Few great playwrights are as inextricably bound to film as Sam Shepard. Personally, he has possessed a “star” quality since his earliest days as a would-be actor, musician, writer, and amateur playwright. Handsome enough to be a male model, Shepard’s face had an even stronger impact on his public than his talent as a writer. It seems that he first wrote plays almost as a compensation for his not being a top-notch musician. As a boy he imagined himself as a film star, often Gary Cooper, and would act out scenes from favorite films as he did his chores, often to the astonishment of onlookers. Almost incidentally he was commissioned by Antonioni to write the screenplay for the Italian director’s Zabriskie Point (1970) a few years after Antonioni had gained international recognition with his acclaimed movie, Blow-Up (1966). Antonioni was drawn to Shepard for his alienated but dangerously appealing manner, the very American nasal twang of his southwestern accent, and his irreverent and inchoate early plays, often performed in coffee houses or totally noncommercial venues. Somehow he perceived that Shepard stood for all disenchanted young Americans who could capture the loathing for contemporary capitalistic decadence while at the same time projecting old-fashioned, anarchistic longing for the carefree American individual of an earlier century. Shepard’s first encounter with a movie production was something of a debacle. Although the playwright has claimed authorship of the Zabriskie Point screenplay, he abandoned the project before the movie was ever completed and Antonioni chose Fred Gardner to rewrite most of the script. Few of Shepard’s lines of dialogue or artistic imaginings remain in the completed work. Yet Zabriskie Point had a traceable influence on Shepard’s Operation Sidewinder (1970), which he completed after his resignation from the Antonioni film. In fact many of Shepard’s best stage plays have been enriched by his primarily negative reaction to contact with mainline Hollywood films. Not only Angel City (1976) with its specific exposé of Los Angeles and Hollywood, but also True West (1980), where two brothers vie to write a better screenplay, and Seduced (1978), where a dying Henry Hackamore describes his disastrous liaisons with female stars and a movie industry which robbed him of personal identity at the same time it turned him into an American icon, dissect a gangrenous Hollywood milieu. Then, too, it would be impossible to disprove that Shepard’s many turns as a movie idol conferred on him a celebrity status that resulted in Americans having a peculiar reverence for his stage plays. A good-looking movie star, projecting a strong heterosexuality in all of his performances, earning what must have seemed to many, huge amounts of money, chose nevertheless to write for the stage. Shepard is not a dilettante and his plays are not indulgences of a mediocre talent, but his originality of mind, his unerring ear for speech rhythms, his wildly imaginative characterizations were possibly less relevant to many theatregoers than his celebrity status. Always distrusting Hollywood’s artificiality and distortion of what the playwright considers honest values, he nevertheless is fully aware that success in this area of his life has enhanced his reputation in other areas.
Shepard’s reputation as a brilliant young playwright led to his being discovered as an actor and, conversely, his international recognition depends in large part upon the familiarity of his face in more than twenty films he has appeared in over thirty years. He was first an amateur playwright, then a professional though hardly “mainstream” writer for the stage. He has also been a stage actor, a screenwriter, a director, and a film star, even playing the lead in his own movie, Fool for Love (1983). He never seems to have conceived of himself as a professional stage actor. Such an actor would have been cast in a variety of roles and, out of a necessity to survive, would have developed several stage personae and would have accepted parts in works he failed to admire or which forced upon him the need to depict a character unlike himself. Shepard is not haughty, but he is aloof and independent, hardly the sort to be molded by a director with an incompatible vision. It is difficult to separate the playwright from the filmmaker from the actor. Shepard is unswervingly male, unaffected, and bright – but never polished or super-educated. Financial considerations may have led him to accept certain parts in films, and there are subtle differences in his characterizations; but primarily he has been selected for and/or has agreed to participate in projects in which the Shepard persona remains intact. He is the lean, handsome man of mystery with crooked teeth who seems to flaunt his distrust of artificiality. When he joins the cast of a movie, that film tends to be shaped by his presence, rather than absorbing him into it. Maybe because he has juggled several related careers successfully, the actor/writer has been more careful than most to choose projects that reflect his interests and display his talents to advantage. Shepard was asked to act the role of a wealthy Texas farmer in Days of Heaven (1978). Approached in 1976 to begin work in the movie, Shepard drove himself to Alberta, Canada, where the film was being shot. He might have written the script himself although, in fact, it was partly inspired by Hamlin Garland’s Boy Life on the Prairie written in 1899.
