dubdobdee | quick notes on oaters

1: jesse james
(d.henry king, 1939: w. tyrone power, henry fonda, randolph scott)
Went through a watching Westerns phase in the mid-90s (I was sweet on a girl who watched little else) but am finding there's much stuff now I overlooked then, primarily related to the massive donkey vs elephant in the 1870s room, viz the way the movie faces the Civil War (the historical james gang being touted in the 1870s as a robin hood-ish outfit of johnny reb guerilla resistance against carpet-baggers and The Man in general). In this version -- apparently first of a trend to soft-soap and romanticise the big-name outlaws -- the war is reduced to a near-invisible dog-whistle; the film's villains are corrupt and bullying railroad agents (who harass the james bros' loving old mom to death), and much of the action *is* pure robin hood-ery (dodging the posse by hiding underwater etc). Local pro-James newsman (Henry Hull) has the look -- weskit, pointy white beard -- of a retired southern colonel: peppery, proud and unbent by defeat. But it's never stated he is such. James family have a black "servant" called Pinky (Ernest Whitman), who adores them and supports them in their outlawry (but is himself rotund, fearful, comical). Required complexity: Scott is unbendingly uncorruptible as the sherriff after them, so that Jamesian outlaw badness is (as they say) "interrogated" a little; will stressed Jesse stop himself becoming mean and indeed evil? Luckily for his soul, one of his gang is a "a traitor and a coward whose name is not worthy to appear here" (viz John Carradine of course). So he dies tragically on the eve of going straight (ish) and leaving for California w/his sweetie. Made the year of Stagecoach, so Westerns were on the move in a far less cheerfully swashbuckling direction...

2: red river
(howard hawks, 1948: john wayne, montgomery clift, WALTER BRENNAN, joanne dru)
Clift's debut (and IMO greatest performance, light, lithe and witty) as the adopted son of embittered lonely driven hardman Wayne, who is pioneering an overland cattle trail from Texas to Missouri. The Red River is named for a minor geographical feature; can't help feeling it better describes the vast herd of cattle that are present more or less first to last (9000 head), round and within which all the action takes place. Much Hawkesian business -- there are no characters with close-ups who are merely ciphers (the maurauding indians don't get ciphers, the main indian on the trail has cheerful comedy business with brennan, eg won brennan's teeth in a card game and keeps charge of them except at meals). Civil war is gestured at: Clift is returned from fighting in it (forget which side); the slump that necessitates the cattle trail is caused by it. Wayne -- damaged, unforgiving, self-sufficient to the point of sociopathic selfishness -- learns to recognise his son as an adult and unbend (Clift knows better how and where to run the cattle, and seizes command from his dad, who vows a murderous revenge that actually quite implausible last-second change of heart averts: this is the "moral", the happy ending; the underlying story is I guess actually the relative pragmatism the younger ex-soldier has learnt, in victory or defeat, and the setting aside of the old harsh unbending pre-war ways (Clift runs the diverted river of beeves up to the new railroad at Abilene, a tiny spatch-cock town where the final confrontation takes place, Wayne wading through a lake of living cow in his characteristic heavy-yet-light-yet-heavy way...)

3: the man from laramie
(d.anthony mann, 1955: james stewart)
Potentially interesting set-up -- stewart the driven revenger arrives to confront a dysfunctional all-male family, who is the true villain? -- that generates a couple of great scenes but no momentum. Stewart too busy being loveable to generate frisson of unsettling revenger self: the sadist dimwit of a brother (Alex Nicol) is way too cartoonish, cacklingly bullying and incompetent, so that the rational, level-headed adopted brother (Arthur Kennedy) has nothing to play against -- secretly angry bcz he's undervalued by the cattle baron dad (Donald Crisp). There's love interest and backstory, but it's all pretty ho-hum, which is sad in such a breath-taking setting, salt-flats, sagebrush, widescreen sunsets beautiful to the point of distracting irrelevance...

4: custer of the west
(d.robert siodmak, 1967: robert shaw, mary ure)
Siodmak, a pioneer of noir, is WAY outside his comfort zone in this sun-drenched technicolor historical epic, aimed at salvaging custer from charges of incompetent vainglory and ruthless lack of humanity. The pop-cult attitude to indians was shifting sharply in the US at this moment -- in 1970 the counterculture and the anti-war movement would make a best-seller of Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" -- ~~and~~ [edit: BUT] the film does little to treat the indians as more than a threatening, war-whooping mass. White violence and corruption is depicted through the heavy-hearted obedience to his corrupt superiors of Robert Shaw's strikingly poorly conceived and miscast Custer. Despite several spectacular set-pieces -- including a 10-minute log-flume ride from the POV of a log and a train tumbling from the roalroad as it passes across a high bridge, which is on fire, not to mention a reconstruction of Little Big Horn at (I believe) its historical location -- this is an exhaustingly boring failure of a film, two and half hours to deliver Custer to the doom he richly deserved, in fact and -- so wearied are you by then by the movie's incompetent attempts at loading the dice -- in the perverse opinion of the viewer...

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(these were all watched when tired and written up entirely from memory: i checked facts about dates and actors bcz i can't help myself, but rich in error they may otherwise very well be)

actually rereading the custer -- which i only watched yesterday -- i think i've miscued the write-up some; or at least not said clearly the thing i was getting at... will put up a rewrite later (maybe), when i've done some of the actual grown-up work i'm meant to be doing today

(Spoilers, obv., if you're a passerby.)

Robin Wood defends the ending of Red River as emotionally true to the Dunston-Garth relationship, there being no way that Dunston could bring himself to shoot Garth. If I recall the book correctly (The Chisholm Trail), Garth refuses to draw (just as in the movie) but Dunston does indeed try to kill him but keeps missing, due to a wound that he'd gotten in an earlier shootout with Cherry that's now killing him.

Whether it's plausible or not, the ending of the movie makes me feel as if I'd suddenly stepped into a Hawks comedy (I Was A Male War Bride, for instance) with a woman making fun of two masculinely manly men.

According to Richard Corliss, Borden Chase, who wrote the book and the screenplay, called Hawks' ending "garbage."

Borden Chase wrote or co-wrote screenplays for three of the Mann-Stewart westerns: Winchester 73, Bend Of The River, and The Far Country. In the last two, at least, Stewart forgoes a good deal of his lovability, takes on some of Dunston's hardness, carries the Dunston-Garth conflict inside himself. (Iirc; it's been a while).

Edited 2012-08-21 23:26 (UTC)

The Far Country features WALTER "ALL CAPS" BRENNAN.

also one of manny farber's favourite westerns! so i'm looking forward to it

Have you seen My Darling Clementine? Very decent-feeling treatment of the OK Corral story, Fonda as Wyatt Earp, a dark and ethnic Victor Mature as Doc Holliday (as Edgar Allan Poe, basically), and WALTER "ALL CAPS" BRENNAN as a truly frightening and twisted Pa Clanton.

Speaking of Clementine, the new Neil Young & Crazy Horse album is a pisser:

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Very long time since I say MDC, certainly never watched it thoughtfully. Lindsay Anderson (the if-man) was a massive Ford fan, of course -- wrote an interesting if somewhat gullible book about it -- and I planned to watch more Ford while researching my book, but in the end that bit of the project was a casualty of time.

say = saw

Update notes: the first and the last feature historical figures in the title, the former a cheerful swashbuckling mess, the latter much more self-consciously attempting to address the truth and the myth in pseudo-scholarly fashion. In fact I doubt it had political pretensions, especially, and even though its politics are probably fairly pernicious I found it more diverting (and feeble) than obnoxious. The second was massively boring and pointlessly digressive: the attempt to ensure we saw Custer as a tragic and decent figure, doomed to enact violence and die violently by the corrupt manoeuvring of his military and political superiors, who refuse to allow him to honour treaties and such, is endlessly interrupted by irrelevant set-pieces (the log-flume ride is the most bizarrely pointless). Interestingly, not only is Washington corruption a driving force in both films, it's actually the same corruption -- and it's a historical fact, this was the so-called Gilded Age, and the 1876 election was one of the most shamelessly stolen in US history. But in both cases (in terms of history), it functions to obscure other relevant social elements; the James Gang weren't (just) outlaw warriors against East Coast corruption, if there were this at all, and not just ex-confederate terrorists; and Custer was a senior and surely willing enough figure in a ghastly ethnic cleansing. As I noted, by decade's end, the Native American cause was seen very differently, at least by the counter-culture: perhaps not unrelatedly, Westerns were in decline (there were other reasons). And anti-Washington and anti=war rhetoric had convulsed into very different forms.

In fact I doubt it = In fact I doubt Jesse James

(shouldn't updates notes while watching actual further westerns possibly)

"Other reasons" incl. the waning of a story: of a gunman bringing civilization to the wild, while he himself is not thoroughly tamed (so will either get tamed or shunted aside). But w/ the Sixties bringing dissension right to the heart of the middle class (or apparently bringing dissension, to hearts if not to reality), the "wild" can no longer be located in the past or in a particular area, and a consensus civilization can no longer be seen as waiting in the wings to supersede it. The crime film can survive and mutate, since it can make do and even flourish while the idea takes hold that wildness is ineradicable. But the west, as the official half-wild area that eventually gets tamed, has to close up shop.

Kennedy killed the Western? "[W]e stand today on the edge of a New Frontier -— the frontier of 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled dreams. ... Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus." <-- presidential acceptance speech, 1960

Explicitly re-opens the frontier as a social metaphor. Obviously it didn't die, but in a few years it had vanished from the mass cheapie layer of pop film, via television at first but not lasting there*: by late 60s largely either European (spaghetti) or art/event movie.

*Television changed it another way, maybe: domesticated its "untameable" figures by promising they'd be back next week in the identical same role.

TV Westerns were a different animal, one I remember less well. But yeah, definitely domesticated, and to some extent made the west a stand-in for small-town America, rather than America riding the border between wild and civilized. I'm not sure about that, though. Barely remember Rawhide, except for its excellent theme song* (had no memory at all of the show's soon-to-be-massively-famous-in-the-movies co-star). Assume that that show leaned a bit more towards wildness. Wagon Train was small-town on wheels. Don't think I remember Gunsmoke at all. Its old episodes weren't syndicated in the after-school afternoon where I was growing up. Bonanza? Had some kind of dramas, I guess. Also didn't yet have syndicated afternoon showings in Connecticut. Was the top-rated show for years. I remember reading that Altman directed a few episodes. The Virginian was a liberal show, about problems and sometimes even had unhappy endings — maybe the western equivalent to The Defenders. Nine-year-old Frank was impressed.

At a younger age, I saw The Lone Ranger. Was adventure, only a tad removed from Superman and the like. Wyatt Earp? Davey Crockett (sponsored by Disney)? I know I saw 'em a few times, don't really recall 'em.

*Dimitri Tiomkin, performed by Frankie Laine (says Wikip).

Edited 2012-08-27 23:34 (UTC)

quick notes on oaters

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