kaufmanns.

Adaptation received rave reviews from many critics as well as numerous nominations and awards from critics' groups, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars. More than 50,000 users of IMDb give it a very high 7.8/10 rating. I can sum up my reaction to the movie in two words: pretentious rubbish. Nearly everything in it seems a contrived, attention-seeking stunt. If the acting weren't so good, I would give it an even lower rating.

A Dedicated Man: An Appreciation of James Stewart

"James Stewart, the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema"

—Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

For many years I took James Stewart (1908-1997) for granted. I never thought of him as n exceptional actor, as one of the great self-manufactured screen personalities like Cary Grant or one of the great emoters like Marlon Brando. He always struck me as a regular guy who appeared to be playing himself in every role. In the last few years, though, I have revised my opinion of him as an actor. This new appreciation came about partly from seeing him in pictures I hadn't seen before and partly from rewatching some of his performances I had seen years earlier but dismissed as unexceptional. I suddenly saw sides of him that I had never noticed before and subtleties that had previously escaped me. My present view of Stewart is that he is one of the great American actors, second only to Cary Grant in my own pantheon of the great actors of the studio era.

When Andrew Sarris referred to Stewart as an "actor-personality," he got it exactly right. Stewart was that rare breed of screen actor who in every role seems to be both the character he is playing and himself. Every character seemed a new incarnation of a familiar personality. On reflection, I think it is this combination of familiarity and continuity of personality that blinded me for so long to the true artistry of his acting. When he projected a heightened emotional state, it didn't seem like acting at all, but like the wholly natural outgrowth of a familiar and normally staid personality pushed to its limits.

That personality, the one we automatically think of when we think of James Stewart, is one of comfortable ordinariness. If ever there was a screen personification of the American Everyman, it was James Stewart. He suggested none of the uniqueness or quirkiness of Cary Grant or the barely contained passion of Marlon Brando. His personality was always exactly life-sized, never larger than life. His screen presence was closer to that of Spencer Tracy, Joel McCrea, or his lifelong friend Henry Fonda—all, like Stewart, masters of understatement and invisible technique. Just watch one of Stewart's performances with the sound off and observe how subtly yet clearly his body language and especially his facial expressions register his emotions.

But the screen personality known as James Stewart did have one individual trait that persisted from movie to movie. Call it steadfastness, tenacity, constancy, perseverance, loyalty, or even stubbornness—these are all aspects of the quality that Stewart consistently projected and around which he fashioned each performance. Although modified to suit the needs of the role, this quality was the constant that set him apart from the truly ordinary man, that gave him the quiet individuality it took me so long to recognize and appreciate.

In his early romantic roles, Stewart's devotion is to someone he loves. In You Can't Take It with You (1938), the breakthrough role that made him a star just three years after his first credited part, his allegiance is to Jean Arthur. Despite her unconventional family and the disapproval of his stern and narrow-minded father, a banker and industrialist, he remains true to Arthur, even sacrificing his career and inheritance (in the middle of the Great Depression). In The Mortal Storm (1940), one of four films he made with his friend Margaret Sullavan, he risks his life to help Sullavan escape from Nazi Germany. Later in his career, in the whimsical Harvey (1950) he never loses faith in the existence of his imaginary friend, a 6-foot tall rabbit. And in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), as another ordinary man, a dentist from Indiana, he must use his wits and rise to heroism to rescue his kidnapped son from terrorists.

In many movies Stewart's commitment is to a principle or ideal. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) it is to the ideals of democracy and honesty in government. In Destry Rides Again (1939), in which he plays the inexperienced sheriff of a lawless Wild West town, it is to the notion that law enforcement can be practiced without the use of firearms. In Call Northside 777 (1948), as a reporter, it is to his belief that an imprisoned killer is innocent. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in which he plays a criminal lawyer, it is to the legal principles of presumption of innocence and that every accused person is entitled to the most effective representation. In John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) it is again to the rule of law, non-violence, and the ideals of American democracy. In The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) it is to his unshakable faith that if he can keep the crew of the crashed plane united in their purpose, they will somehow overcome all obstacles and get that plane in the air again.

From 1941 to 1945 Stewart left pictures and served in the U.S. Army. An aviation enthusiast, he had earned his pilot's license in 1935 and even had a commercial pilot's license. During World War II he flew many combat missions over Europe. When Stewart returned to making movies after the war, he seemed different. The boyish charm that had been a big part of his screen presence was still there but seemed somehow muted, with an undercurrent of sadness that hadn't been there before. And he looked different. The skinny boy now looked looked older and a bit worn. He had been absent from the screen for only five years, but when he returned he looked closer to fifteen years older.

Stewart's first movie after the war was Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Surprisingly, Stewart was not Capra's first choice to play George Bailey in the film; Cary Grant was. Today it's hard to imagine anyone but Stewart in the role. This is a part that required him to play a tormented and disappointed man, a man shattered by self-doubt who has given up all hope. Considering the upbeat and optimistic streak that runs through Stewart's prewar performances, it is perhaps understandable that Capra did not immediately think of him for the part. Possibly Capra eventually realized that the role would not be too much of a stretch for the actor who in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington played a man so committed to his principles that in the end he drives himself to physical exhaustion and comes close to a nervous breakdown.

Contrary to what one might have expected from Stewart's prewar performances, his depiction of George Bailey's despair is almost overpowering in its intensity. And when Bailey is saved at the end, his sense of joy and relief is almost tangible. It's enough to persuade even the most obdurate cynic to accept the movie's simple premise that every human life, no matter how ordinary, has meaning and value. And it's hard to believe that any actor but James Stewart could have communicated such a premise with so much conviction.