In the movie Shepard plays a terminally ill Texan who is plotted against by a rebellious young day-worker and his girlfriend, Abby, who see the opportunity of an ample inheritance for Abby, if she can seduce “the boss.” Of course, she falls in love with him and thwarts her boyfriend’s plan. The plot in that sense is similar to Kate Croy’s and Merton Densher’s deception of Milly Theale in Henry James’s novel, Wings of the Dove (1902), although there is no reason to believe the makers of Days of Heaven were ever aware of the Jamesian novel, nor that James, in turn, knew about the Garland journal. Shepard was a “natural” at performing cinematic “tasks” that were a part of his childhood. He enjoyed riding horses, shooting game, and knew exactly how a farmer would test a sheaf of wheat grain. Always his long-legged swagger and vocal twang added authenticity to his portrayals. They were, of course, natural assets. Shepard is not a narcissistic artist, but the male characters who interest him are ones similar to himself – rugged individualists at home riding the range in period pieces, or driving Chevy pick-up trucks in a more modern milieu. Timing is important in the movie industry. A youth in the sixties, Shepard entered the film industry at a time when the polished, almost artificial good looks of a Robert Taylor or Tyrone Power were being replaced by the “natural” man. Shepard the actor, like Shepard the writer, projects self-confidence, sex appeal, and a mysterious detachment, which suggests intelligence without intellectual pretense. Although Days of Heaven also featured a very young Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, Shepard took the lion’s share of applause when critics discussed the movie at the Cannes film festival.
Shepard’s successful acting turn in Days of Heaven led to his being recruited for the scruffy hero of Resurrection (1980). Cast this time as a rowdy, often drunken poor man in greasy clothes, he merely exposed what seemed to be a different side of the earlier character – equally authentic yet winsome, in a way. In this way the two protagonists resemble Austin and Lee in True West or Carter and Vinnie in Simpatico, paired first in stage plays and later in movies based on those plays, sharing an almost symbiotic relationship and literally experiencing role reversals, as if they were two parts of the same person. Ellen Burstyn plays a faith-healer in Resurrection and Shepard is cast as her lover who is divided by his belief in her powers of healing and by the fundamental prejudices of his background, which are exacerbated by the presence of his testy, self-righteous father. Some credited versatility to Shepard’s performances as two very different men in Days of Heaven and Resurrection. It is easier to note the similarities, however, and to gain a sense of an immutable personal vision in all of the artist’s endeavors.
For many, of course, Shepard’s most memorable film opportunity was his contract to play Chuck Yaeger in a movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book on astronauts, The Right Stuff (1983). Like the title of Shepard’s play, True West, Wolfe’s use of “The Right Stuff” is ironic. Both works emphasize the artificial labels which society assigns to the genuine and the worthwhile. Image becomes more important than reality in a public relations-oriented society. Most Americans perceive the West as a Hollywood product, a legacy of films like Stagecoach (1938). In the same way, they glorify the over-hyped heroism of astronauts, ignoring the hard work and frequent discouragement that have under-girded their eventual successes. The character of Chuck Yaeger had been written out of the original screenplay of The Right Stuff but Phil Kaufman, the movie’s director, insisted on Yaeger’s inclusion in the movie. Yaeger is “the real thing,” a no-nonsense test pilot who despises vainglorious publicity-seeking. Pretending to be a test pilot is a far cry from being a farmer or a hick roustabout, but Shepard conveyed his same unyielding persona – the manly loner without a façade who discovers a role for himself and accepts it somewhat stoically. Thus, it seems that a certain stolid unity in Shepard’s own personality gives shape to all of his creative experiences. From playing the dynamic lover of Frances Farmer in the movie, Frances (1982), to performing quite minor roles in Crimes of the Heart (1986), Steel Magnolias (1989), and The Pelican Brief (1993), Shepard seemed to select films which permit him to affirm his favorite themes: the difficulty of romantic relationships, the frustrations and disappointments of everyday life, and the competing emotions of anger and compassion in ordinary men. His screenplays and stage plays become amplified explorations of these same interests. In the spring of 2000 a modern version of Hamlet was released with Shepard playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Denmark is now a multinational corporation and the murdered king its former CEO. The play’s setting and action have been moved to New York City after the millennium. Shepard is well cast as Hamlet’s father appearing to his bemused son in a video arcade and on the balcony of the Hotel Elsinore. His stern masculinity blends well with his understated but appropriate recitation of Shakespeare’s familiar lines. When he appears as an apparition standing in Hamlet’s room or sitting in a chair by Gertrude’s bed, Shepard’s presence is natural, expected. The subject of murderous feelings between brothers recalls True West and the flighty wives with wavering loyalties have appeared in Buried Child (1978), Curse of the Starving Class (1977), and other of the actor’s stage plays. He continues to select screen roles which reflect his own views on life. And like many other twentieth-century artists, Shepard has written several stories for the screen that to this day remain unproduced.
