The Moviegoer on Vacation...

... Until Tuesday, September 1.

On this day in 1924...

John Ford's The Iron Horse was released. A grand epic dealing with the building of the transcontinental railroad, this movie placed Ford in the first rank of American directors.

Harry Carey and the Western

Here's a nice clip about Harry Carey and Straight Shooting. John Wayne talks about Carey's influence on him and other Western stars.

On this Day in 1917...

John Ford's first full length movie, Straight Shooting, was released. Prior to these he had made several short films, but this ws his most ambitious project to date. Starring Harry Carey, with whom he would make some 25 Westerns over the next four years, this is the only film from that collaboration to survive. It was rediscovered in a Czechoslovakian film vault in 1966. Fernando Martín Peña has a nice essay on the film at Fipresci, the the International Federation of Film Critics website:

What makes a man to wander? Where does Ethan Edwards come from in The Searchers (1956)? Probably from Straight Shooting (1917), as many have already noticed. Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey) is a carefree outlaw hired by a cattleman to kill a farmer who does not want to leave his land. When he is about to do it, he's moved by the sight of the old man, mourning the death of his son, and decides to reform. The ending of the film is confusing — there are parts obviously missing or misplaced — and the titles are not reliable, because the print was found in Czechoslovakia and they had to be reconstructed from the Czech titles. However, it seems clear that Cheyenne Harry sets things right, feels unworthy of the farmer's offer to stay with him and replace his son (by becoming his son-in-law) and goes away. Fade out and some decades later we have Ethan Edwards.

But there are many more elements in Straight Shooting that prefigure future Ford films, which is quite bewildering given the fact that it actually was his first feature. How can a film be Fordian before Ford? Where does John Ford come from? Surely from David Wark Griffith and William S. Hart. The climax of Straight Shooting finds the ranchers besieged by the cattlemen in a cabin, much as in The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Ford always kept a direct link with the Master through the frequent casting of Mae Marsh (as Lindsay Anderson pointed out). The change that undergoes Carey's character is very close to the pattern set up by Hart in many films, and the austere, dusty western town in Straight Shooting is very close to Hart's imagery. But those obvious links don't explain it all because the film also contains at least three things that cannot be attributed either to Griffith or to Hart.

In the first place, the legendary "eye for composition," that natural gift that defined Ford's visual style, is already quite developed here, as Lindsay Anderson proved in his book.
In the second place, we already find here the somewhat tragic character who assumes the mediating role between the wild and the civilized and who will reappear over and over again in Ford's future westerns, notably in films like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Like Fonda and Wayne in those films, Carey is not motivated only by virtue (like Hart). He's part of both worlds, but in fact, he's mostly wild: he rides with a band of outlaws, gets noisily drunk with the cattleman's main henchman, seems very happy at the prospect of killing for money and mainly survives by violence, unlike the civilized settlers who don't exactly know how to do that and therefore get killed. So Carey (like Fonda and Wayne) is the one who can exert violence against the violent and help wipe them out with the rest of the wild things, including himself, who feels out of place when the work is done.

And finally, Straight Shooting is devoid of the strong racism that permeates not only Griffith's work but also Hart's. In films like The Aryan (1916), Hart's hero degrades himself by joining an outlaw band exclusively formed by Indians and Mexicans (and quickly becomes their leader, which is presented as the natural thing that happens to a white man in that context). In Straight Shooting, Carey rides with — but does not lead — an outlaw band composed of Mexicans and Indians and afterwards gets their help to fight against the cattlemen and break the cabin siege. Everybody mixes happily in that climax, the outlaw band saves the day, and they even become equated with the settlers when Carey leaves them as well, probably in search of himself, as he finally rides away.

On this Day in 1948...

Red River, starring John Wayne and directed by Howard Hawks, was released in the theaters. Hawks was a versatile director who had directed every type of movie genre except Westerns, and this was Wayne's first movie with him. Hailed by critics and fans as perhaps the greatest Western of the 1940's, the epic story tells the tale of the first cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail in 1866 and Thomas Dunson, the man who led it. Wayne's role as Dunson was diferent from anything he played before. For one thing, it was the first time he played an old man (he did so again in 1949's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon). It was also a different role for Wayne in that he played a ruthless, driven man bent on completing the drive no matter what (or who) it costs, in the process causing a mutiny. It was the closest he ever came to playing a bad guy in the movies, and it worked. Wayne showed he could really act. (A little trivia for hardcore Western fans: this is the only A-list Western where the Duke wore a holster string. Traditonally in the genre, this was considered the mark of a bad guy.) This is one of the alltime great Westerns, and shows up regularly on top ten lists (including mine).