It's a Wonderful Life liberated the dark side of the American Everyman by showing that the adherence to a belief that typified Stewart's characters, in this case his unswerving belief in his own worthlessness, could when taken to extremes result in destructive obsession. But it was not by any means the last that moviegoers would see of this side of James Stewart. His dark side was most fully mined in Stewart's collaborations with two great directors in the 1950's.

Between 1950 and 1955 Stewart made several Westerns directed by Anthony Mann. Considering the series of stark low-budget films noirs that Mann made in the late 1940's, it is not surprising that his Westerns of the 1950's would have darker overtones and greater emphasis on character psychology than the typical studio Western of the time. In The Far Country (1954) Stewart plays a character motivated solely by self-interest. He lets nothing stand in the way of his goal of making a fortune in the Gold Rush-era Yukon and returning to the U.S. with his loyal pal to buy a ranch. He refuses to intervene as a sadistic and power-crazed local boss terrorizes and exploits the inhabitants of the mining village where he has staked his claim. It is only after his friend is killed and their gold stolen that he takes action and defeats the villains. In The Man from Laramie (1955) Stewart plays a man consumed with finding those responsible for his brother's death. He endures extreme physical suffering and eschews all intimate human contact in his relentless pursuit of revenge.

Perhaps the greatest of the Stewart-Mann collaborations is The Naked Spur (1953). Here he plays a man obsessed with capturing a dangerous outlaw, not out of any sense of justice, but strictly to claim the reward money that will allow him to buy back the farm he lost through betrayal by a woman while fighting in the Civil War. He is a man driven by a compulsive pursuit that he believes will correct the injustices of the past and restore what he has lost, and his obsession causes the death not only of the outlaw but also of every other person in his party except for the outlaw's girl friend. It is only the promise of her love that in the end breaks the hold his anger and disappointment have over him and allows him to escape his past and move on to a new future.

The other director who used the darker implications of Stewart's dedication to purpose to its full advantage was Alfred Hitchcock. Rope (1948) first hinted at the dark themes that Stewart's covertly obsessive persona was capable of catalyzing. In this movie Stewart plays a rather smug teacher who purports to believe in the Nietzschean proposition that laws and morality are mere human inventions and that some people are above them, even the ultimate prohibition against murder. For him this is strictly an intellectual proposition. He never imagines that two of his former pupils, taking his teachings literally, will put them into practice by murdering an unpopular former schoolmate. His smugness becomes horror as he gradually sees the destruction his adherence to a wrong-headed concept has inspired.

Hitchcock took the dark component of Stewart's screen persona even further in Rear Window (1954). In this movie Stewart's character, a news photographer temporarily confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, idly begins spying on his neighbors. What begins as an amusing pastime quickly takes over his life and becomes an obsession. Without professional constraints, Stewart's desultory curiosity grows into full-blown and dangerous voyeurism that places himself and his fiancée at considerable risk from a ruthless murderer.

But it was in Vertigo (1958) that Hitchcock gave Stewart's embodiment of all-consuming obsession its ultimate expression. What begins as a scheme to exploit former detective Scottie Ferguson's (Stewart) fear of heights in order to disguise a murder as suicide grows out of control when Scottie falls in love with the woman he has been hired to follow, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). The long sequence in which he tails her around San Francisco in his DeSoto—without dialogue, filled with swooping camera moves, Bernard Herrmann's alternately pensive and majestic music, shots of the most picturesque locations in San Francisco, and close-ups of Stewart's reactions as he spies on her, and ending with Stewart pulling her from the Bay at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge—is one of the great sequences in modern movies. But it would be far less effective without Stewart's wordless reactions conveying the transformation of professional detachment to romantic curiosity and finally helpless love. This is the intersection of brilliant, showy filmmaking with subtle, expertly calibrated acting.

Believing that Madeleine has died as a result of his paralyzing phobia, Scottie is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and loss. When by chance he encounters her doppelganger, he loses all control as he obsessively molds her into the image of his lost love. This is the closest Stewart ever came to playing a villain (save for 1936's After the Thin Man), and Hitchcock is merciless in his treatment of Stewart's obsessiveness. In Vertigo there is no final reprieve by the acceptance of love, no saving change of heart, no last-minute pulling back from the abyss for Stewart. His obsessiveness results both in his losing his beloved again and in his own psychological destruction. To see the very quality that made Stewart the All-American Everyman become so distorted that he is transformed into an agent of destruction is a devastating thing to watch.

After Vertigo Stewart seemed to regain some of the easygoing charm that had been so much a part of his early work, while still retaining the gravitas that his screen persona had acquired in the postwar roles. That same year he starred again with Kim Novak in Bell, Book, and Candle, a delightful light comedy that is in a different world altogether from Vertigo. The very next year he gave what is my favorite performance of his career in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in a role that achieved the perfect equilibrium between the two sides of his screen personality. His Paul Biegler is completely focused on the task at hand—defending a soldier on trial for murder—yet he never allows the case to skew his perspective on life. At the end of the movie he is able to let go of the case and simply go fishing.

When I think of James Stewart, that is the way I like to picture him: balancing serious dedication to a purpose with an innate sense of enjoyment of life, and keeping each in its proper proportion.


I don't think Stewart ever gave a bad performance, and his presence makes any movie worth watching. But here are my ten favorite performances by James Stewart:

1. Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
4. Rear Window (1954)
5. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
6. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
7. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
8. Destry Rides Again (1939)
9. The Naked Spur (1953)
10. Harvey (1950)