When he was still in his twenties Shepard had gained a reputation as an off-beat playwright of great promise. It was logical that he would also begin to write screenplays. One of his first was called Maxagasm, which he called “a distorted Western for the Soul and Psyche.”1 The screenplay had been based on one of Anthony Foutz’s stories and Shepard gave the characters archetypal names: Child, Princess, Peach, Cowboy, etc. Shepard’s contact with the musical group, the Rolling Stones, at the time of his association with Antonioni, had led him to dream of a movie in which he and the Stones would all participate. But the Stones went on to fame and fortune in other arenas about the time Antonioni replaced Shepard as a writer on Zabriskie Point. Still, merely because Antonioni had originally signed him up for work on his screenplay, and ultimately gave Shepard some screen credit for his time on the set, offers to write screenplays continued to reach Shepard. In one case he collaborated with Tony Richardson, director of Tom Jones, on a rewriting of Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean masterpiece, The Changeling, which was to be renamed The Bodyguard. Soon, too, he joined forces with Murray Mednick to write a screenplay called Ringaleevie, which contained elements of his slightly earlier stage play, Operation Sidewinder (1970). There was an amateur flavor to the whole project and he and Mednick dedicated the play to various Shepardian characters, including Crazy Horse and the Holy Yehudi, as well as to their wives, Kathleeen Mednick and O-Lan Shepard. Shepard began several screenwriting projects; in some cases he was an “idea” man, in others he rewrote scenes by previous writers. Eventually he completed a screenplay called Seventh Son that concerned feuding gangsters in a child-pornography operation. Shepard recoils from pornography and, in fact, a blackmailer who has used pornographic photos gets his just deserts in both the stage play, Simpatico, and the film based on it.
At several points in Shepard’s career critics have noted what they perceived as autobiographical elements in the artist’s work. For example, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, and A Lie of the Mind are often interpreted in this vein. In films the same is said of Fool for Love. The unpublished screenplay, Fractured, also appears to contain autobiographical elements. Shepard, who lived with his wife and son at the time in California while attempting to earn a living in Hollywood, describes a suburban rancher who supports his family by posing as a model for the Marlboro Man. The husband and wife in the screenplay are called Massey and Lu-Anne (near anagrams for Sam and O-Lan). One scene, in particular, has the potential power of Shepard’s best films. In it a wild Appaloosa mare rampages through Massey’s suburban house, providing a frightening image of untamed nature that emphasizes suburbia’s recent, shallow origins. The runaway horse, Mel, in Far North (1988) or the horses in Silent Tongue (1992) possess some of the same vital mystery of the rogue Appaloosa in Fractured. Still, Shepard would have to wait several years before he would take full control of a film project. Meanwhile he saw several works he had written for the stage transformed by others into movies.
The video film of Shepard’s True West (1984) is an anomaly. While Shepard wrote True West as a stage play, generally considered to be one of his best, the video version was taped by PBS. The Cherry Lane theatre production of the play stars John Malkovich and Gary Sinese. Therefore, while Shepard had essentially nothing to do with producing the film, it is an accurate representation of his theatre piece. Although it was not intended to be a feature film, such as Shepard’s Fool For Love (1985) which was also based on one of his stage plays, it is available at video stores and is considered by many as a Shepard “movie.” It is worthwhile to examine its production values. Literally filmed on a stage set, True West avoids the monotonous and claustrophobic atmosphere one might expect of a drama filmed in a single room. And while the absurdities of Hollywood’s financial exploitation of writers and their audiences become its principal subject matter, the city of Los Angeles, the environmental rape of California, and the corrupt milieu of major studios are never witnessed first-hand. The impact of these elements on two estranged brothers provides all the proof we need of their existence, apart from two brief scenes with a Hollywood “idea” man, Saul Kimmer, who plays the role of an idiot savant, who recognizes the commercial possibilities of the sociopathic brother, Lee’s, improbable saga of adventure in the modern West.
The simple plotline of True West is equally well-suited to stage or screen. Austin, a semi-successful, college-educated screenwriter from north California has taken occupancy of his mother’s house while she is traveling to Alaska. He is interrupted in his attempts to lead a quiet life as a writer when his brother, Lee, a boorish, uneducated bum who has been leading a hand-to-mouth existence in the desert (he claims) and who has a reputation for thievery and brushes with the law, alluded to by his disapproving brother, appears unexpectedly and demands asylum. After unsuccessfully canvassing his mother’s neighborhood for robbery prospects, Lee directs his energies to becoming a screenwriter like his brother. A chance meeting with Austin’s Hollywood sponsor, Saul, results in Lee’s being assigned to write a screenplay rather than Austin. There is the suggestion that Hollywood professionals like Saul have no appreciation for art and see involvement in culture as a business and also that Saul has selected Lee’s project over Austin’s as a result of gambling on a golf game, as well as a hint of a possible homosexual assignation.
Horribly disillusioned and crushed by the rejection of his own screenplay, Austin begins eventually to “exchange” roles with his brother, in time stealing from neighbors’ houses (admittedly toasters, with limited monetary value) drinking excessively, and bemoaning his discomfort in “civilized” surroundings. Yet Lee, though he attempts to choose writing as a career for a few minutes, is ultimately defeated by his impoverished vocabulary, inability to type, and utter lack of self-discipline. Increasing hostility between the two brothers and their atavistic reversion to infantile behavior suggest the intolerable pressures which sap the strength and talent of ordinary people.