William S. Hart's 1939 Farewell to the Screen

In this 1939 clip, silent movie legend William S. Hart bids farewell to the screen. The last five minutes are worth it!

On this Day in 1949...

Massacre River was released, featuring up and comers Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun. The Encyclopedia of Western Movies (1984) has this to day about the movie: "This inept actioner sees Madison and Calhoun as a pair of army officers in love with the same woman, Cathy Downs (of My darling Clementine fame). However, it is Steve Brodie, as the menacing gambler, who steals the film, epecially as the action scenes of the Indians going on the warpath are so weakly done."

On this Day in 1973...

Cahill, U.S. Marshal was released with John Wayne, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen. This is a routine entry from Wayne's later years that never really gets off the ground. Part of the reason, I think, is that Wayne lost interest halfway through the picture when he learned that his old mentor, director John Ford, was dying of cancer. Indeed, Ford died a week after the movie's premiere. But another problem is that it all just seems old: the story, the one-liners, even the actors. By ythe 1970's, the Western was on a visible decline, and movies like this one didn't help turn things around.

Hoot Gibson (1892-1962)

This day in 1962 marks the death of onetime star Hoot Gibson. Born Edmund Richard Gibson in Tekamah, Nebraska, he joined the circus at age thirteen before working as a cowboy in Wyoming and Colorado. After working in the rodeo he got into the movies as a stuntman in 1910, earning $2.50 a stunt. As he said later on: “I hired out to be an Indian in the morning then turned cowboy and chased myself all afternoon. They paid five dollars a day and two-fifty extra to fall off a horse.” For most of that decade he alternated between the rodeo and the movies, until he found regular with a young director named Jack Ford (who for a time was also Gibson’s roommate). Beginning with Straight Shooting in 1917 as a supporting actor, Gibson worked his way up to leading man. He wasn’t a handsome man and he rarely carried a gun onscreen, but by the mid-1920’s he was making $16,000 a week, and was one of the decade’s leading cowboy stars. His likeable personality and light comedic touch worked at the time, but by the 1930’s his career suffered as decline with the advent of the singing cowboy. By the end of the thirties he left the movie business and went back to the circus. He made a final appearance in Westerns with a small role in John Ford’s 1959 The Horse Soldiers.
(Adapted from IMDB.com)

Rio Bravo Still Popular at Fifty

Back in March, Allan Barra wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal on the fiftieth anniversary of Rio Bravo and why the film continues to be popular:

It wasn't nominated for any Academy Awards. It was scarcely taken seriously by the critics on its release, and it's never made into the American Film Institute's top 100. But Howard Hawks's "Rio Bravo," which had its premiere half a century ago this month, may be the most popular cult film ever made.

The phrase "cult favorite" conjures up images of wobbly hand-held camera shots and little-known actors. But "Rio Bravo" was shot in glorious Technicolor and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history. Most cult films are too hip to be popular, and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But "Rio Bravo" is that rarest of films -- both popular and hip.French director Jean-Luc Godard called "Rio Bravo" "a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception." British film critic Robin Wood wrote, "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be 'Rio Bravo.'" Quentin Tarantino, whose "Pulp Fiction" was also both popular and hip, told an audience at a 2007 Cannes screening of "Rio Bravo" that he always tested a new girlfriend "by taking her to see 'Rio Bravo' -- and she'd better like it!"

Why has a simple western with an unremarkable plot become such an enduring favorite? The story is simplicity itself: A small-town sheriff, John T. Chance (played by John Wayne), holes up in his jail with just two highly questionable deputies, an old jail keeper named Stumpy (Walter Brennan) and an alcoholic gunfighter named Dude (Dean Martin), while waiting for the marshal to relieve him of a murderous prisoner who happens to be the brother of a powerful rancher (John Russell). That's about it -- there aren't really any side plots except for a slowly developing romance between Chance and Feathers (Angie Dickinson), a dance-hall girl at the local saloon (the role made Ms. Dickinson a star).

This hardly seems the stuff from which legendary films are made. In fact, it seems more like a hodgepodge of elements from many westerns, which is exactly what The New Yorker's Pauline Kael liked about it. "A semi-satiric Western," she called it in "5001 Nights at the Movies," "silly, but with zest."

Todd McCarthy, author of "Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood," says: "'Rio Bravo' isn't, as many people refer to it, a 'classic western' -- it's more like a Neo-classic. It came at the end of an era of great westerns at a time when both Wayne and Hawks needed a hit. They were both happy to recycle elements from earlier pictures, even their own." And they would do so again in 1967, when they remade "Rio Bravo" as "El Dorado," with Robert Mitchum as an alcoholic sheriff and Wayne as his deputy. (The confusion over who starred in which movie made for a very funny sequence in the John Travolta hit "Get Shorty.") In 1976, John Carpenter took the basic story line from both films and remade it as a crime thriller, "Assault on Precinct 13."

"Rio Bravo" was designed as an Alamo story in which the besieged Texans win. In case viewers don't get the message, the hotel Wayne's sheriff lives in is called "The Alamo," and the outlaw boss hires a Mexican trumpeter to play "El Deguello," supposedly the song that Santa Anna had played for the Alamo's garrison. (Actually, the piece was written by the film's composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Wayne liked it so much that he used it in his 1960 film called "The Alamo.")Tiomkin's music both heightens the tension and relieves it. While the film moves at its own leisurely pace -- at 140 minutes it was longer than most '40s and '50s westerns -- the suspense is sometimes broken for a song. In one sequence, the action stops -- literally -- while Martin and teen idol Ricky Nelson croon "My Rifle, My Pony and Me," a reworking by Tiomkin of his famous theme from Hawks's great 1948 film "Red River." No action movie today would risk anything so daring.

Well known to every "Rio Bravo" aficionado is that it was an intentional response to Fred Zinnemann's 1952 "High Noon," a film that Wayne loathed because it was written by Carl Foreman, who took the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee while "High Noon" was being shot. Foreman, who was later blacklisted, admitted that he wrote scenes in his film to make sure the audience knew he was protesting HUAC. Hawks later said in an interview, "I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help. . . . We did everything the exact opposite of what annoyed me in 'High Noon.'"

But as Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West magazine, notes, too much was made of the differences between "High Noon" and "Rio Bravo." Gary Cooper's sheriff confronts the four outlaws with no one but Grace Kelly to help, while Wayne takes on a couple of dozen with Brennan and Martin, the deputies he started out with, and Nelson, who's only there to get revenge after a friend of his is killed. The odds are about the same for the good guys in both films.

Mr. Bell also notes that the two films are similar in that they perpetuate the myth that a handful of gunmen could simply take over a town without resistance. "When Jesse James and his gang rode into Northfield, Minn., in 1876 to rob the bank, just about every citizen in town reached for a gun and opened fire. That was the case more often than not in the Old West."Still, two generations of fans have loved "Rio Bravo" without caring at all about its political implications. "Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time," the film critic David Thomson asks rhetorically in his recent book "Have You Seen ...?"

Fifty years later, the melody lingers on.
(Drawing by Pat McNamara, 1987)

Errol Flynn's Westerns

Last August, the New York Times carried an article about Errol Flynn's Westerns, which had just been reissued. The article (as well as the movies) are worth a look:

John Ford, the legend goes, rescued the adult western from the B-movie category into which it had fallen during the first years of the Depression, making it safe again for big budgets and big stars. But that is an honor rightfully shared with Errol Flynn. This unruly Australian-born star lent his immense popularity to three hugely successful westerns in a row, beginning with “Dodge City,” released in April 1939, a month after “Stagecoach,” and continuing in 1940 with “Virginia City” and “Santa Fe Trail.” (“Stagecoach” was itself preceded by Henry King’s Technicolor “Jesse James,” released in January 1939, starring Tyrone Power.)

These Flynn westerns paired him with his Warner Brothers screen sweetheart, Olivia de Havilland, and were directed by Michael Curtiz, a Hungarian immigrant. Curtiz’s minimal level of engagement with the genre is suggested by the command he is said to have issued during the shooting of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”: “Bring on the empty horses!” — meaning the riderless mounts.

Apparently it wouldn’t do to have a bunch of foreign interlopers behind the rebirth of this most American of American genres. So Flynn’s role in the history of the western has largely been forgotten, despite the fact that he went on to appear in five more, including Raoul Walsh’s 1941 classic “They Died With Their Boots On.” But now that Warner Home Video has brought together four superbly mastered Flynn westerns — “Montana,” “Rocky Mountain,” “San Antonio” and “Virginia City” — in “Errol Flynn: The Warner Brothers Western Collection,” the moment is ripe for reappraisal.

On one level Flynn’s transition from swashbucklers to westerns makes perfect sense: after “Captain Blood” (1935) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), his screen character had grown to such epic proportions that it required a correspondingly epic stage. And after he did his bit for the British Empire, the American West was just about the only other arena that could contain him.