When PBS officials decided to videotape the Cherry Lane production, they hired Malkovich and Sinese to recreate their stage roles on film. Both actors were experienced by this time with cinematic acting techniques and their close-ups, somewhat less theatrical gestures, and slightly accelerated patter contribute to an impressive “movie.” The film’s cinematography adds to its appeal, especially in scenes where close-ups of the actors’ faces are distorted by light and shadows into almost symbolic manifestations of the play’s cultural conflicts. A good example is the closing shot focusing on the face of John Malkovich, whose make-up emphasizes the lupine cast of his face, and the eerie lighting, combined with the sound of coyotes’ howling on the soundtrack, transforms him into a kind of indestructible beast, who has survived strangulation to reign again as a predator.
Along with the cameo appearance of Saul Kimmer, satirized as a plump, effeminate, polyester-clad representative of studio system crassness, is the unexpected return home of Austin and Lee’s mother at the play’s conclusion. Stereotypically middle-class, orderly, and almost inhumanly passive, the mother startles viewers with her tidy but inexpensive-looking carefully matched travel outfit and suitcases. Arriving amidst the squalor of her sons’ transformation of a once pristine suburban ranch-style house, she brings events to a simultaneously comedic yet frightening conclusion. When she speaks to her sons, they revert to childhood poses, partially hiding behind screens and talking in small-boy voices, as if they were accustomed to defending themselves against accusations of unacceptable behavior. As she slaps Austin in the back of his head, the audience immediately recognizes the connection between Lee’s irritating “swats” at his brother’s head and the physical abuse the boys, now grown men, received from at least one of their parents when they were growing up.
Typically, the film of True West, a recapitulation of the playwright’s words for the stage, features role reversal, atavistic behavior, a longing for a simpler life and for an America which perhaps exists only in myths of the past. It is a macho, male-dominated world and the one woman who enters it has inscrutably surrendered any attempt to impose order or meaning upon it. There is a thematic connection, both psychological and philosophical, among all of Shepard’s works. Although the movie of True West is not the playwright’s adaptation of his own play, it shares with his films topical similarities which legitimize its inclusion among his movies.
Ten years after the effective film production of True West, a cable TV film of Curse of the Starving Class resulted in the unsatisfactory adaptation of one of Shepard’s finest plays. The cable movie’s screenplay was written by Bruce Beresford, who had directed Shepard in the film of Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (1986). Shepard perceived Beresford as a controlling man who misunderstood his theatrical intentions. Director Michael McClary missed much of the play’s understated humor and tended to sentimentalize the story as well. In fact, Roy Loynd wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “McClary’s direction misses Shepard’s rhythms and Bruce Beresford’s screenplay fails to highlight the playwright’s tone and idioms.”2 More damningly Loynd asserts that Shepard had been writing “metaphorically” about a “‘starving class’ hungry for moral and physical sustenance” but claims that in the movie “they’re just snarly, messy farmers.”3 The Big Name power of Kathy Bates and James Woods as actors in the film was intended to draw viewers. It did, but the actors’ interpretations of the original stage roles diverged from Shepard’s intentions. While Kathy Bates effectively depicts the exhausted but noisy mother who dreams of leaving the farm and going to Paris, James Woods over-acts his part as the sulky alcoholic father and turns him into an abusive monster. A highly suspect real-estate agent who wants to get the family off potentially valuable land, a son who seems mentally disturbed rather than rebelliously adolescent, and a daughter entering womanhood who is clearly self-destructive rather than confused and questing, create an unhealthy ménage of dysfunctional characters. With such overstated depiction of entrepreneurial destroyers of the environment and with such hopelessly neurotic family members, the movie of Curse becomes a predetermined tragic melodrama, rather than a cautionary tale of declining American values.
Along with True West and Curse of the Starving Class, Simpatico (1999) is a movie made from a Shepard play without the playwright’s direct involvement. The stage play, Simpatico, written four years earlier, contained familiar Shepardian motifs. Horse owners and horse-racing were central to the plot. The opening scene of the play takes place in a tawdry western motel room and its occupant is an eccentric, seemingly outcast loner, who refuses to look at television sets or to drive cars that are manufactured in Japan. Although he appears to be agoraphobic, he surprises audiences by visiting his former partner, now a wealthy Kentucky horse-farmer, in a successful attempt to stir up past troubles. A complicated plot involves pornographic pictures, the framing of a supposed friend whose life was consequently ruined, and an almost inevitable role-reversal of the major characters: the poorer partner virtually exchanges roles with the formerly wealthy one, who is left at the play’s conclusion, huddled in the stark motel room’s bed. Justice has been served in the process and the play’s message is more affirmative than many of the author’s previous works.
Unfortunately, the transformation of Simpatico into a movie is only partly effective. Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, Albert Finney, and Sharon Stone bring major Hollywood names to the production but the wide-screen treatment of the story fails to capture the nuances of the original. Nolte, as Vinnie, who lives in the cheap Los Angeles motel, possesses the masculine persona and potential for violence one associates with Shepard’s protagonists, but he lacks the fidgeting edginess of Vinnie on stage. Bridges, as Carter, is too sophisticated to imagine as Vinnie’s former partner and Stone is too stylishly beautiful to be cast as the down-to-earth Rose, Vinnie’s former girlfriend. Lavish Kentucky settings provide an overly bold contrast to the stage’s confined in-door spaces with their hint of vulgarity and modest expectations. G. D. Schmitz, in a generally negative review, believes only “more horse-racing and more tightly edited scenes”4 could rescue the film. Its major fault is, in fact, English director Matthew Warchus’s inability to capture the essentially western American quality of Shepard’s original work, with its wry wit and homespun philosophy, so typical of the author’s bizarre mixture of authentic details in unexpected situations.
Although Shepard has written successfully for the stage since the 1960s, has created movie scripts since the 1970s, and has often appeared as a movie actor in important films, it was not until the 1980s that the author and film star would realize his dream of creating important feature films.
Paris, Texas (1984) is the first of Shepard’s four feature films. At a cost of 3 million dollars it was considered a low-budget production, even in the early 1980s. Harry Dean Stanton, who would later play Shepard’s father in Fool for Love, is cast as a loner and drifter named Travis, whose secret past is not completely revealed until the last moments of the movie. Travis’s ravaged face is more manly than handsome, but his soulful eyes possess a gentleness that keeps him from being frightening. He shares many qualities with the playwright: he’s a heavy drinker, refuses to fly in airplanes, and enjoys driving pick-up trucks. He seems anxious not to repeat the child-rearing mistakes of his parents when he returns to his abandoned son after a four-year absence. He is obsessed with the notion that he was conceived in Paris, Texas. Clearly Paris, France, is prominent in the playwright’s personal iconography. Travis’s wife is a Frenchwoman and characters in Shepard plays often dream of escaping to Paris (for example, the mother in Curse of the Starving Class). Paris, Texas, seems to represent some idyllic combination of an authentic American southwestern town and an ideal modern community, where families can communicate freely and trustingly.
Travis’s nearly eight-year-old son, Hunter, is played by Hunter Carson. Hunter seems instinctively to trust his long-lost father enough to leave the benevolent Aunt Anne and Uncle Walt who have raised him in his parents’ absence. Father and son travel to Houston where they discover the boy’s mother, Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, working in a peculiar sex-games parlour. When Travis enters a booth, Jane appears at the other side of a two-way mirror, offering to remove her blouse while she listens to her “customer’s” tale of woe and/or sexual fantasies. Horrified, Travis leaves Jane and takes Hunter to a hotel, but later he returns to Jane’s “club” and reveals himself in a dark narrative of the couple’s life together. Acknowledging his obsessive love for his young wife, he begs forgiveness for his drinking and carousing and tying her to a stove in their trailer home. Simultaneously, he forgives her for setting the trailer on fire when escaping with their small son. All along his intention was to reunite Hunter with his mother. One supposes he will relinquish custody to the aunt and uncle who have raised him so lovingly and that the boy’s birth mother will play a more active role in his life. Travis will probably disappear again, sacrificing his own needs to those of his son and former wife. In one of the film’s most interesting shots, Travis, looking through the one-way mirror, sees his own face transposed upon his wife’s. The long gaunt face of Travis surrounded by Jane’s dyed-blonde pageboy is strangely androgynous and suggests the futile and even grotesque attempt of two people to become a single being. The symbiotic pairing of the brothers in True West, the incestuous brother and sister in Fool for Love, and the Indian woman and her young husband’s obsessive devotion in Silent Tongue are recalled for a moment. The artist’s preoccupations with doubling, role reversals, and a kind of permanent human bonding appear to be constant thematic concerns. And while a lack of money has contributed to the failure of Travis’s marriage, his son’s initial discomfort at reuniting with him, his brother’s need to finance his expedition to Houston, and his wife’s employment in a kind of soft-core sex-game parlor, the film, like Shepard’s stage plays, primarily emphasizes the division of good and bad, masculine and feminine, and active and passive qualities within a single individual. The importance of a loving family and the need for human kindness must ultimately prevail over the material limitations placed upon us by modern society. Vincent Canby argues that while Paris, Texas begins “so beautifully and so laconically,” it eventually “begins to talk more and say less.” He believes that Shepard’s “art – and his temperament – do not seem to adjust well to the sort of long, collaborative process by which movies are made.”5 However, the film’s affirmation of long-term loyalty, the need for forgiveness, and the willingness to make sacrifices for others provide a unique example of idealistic film-making.
Shepard’s next screenplay was based on a play he had staged in 1982, Fool for Love, two years after True West. The successful filming of True West for a made-for-television movie preceded by a year the filming of Fool for Love, which was the first Shepard play that the writer himself adapted to the big screen. It was directed by Robert Altman and its premiere was originally timed to coincide with the opening of Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind in New York City. Critically, the film was not a success. Reviews were mainly negative, often scathingly so, although it is possible to glimpse a grudging recognition of Shepard’s skill as a playwright in both John Simon’s review for the conservative publication, The National Review, and Stanley Kauffman’s more liberal essay in the New Republic. Simon claimed that the “impinging of reality and fantasy” gave the stage play “much of its interest,” adding that in the movie Shepard “devised a scenario that the past takes place currently behind and around the present, with present selves mingling with the past ones.” He added that the solution is “ingenious, especially as abetted by Pierre Argnot’s extremely flexible camera work and Robert Altman’s most successful direction in years.”6 Simon nevertheless concludes that the movie fails to satisfy the audience. Kauffman, slightly more upbeat in his assessment, claims that “somewhere inside . . . the electric Shepard was struggling to emerge and almost made it.”7 Several changes were required for Fool for Love to be transformed from stage play into a movie. On stage, the continuous appearance of a silent father, sitting in a chair, stage forward, emphasizes the psychological impact of the father’s past actions on his hapless children. Eddie and Mae are lovers but they are also half-brother and -sister, sired by a father with two wives. Repeatedly they try to escape their “fatal attraction” to each other but while pursuing more “acceptable” relationships, they always appear to reconcile with each other. The silent father in an onstage chair reminds theatre audiences of Anna, sitting in the rear of a naked stage in Pinter’s Old Times. As a friend of a youthful Kate, now coupled with Deeley, a needy male, Anna’s silent presence suggests to audiences that she has played a significant role in the woman Kate has become. In the same way Eddie and Mae’s father has, unintentionally perhaps, burdened them with the sin of incest, a legacy of his own irresponsible philandering.
Again the cramped interior of a cheap motel room adds to the intensity of the play’s atmosphere. When one of Eddie’s jilted lovers, “the Countess,” drives insanely around the motel in her Mercedes Benz, firing at Mae’s room with a shotgun, Shepard’s dark humor captures the spectator’s attention. When Mae asks how “crazy” the Countess is, Eddie’s wry response, “pretty crazy” elicits a hilarious reaction from the audience. The necessity in a film to move outside a single room, to display the entire motel complex, to locate it visually in a New Mexican oasis adds a dimension of reality at odds with the subtler theatre piece. In the movie the errant father is an almost voyeuristic motel-owner. Played by Harry Dean Stanton who had starred earlier in Paris, Texas, he conveys little of the sensitivity of Travis in the earlier film. Shepard himself plays Eddie and one feels he truly enjoys driving a truck and lassoing furniture. As Mae, Kim Bassinger, while not admired by many critics, manages to project successfully both vulnerability and sensuality. In spite of Shepard’s and Bassinger’s fine performances, however, Fool for Love exaggerates the tense, confined subject matter of the play and seems more like an absurd melodrama than a tragic glimpse at unhappy siblings trapped by a parent’s indiscretion.
Following the production of Paris, Texas and Fool for Love, Shepard turned director as well as screenwriter in Far North. The thought-provoking comedy was shot in northern Minnesota, near where his companion, the film’s protagonist, Jessica Lange, had grown up. The story line is simple, which gives Shepard ample opportunity to comment on the changing nature of rural life in America, the death of the pioneering spirit, and the somewhat alarming urban growth of the twentieth century. An aging father, Bertrum, played by Charles Durning, is thrown from his horse at the onset of the movie and ends up in a hospital bed. His daughter, Kate (Lange), returns home from New York City to check on him and is startled when he asks her to shoot the horse that unseated him. Ahab-like, he seeks vengeance on the dumb brute who caused his injury. The horse runs away, however, and Kate, though at first resolved to do so, is unable to carry out her father’s wishes. Eventually, Bertrum escapes from his hospital bed and walks the many miles to his rural home with an alcoholic male relative, Uncle Dave, played by Donald Moffat. The two old men see the horse, nearly get run over by a speeding car, and Bertrum collapses on the roadside, possibly of a heart attack. One is never sure whether or not he has died but his two daughters and granddaughter, who have been lost in the woods, come upon the father’s body and transport him home on the horse. The film concludes with a birthday party for Kate’s one-hundred-year-old grandmother, and its final shot appears to reveal the father with a gun in one hand and the horse’s reins in the other marching out through snowy woods to the horse’s possible execution. Perhaps the figure we see is not Bertrum, however, or the whole scene is a fantasy on the part of Bertrum’s wife and daughters.
Such fantasy elements punctuate most of Shepard’s plays and screenplays, but as with many other twentieth-century artists, imagined or surreal scenes are played naturalistically, in the manner of Harold Pinter’s work or Samuel Beckett’s. Not only is the audience uncertain as to whether Bertrum is living or dead at the film’s conclusion but it seems highly unlikely that two men could “escape” so easily from a hospital, walk down empty city streets, and complete a walk of many miles back into the countryside.
In another scene, Kate’s bemused mother prepares an enormous breakfast and conjures up a kitchen table crowded with men who work on the farm. Only one of these men any longer lives on the farm, yet the mother’s imaginings are filmed realistically with husky, hearty eaters crowding the table so that she can barely reach her arms through them to pour them coffee. Similarly, while it is not difficult to get lost in the woods, the fact that the three women and an overly frisky horse end up at dawn in the same spot of road with Bertrum and Uncle Dave seems like a more fitting ending for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream than the tidy finale to a plot emphasizing credibility.
Throughout Far North the artist’s favorite themes resonate in the crisp rural landscape. Americans are depicted as having abandoned the countryside, and the constant complaint of the many women and few men who inhabit it is the question, “Where are the men?” Obviously, they have left their homes to seek better jobs and more exciting lives in the city. Far North is yet another of Shepard’s elegies for the death of rural America. The close, often hostile, relationship between man and animals is emphasized, as well as the strength of female survivors in a male-dominated world, the love of traditions (at Granny’s one-hundredth birthday her female descendants and friends sing a Norwegian folk-song), and the regrettable loss of religious faith. Again, Granny, distressed that her birthday falls on a Sunday, keeps asking, “Doesn’t anyone go to church anymore?” Such thematic concerns are commonplace in Shepard’s plays as well. In Far North, however, the artist is able to add visual concepts and episodes inappropriate to the stage. The artist’s love of nature is, of course, particularly apparent.
Shepard has always been moved by larger images that cannot be contained in a stage setting. His picture of man fighting the forces of nature recalls Hemingway’s adventurous episodes, although Shepard’s landscape is more distinctly American, glorifying the unique rock formations of the Southwest or Northwest, silver-treed forests, wild horses, and grain-covered fields. Movies provide an excellent opportunity to reveal visual experiences that can only be captured on the wide screen. The sheer beauty of the settings in the playwright’s films is arresting. One can almost feel the cold air in Far North and enjoy the sunsets and full moon against a backdrop of trees, or shudder at the bleak snowscapes. Filming also permits naturalistic representation of surreal events, more convincingly than they can be presented on stage. Movie audiences tend to believe what they see on film is actually happening, whereas unlikely or distorted episodes on stage become more blatantly theatrical. The “tricks” of the camera are more difficult to detect.
In True West, both the stage version and the filming of the Cherry Lane Theatre production hint at the look of the desert. But the actual desert is described mainly by Lee. Primarily, the howling of coyotes on a sound track suggests the usurpation of the wilderness by a metathesizing suburbia. In films, though, the majesty of the country’s remaining geographical beauty lingers. A play hasn’t been written where a horse can enter the stage and become a major character. Yet, Mel, the horse in Far North, frequently takes possession of our attention and suggests that he is more than an animal – in fact, he may well represent something pure and untamed from an earlier era.
The loneliness of rural life is palpable in Far North. People are separated by vast spaces, country roads are empty, and tangible evidence of a declining population is visually depicted throughout. The rugged individualism of an earlier America, the fundamental conflicts between people and animals can only be hinted at microscopically on the stage. Furthermore, Shepard’s personal fetishes need to occupy the wider landscape. His habit of driving old pick-up trucks on country roads, his love of walking through forests or over stony paths can be facilitated by the cinematographer’s skills. The filmmaker can indulge urges that must be expressed differently, if at all, in a theatre. In his next movie, Silent Tongue, Shepard also blends the real with the surreal, using the visual impact of natural scenery to enhance his almost mythical narrative.
Although he had already written nine screenplays when he created Silent Tongue in 1993, it is only the second film which Shepard both wrote and directed as an original movie. Like its predecessor, Far North, Silent Tongue provides deep insights into the artist’s underlying philosophy and world view. It accomplishes on the screen certain effects that cannot be easily conveyed on stage. The combined majesty and starkness of the desert and of outlying fields of grain underscore the daunting combination of usurpation and challenge encountered by our forebears in a newly discovered country. The imagined rampaging female warriors on horseback who are occasionally interspersed with a realistic plotline express the astonishment and outrage of Native Americans who were forced to confront pioneers who claimed an inexplicable right to their property. Caryn James, writer for the New York Times, entitled her review of the film “Sam Shepard’s Spiritual, Majestic Vision of the Old West.” She calls the film “uncompromisingly good” and argues that it deals with “mysticism, history and a kind of profound family tangle that echoes his best plays.” Elsewhere she refers to Silent Tongue as “eerie, inventive, poetic,”8 citing it as a noncommercial film which deals less with specific issues than with underlying anthropological conflicts and personal enigmas. Recognizable issues that mirror the plays, of course, abound. An alcoholic father, who engenders two daughters with an Indian woman he rapes, one of whom he sells to another pioneer, provides the typically destructive parent one expects to find in a Shepard play. Performed by Alan Bates, this character named Eamon McCree operates a circus of sorts, sells patent medicine, scorns his son by a previous relationship, and eventually flounders in the desert like a mad King Lear who, deservedly perhaps, lacks even one loving child to rescue him.
Eamon was not the first white man to injure the mother of his daughters. She had been previously raped by another white man and her tongue had been ripped out so that she couldn’t accuse her attacker verbally, hence giving her the cognomen of Silent Tongue and the movie its title. Eamon’s counterpart is actor Richard Harris, who plays Prescott Roe, a devoted father who’s willing to risk his life and fortune for the well-being of his son, mad with grief over the death in childbirth of his part-Indian wife. The dark side of Prescott’s character is a willingness to disregard the humanity of others as he attempts to satisfy his son’s needs. It seems he originally purchased the now deceased Indian woman from McCree and seeks to purchase her surviving sister as well, to distract his own flesh and blood from self-destructive mourning. The bond between parents and children or the severing of this bond becomes subject matter for much of Shepard’s work. Also, the bonding of siblings, who often need to protect themselves against a hostile or controlling parent, is shown in the relationship of McCree’s two half-Indian daughters who remain resolute in their hatred of the man who abused their mother. Believably, as with Austin and Lee in True West or Kate and Rita in Far North, siblings squabble and compete as frequently as they support each other.
Although Shepard avoids overtly political issues in Silent Tongue, the white invaders of Indian territory appear to possess the larger share of vices and to provide the major cause of conflict. The gigantic issue of man’s proper place in the natural world, the perilous encroachment of civilization upon the wilderness, and the dangerous solipsism of ethnocentric Western culture pervade Shepard’s universe.
Enjoying as he does the music of the Red Clay Ramblers, Shepard employs them again in Silent Tongue (as he had in Far North and the stage play, A Lie of the Mind) to compose original songs, with a blend of country music, jazz rhythms, and, perhaps, even resonances of rock-and-roll, which complements the mystical and primitive elements in the plot and the photography. A musical “medicine show,” supervised by the drunken Eamon as a prelude to this sale of patent “medicines,” suggests the outbursts of energy and joy which both enliven and shatter the otherwise silent and foreboding landscapes. Performing dwarfs hint at the exploitation and abnormalities of supposedly “civilized” life. The carnival atmosphere of Eamon’s traveling sideshow as well as his verbal virtuosity, expressed in a poetically exaggerated Irish brogue, offer a diversion from monotony and a painful reminder of the human cost of pleasure-seeking.
With such devices as a dead woman whose face is half-beautiful and half-decaying, who is still able to berate her grieving husband and to demand that she be burned on a traditional Indian funeral pyre, Shepard indicates his sincere fascination with the spiritual world. From Lee in True West, who recoils from his brother’s suggestion that destroying a typewriter is a “sin,” to the hundred-year-old granny’s complaining that no one goes to church anymore in Far North, to the vision of a dead woman restored to beauty, and tranquility, as she emerges ethereally from the blaze that consumed her corpse in Silent Tongue, issues of good and evil, honor and ritual, sin and redemption take their places as recurring motifs of otherworldliness in Shepard’s cosmology. What distinguishes Silent Tongue most importantly are the deft suggestions of nature’s mysteries and greatness. The appearance of young elks on a barren plain, the twisting of shimmering, curled-up rattlesnakes on two occasions, the startling contrast of a white wolf against lush green grass make watching Silent Tongue a treat for the eyes. And then there is the totally unexpected approach of a camel led by a circus lady, the former as comfortable on a New Mexico set as in the shadow of Egypt’s pyramids, and the sight of a white horse fording a stream, or of four horses turned gold-colored by the twilight. All of these images deepen one’s sense of primal forces that are alluded to but infrequently depicted on a small stage.
As a director, Shepard selects masterfully effective final shots as conclusions to his films. In this case a field of waving golden grain against a blue sky is framed like an abstract painting and its black borders become wider and more intrusive, leaving viewers with what resembles an abstract expressionist composition.
While most of the chapters in this volume assess various facets of Shepard’s literary achievement, this one has attempted to examine his relationship to the cinema. The subject is complex because the ideas and attitudes which shape Shepard’s canon define his achievements as a movie actor, director, and screenwriter, just as they do his reputation as a major twentieth-century dramatist. His vision and his accomplishments cannot be contained by a single medium.
1 Quoted in Don Shewey, Sam Shepard, 2nd edn. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 65.
2 Roy Loynd, “Curse of the Starving Class,” Los Angeles Times, 4 February 1995, 17.
3 Ibid., 16.
4 G. D. Schmitz, “Simpatico,” http://upandcomingmovies.com/simpatico/html.
5 Vincent Canby, “Fool for Love,” New York Times, Section 1, part 2, 14 October 1984, 14.
6 John Simon, “Love’s Fools,” National Review, 30 June 1986, 3.
7 Stanley Kauffman, “Fooling Around with Love,” New Republic, 23 December 1985, 24.
8 Caryn James, New York Times, Section C, col 2, 25 February 1994, 3.