But on another level, as Flynn is said to have observed, his accent and manner were too Continental to fit smoothly into the imaginary space of the American frontier. The screenplays for his westerns — many written by Robert Buckner — continually come up with ingenious explanations for the hero’s curious courtliness and exotic speech patterns: in “Dodge City” he’s an Irish soldier of fortune who finds himself herding cows in Kansas; “Montana” (1950) just throws in the towel and identifies Flynn as an Australian sheep farmer (among the many professions Flynn practiced) who dreams of bringing these white, woolly creatures to western cattle country.

But who could accept Flynn, with his pencil moustache and rakish smile, as a humble cowpoke in a 10-gallon hat? Warner Brothers got around this issue mainly through costuming, dressing Flynn in long frock coats that set him apart from the bandannas and bluejeans of the supporting players. With their slimmer profile, these costumes evoked the tailored three-piece suits of the 1930s far more than the mail-order dry goods of the 1880s. Wide-brimmed, flat-topped hats completed the ensemble, adding an ineffable touch of urbanity (and even a hint of zoot suit flair). This look established Flynn as a man apart, an aristocrat passing through the West without necessarily being a part of it.

The four films in the new set are interesting but of uneven quality. (Not included are “Dodge City” and “They Died With Their Boots On,” which were part of Warner Brothers’ “Errol Flynn Signature Collection: Volume 1”; “Santa Fe Trail,” which has fallen into the public domain and is available in several dubious versions; and “Silver River,” a fine Raoul Walsh film from 1948.)
“Virginia City” casts Flynn as a Union officer who escapes from a Confederate prison and is sent west on a secret mission to intercept a shipment of silver intended for the depleted coffers of the Confederacy. Its oddest element is Humphrey Bogart, pre-stardom, as an outlaw whose accent wavers unpredictably between French and Spanish. As a director, Curtiz never seemed happier than when he was staging elaborate tracking shots through crowded cafes (including a famous one, a couple of years later, under Bogart’s management). The gigantic saloon set of “Virginia City” gives Curtiz several opportunities to indulge himself, as Flynn and his opposite number, a Confederate officer played by Randolph Scott, compete for the affections of the star attraction, a singer played by Miriam Hopkins.

“San Antonio” (1945) repeats the formula, although this time in Technicolor and with the regal Alexis Smith as the singer. The director is David Butler, best known for his musical comedies (“Calamity Jane,” 1953); not surprisingly, he emphasizes the comedy (in the hands of S. Z. Sakall and Florence Bates) and musical elements. (Smith is a vision in white satin and rhinestones, performing “Some Sunday Morning.”)

With a brief running time of 76 minutes, “Montana” has the feel of a troubled production. Both Vincent Sherman and Raoul Walsh did some directing work on the project, which was ultimately signed by Ray Enright. Near the end of his Warner Brothers contract, Flynn was starting to show signs of his drug and alcohol addictions, and the film, despite some handsome Technicolor interiors photographed by Karl Freund, is choppy and lifeless.

But Flynn’s final western, the little-known “Rocky Mountain,” turns out to be a small discovery. Its black-and-white photography and restricted scale suggest the rapidly shrinking budgets that accompanied the late-’40s collapse of the studio system, yet both of these elements work to the benefit of this taut little tale of a Confederate raiding party, led by Flynn, pinned down on a mountaintop by Union troops and Shoshone Indians. The director, William Keighley, was Warner Brothers’ specialist in adapting Broadway stage comedies (“The Man Who Came to Dinner,” 1942), and he makes the most of the confined setting, drawing sharp characterizations from a supporting cast that includes Guinn Williams, Slim Pickens (in his first film) and Howard Petrie, as well as Patrice Wymore (soon to become the third and last Mrs. Flynn) as the troubling female presence.

Like several westerns of the period, “Rocky Mountain” is defined by a very unwestern sense of claustrophobia and entrapment. With the slightest push, the picture would be a film noir, and its climax is appropriately somber. Much of the credit must go to the cinematographer, Ted McCord, a great landscape artist (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) who was also fluent in the high-contrast style of studio noir (“Flamingo Road,” “Young Man With a Horn”). The western, in its infinite richness, continues to yield surprises. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, not rated)

A New Western Blog

For almost a year now I have been writing a blog on Catholic History titled McNamara's Blog. It's been a great way to share my love of Church History with a wider audience than is possible elsewhere. In addition to this field, another lifelong love of mine has been the Western movie. So today I am launching The Moviegoer: A Western Lover's Blog. The title comes from Walker Percy's 1962 novel, and the quote I remember most is this:

Other people... treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books... What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach...