INTRODUCTION
1. Wicking and Pattison, “Interview with Anthony Mann (1969),” 201, 202.
2. Turan, “A Fistful of Memories,” 249.
3. On the theme of violence in the Western, see Richard Slotkin's essential work Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. This is the third in Slotkin's landmark trilogy on the role of the frontier in American history and culture.
4. Warshow, “Movie Chronicle,” 36, 38.
5. Alexandra Keller makes this very distinction in her essay “Historical Discourse and American Identity in Westerns since the Reagan Era.” See especially pages 242 and 252.
1. DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES IN SILENT WESTERNS
1. See chapter 1 (“Pioneers”) in Silver, The Western Film, 12–17.
2. Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians.
3. See chapter 2 (“The Eastern Western”) in Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, 12–18.
4. Biograph Bulletins, 1908–1912, 113.
5. Ibid., 149.
6. Ibid., 113.
7. Prats, Invisible Natives, 122. See also 119–120.
8. See chapter 8 (“Pocahontas Meets Custer: The Invaders”) in Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, 55–78.
9. See Simmon's observations about the self-contradictory nature of the film in The Invention of the Western Film, 84–86.
10. See chapter 1 (“Indians to the Rescue”) in ibid., 6–11.
11. Buscombe, Unforgiven, 45.
12. See chapter 7 (“The Politics of Landscape”) in Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, 51–54.
13. See chapter 6 (“Wars on the Plains”) in Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, 47–48 and 50.
14. Biograph Bulletin, 1908–1912, 465.
15. Prats, Invisible Natives, 93–94. See also 100.
16. As Fenin and Everson tell us in their survey The Western: “From the very beginning, Hart directed all of his own films, and only very occasionally did another director—Cliff Smith or Charles Swickard—work on his pictures. Even then, the director credit was largely nominal, for Hart's films were made the way he wanted them to be made…. Not only did Ince never direct Hart in a single foot of film, but after the first few productions he had little to do even with their supervision, despite the large screen credit he took on each film” (78–79).
17. For the theme of chivalric knighthood and its connection with the theme of love, see Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, especially his chapter “The Minnesingers,” about an extension of the earlier medieval troubadours. One crucial theme that Barber develops is the connection between passionate love and moral self-transformation.
18. Silver, The Western Film, 32. See also Silver's essay “Ford and the Romantic Tradition,” 17–33.
19. Bogdanovich, John Ford, 40.
20. Ibid., 18.
21. See Gallagher, John Ford, 17–19.
22. Ibid., 22.
23. Ibid.
2. NOT AT HOME ON THE RANGE
1. A particularly insightful essay on this film is Tibbets's “Vital Geography: Victor Seastrom's The Wind,” 255–261.
2. The most illuminating book expressing the feminist approach to the American Western—and most especially a take on the Western as a response to popular women's fiction in nineteenth-century literature—is of course Jane Tompkins's West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. See especially her chapter 2, “Women and the Language of Men,” 47–68. Tompkins's book is most effectively read as her own personal response to the genre of the Western, especially in terms of her own writings on nineteenth-century women's popular fiction. An informative essay on the role of the female in the Western film is Pam Cook's “Women in the Western,” 293–300. See also Blake Lucas's “Saloon Girls and Ranchers' Daughters,” and Gaylyn Studlar's valuable essay “Sacred Duties, Poetic Passions,” 43–74.
3. In her analysis of Riders, Jane Tompkins notes that “in this orgasmic act of self-destruction, a long-awaited moment of ‘wrathful relief’ that ends in dust and shrouds, the landscape expresses feelings that are too colossal, too outrageous, and too inexplicable for human characters to claim. Wreaking a horrible vengeance on the villain, forcing the hero and heroine to come together, the fall of Balancing Rock commits murder and sexual intercourse at the same time” (introduction to Riders of the Purple Sage, xviii). Riders of the Purple Sage was filmed several times, including the 1925 version starring Tom Mix and Marion Nixon and directed by Lynn Reynolds, and Charles Haid's 1996 version with Ed Harris.
4. Folsom, The American Western Novel, 85.
5. Ibid., 86.
6. Scarborough, The Wind, 2–3.
7. Westbrook, “Feminism and the Limits of Genre in Fistful of Dollars and The Outlaw Josey Wales,” 26–27, 28.
8. Not surprisingly, Scarborough's doctoral dissertation at Columbia University is titled The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction.
9. Lillian Gish quoted in Sanders, Lillian Gish, a documentary film.
10. Sjöström had trained as an actor and theater director in Finland and Sweden after spending part of his childhood in New York. In his thirties he partnered with Mauritz Stiller at the Svenska Bio film company. Both directors came to Hollywood: Sjöström first, in 1923, signing with the Goldwyn Picture Corporation, which the following year merged with Metro Picture Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to become MGM. Sjöström's fifth Hollywood picture was The Scarlet Letter of 1926, followed in 1928 by The Divine Woman, starring Greta Garbo and Lars Hanson, and then The Wind. Sjöström returned to Sweden, and by 1930 he was making films in Stockholm. His last screen appearance was in Wild Strawberries, directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1957.
11. Eder, “Don't Fence Me In,” 8.
12. Cowie, Swedish Cinema, 28.
13. At MGM, from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s, Marion was one of the studio's most active and successful scenarists, and she was much relied on by Irving Thalberg. Marion, who had more than three hundred credits, received two Academy Awards, for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931). Her MGM work also included the script for Clarence Brown's Anna Christie (1930)—Garbo's first talkie—and her collaboration on scripts for George Cukor's Dinner at Eight (1933) and Camille (1937).
14. Marion, Off with Their Heads! 158–59.
15. Paschall and Weiner, “Nature Conquering or Nature Conquered in The Wind (1928),” 54–55.
16. Ibid., 55.
17. See Affron, Lillian Gish, Her Legend and Her Life, especially the chapter “The Perils of The Wind,” 227–234.
18. Gish quoted in Sanders, Lillian Gish.
19. Marion, Off with Their Heads! 160.
20. Marion, The Wind.
21. There are interesting differences between these movies and their literary sources. In the literary resolution for Tom Dunson in Borden Chase's novel The Chisholm Trail (1946), he meets his end in the landscape (see chapter 6), as does Letty Mason in Scarborough's novel. In Alan Le May's The Searchers, Debbie's rescuers, Ethan Edwards and Martin Pauley, discover that she does wish to return to the white man's civilization, but the author tacks on an ending that blurs the issue by having the cavalry kill the Comanche and the searchers survive.
22. Ford called The Searchers “a kind of psychological epic” (Gallagher, John Ford, 333).
23. Scarborough, The Wind, 305.
3. “HE WENT THAT-AWAY”
1. Turner, “Cowboys and Comedy,” 218, 219–220, 234.
2. Fairbanks, Laugh and Live, 72–73, 96–97.
3. Duncan Renaldo starred as the Cisco Kid, and Leo Carillo played his Spanish sidekick, Pancho, in the long-running television series. The character was incarnated in earlier films by such actors as Warner Baxter, Cesar Romero, Gilbert Roland, and Renaldo himself. William R. Dunn portrayed the “Kid” in the 1914 silent The Caballero's Way, directed by Webster Cullison; the character was based on one in a story by O. Henry. Clayton Moore starred as the Lone Ranger in the long-running TV series by that name and had played the character in the 1952 film The Legend of the Lone Ranger.
4. As reported by Buscombe in his 100 Westerns, 21.
5. Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, 258.
6. Van Doren, The American Novel, 272.
7. A list of the humiliations in Ruggles demonstrates that comedy depends on cruelties, small or large, and this is fundamental to the comic Western. Ruggles learns that he was a stake in a poker game and that, since he has been won by the Flouds, he must go to America. Burnstead is humiliated at having to admit he lost Ruggles. Floud is humiliated at the tailor's and barber's shops. Ruggles is humiliated at the café. Effie is humiliated at the late arrival of the drunken trio to her dinner for important people: “Je suis mortifee!” Ruggles is humiliated at being drunk and by admitting his first name to Mrs. Judson, who in turn is humiliated at having her sauce criticized. Effie is humiliated by her husband going to a “beer bust,” and because, after reading about Ruggles's triumph in the newspaper, she must now pretend that he is a colonel in the British army. Effie is further humiliated when Floud and Burnstead avoid the dinner by escaping through a window. Ruggles is humiliated when Belknap Jackson fires him, when he learns Lord B. is coming to get him, and when he is subjected to Mrs. Judson's scorn.
8. Turner, “Cowboys and Comedy,” 219–220.
9. According to Turner, “To understand why parody works as comedy, it is useful to look at the incongruity theory, one of the major philosophical theories of comedy. Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the most useful proponents of the incongruity theory, describes the comedy of a situation as the tension between the conceived and the perceived, or the expected and the actual” (ibid., 220).
4. LANDSCAPE AND STANDARD-SETTING IN THE 1930S WESTERN
1. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 95–96.
2. Carmichael, introduction to The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns, 2–3.
3. For the influences of European and American landscape painters on certain Western filmmakers, with a focus on the influence of Frederic Remington's paintings on the cinematic art of John Ford, see Buscombe, “Painting the Legend,” 154–168.
4. For a discussion of the intersections among nineteenth-century landscape photography, nineteenth-century landscape painting, and Western cinematic art, see Buscombe, “Inventing Monument Valley,” 115–130.
5. Buscombe, Stagecoach, 41.
6. Herzog and Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 81.
7. Gallagher, John Ford, 509.
8. It must be admitted that there are indeed a few A-Westerns whose directors opted more for studio-shot interiors than rugged real-life exteriors, and these include Destry Rides Again (1939) and The Oxbow Incident (1943). These latter movies tended to achieve their “A” status because of high-quality direction, screenplay, and performance rather than as a result of any major investment in on-location shooting.
9. McBride, Searching for John Ford, 106–107.
10. According to McBride, “Ford, in filming The Iron Horse, eagerly responded to the challenge of staging both action scenes and intimate vignettes that offered opportunities for visual poetry reminiscent of the paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. From those Western masters, Ford learned the paradoxical method of capturing the grittiness of frontier life and landscapes in moments of intensely romantic, often statuesque beauty. Both Jack [John] and Francis Ford emulated Remington in their Universal Westerns. [Charles] Russell, who died in 1926, was a frequent guest at Harry Carey's Rancho, where Jack would have had the opportunity to get to know him” (Searching for John Ford, 147).
11. Ibid., 448–449. And Edward Buscombe gives clear evidence of the effect of these landscape-centered artistic representations on Western filmmakers like John Ford: “John Ford is on record as having acknowledged Remington's influence. In his interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ford remarks, ‘I like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. I tried to copy the Remington style there—you can't copy him one hundred percent—but at least I tried to get in his color and movement, and I think I succeeded partly’” (“Painting the Legend,” 154–157).
12. Stevens, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers, 28.
13. Arthur Edeson, director of photography for The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942) among countless other films, dating back to the silent era, was Walsh's cinematographer for the seventy-millimeter version of The Big Trail; he had also worked previously with Walsh on Thief of Baghdad (1924). The cinematographer who handled the photography for the thirty-five-millimeter English-speaking version of The Big Trail, and whose long career dates back to the early silent era, was Lucien Andriot.
14. See McBride, Searching for John Ford, his biography of Ford, for a discussion of Harry Carey Sr.'s influence on John Wayne (whose real name was Marion Morrison): “Harry Carey's silent Westerns had an enormous impression on a strapping kid whose name was Marion ‘Duke’ Morrison when he was growing up on a farm in Glendale, California. ‘Harry Carey projected a quality that we like to think of in men of the West,’ said John Wayne, adding that Ford ‘built on his authenticity.’ Wayne told actor Harry Carey Jr., ‘I watched your dad since I was a kid. I copied Harry Carey. That's where I learned to talk like I do; that's where I learned many of my mannerisms. Watching your father” (102).
See also McBride, quoting Wayne, for Ford's influence on Wayne when the latter worked for Ford as a prop man on silent films: “By then Morrison [Wayne] ‘wanted to be a director, and naturally I studied Ford like a hawk…. He was the first person who ever made me want to be a person—who gave me a vision of a fully rounded human being” (164).
15. See Cork and Van Eyssen, “The Big Vision: The Grandeur Process,” a documentary featurette.
16. Admittedly, The Big Trail suffers from several flaws, including embarrassingly dated and stilted humor. In addition, most of the noncomic dialogue in The Big Trail is overly theatrical, chiefly because some of the major performers in the film, including Marguerite Churchill and Tyrone Power Sr., had been mainly stage rather than film actors.
17. Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, 138.
18. Ibid., 139.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 122–123.
21. In regard to the widescreen method used, see especially the featurette “The Big Vision: The Grandeur Process” contained in the special edition DVD release from Twentieth Century Fox.
22. See chapter 15 (“Rambling into Surrealism: The B-Western”) in Simmon's The Invention of the Western Film, especially 160–170.
23. The Sons of the Pioneers recorded songs for John Ford's Wagon Master (1950) and Rio Grande (1950) and performed the theme song (by Stan Jones) for Ford's The Searchers.
24. Buscombe, Stagecoach, 10, 12.
25. Fenin and Everson, The Western, 203.
26. Gish quoted in Sanders, Lillian Gish.
27. An exception is Ford's 1931 war story Seas Beneath, set in a village on Spain's Canary Island, in which he eloquently captured a coastal landscape—as did Howard Hawks a year later, off the west coast of Mexico, in Tiger Shark, a tale of tuna fishermen.
28. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, Wayne did appear in very minor roles in a few of Ford's late silents and early talkies, including Hangman's House (1928), Men without Women (1930), and Salute (1929).
29. A particularly good essay on Ford's use of Monument Valley in Stagecoach is Carmichael's “The Living Presence of Monument Valley in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939),” 212–228. See also Hutson's “Sermons in Stone,” 93–108.
30. Edward Buscombe states that Ford shot eight Westerns in Monument Valley, including Stagecoach, but confesses that he had once mistakenly included Wagon Master and 3 Godfathers in his list of Ford films chiefly shot there when he wrote his The BFI Companion to the Western. See “Inventing Monument Valley,” 119.
31. McBride, Searching for John Ford, 288. McBride also relates here—in a footnote, and citing Carlo Gaberscek's well-documented Il West di John Ford (Arti Grafiche Fruilane, 1994)—that both Wagon Master and Rio Grande were thought by some to have been shot in Monument Valley but had actually been filmed 120 miles from there, near Moab, Utah. See also McCarthy, “John Ford and Monument Valley.”
32. Gallagher, John Ford, 464–465.
33. Screenwriter Frank Nugent (Fort Apache, 3 Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wagon Master, The Quiet Man, Mister Roberts, The Searchers, The Rising of the Moon, The Last Hurrah, Two Rode Together, Donovan's Reef) has said, “I'm not sure, but I suspect that when he [Ford] starts thinking about a story, he calmly devotes himself to personal research, gets hold of the music of the period and, generally, comes to his office well provided with a mixture of facts and fancy” (quoted in ibid., 464).
34. Kalinak, How the West Was Sung, 64. Kalinak also tells us in regard to the stagecoach theme itself: “My guess is that those few listeners who recognize the tune, or think they do, connect the stagecoach theme to ‘Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,’ an enduring cowboy ballad reproduced in endless school songbooks and folk anthologies. Few listeners, if any, will identify it as ‘The Trail to Mexico.’ I think the composers of the score were counting on that misrecognition. But whether or not audience members recognize the title, they would respond to the musical cues of westernness infused throughout the song. The loping rhythms and simple harmonies function to connote a sense of western geography without the listener actually knowing the source or even being conscious of the presence of music” (60).
35. Patrick McGee offers an interpretation of Stagecoach based on class and gender conflicts in his From Shane to Kill Bill. See especially 42–45.
36. Kalinak, How the West Was Sung, 70.
37. Patrick McGee reads the conclusion of the film in terms of property ownership, which is interesting given his focus on economic themes, family structure, and class conflict. See From Shane to Kill Bill, 42.
38. For a discussion of the pastoral agrarian ideal as expressed by the final line in Stagecoach, see Robert C. Sickels's “Beyond the Blessings of Civilization,” 142–152.
39. Buscombe, Stagecoach, 81.
40. Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 29.
41. Bazin, “The Evolution of the Western,” 85.
42. Welles quoted in McBride, Searching for John Ford, 299–300. The quote by Welles continues: “Every night for more than a month [while preparing Citizen Kane in 1940], I would screen [Stagecoach] with a different technician from RKO and ask him questions all through the movie.”
5. INDIAN-FIGHTING, NATION-BUILDING, AND HOMESTEADING IN THE A-WESTERN
1. Bazin, “The Evolution of the Western,” 49.
2. See chapter 15 (“Rambling into Surrealism: The B-Western”) in Simmon's The Invention of the Western Film, especially 160–170.
3. In his essay “Country Music and the 1939 Western,” Peter Stanfield begins by asking why so few A-Westerns were made between 1931 and 1939, and why so many A-Westerns were produced in and just after 1939. An important part of his answer has to do with the effects of the Great Depression as well as the growing specter of world war (23).
4. Glover, “East Goes West,” 117–118.
5. See ibid., 114–115.
6. Ibid., 116.
7. For an intriguing examination of the influence of modern painting on King Vidor's aesthetic vision, as well as the influence of Vidor's silent classic The Big Parade (1925) on the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, see Gallagher, “How to Share a Hill,” Senses of Cinema, past issues archive, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/43/king-vidor-andrew-wyeth.html, accessed July 15, 2009. Included in Gallagher's online article are images from Northwest Passage, used as evidence to show that the style of illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, father of Andrew Wyeth, had an influence on Vidor's imagery in this film.
8. Glover, “East Goes West,” 117, 121.
9. For Vidor's biography and a cogent analysis and appreciation of his films, see Raymond Durgnat's King Vidor, American.
10. See Glover, “East Goes West,” 117–118.
11. Ibid., 111.
12. Ibid., 121.
13. According to Prats, “The Myth of Conquest is no less appropriative than is Conquest itself…. And so Conquest's mythology presupposes the methodology of historical and cultural appropriation. I am referring to the notion, virtually enjoying the status of a first axiom, that the mythological alterations of historical events—regardless, and often because, of the resulting distortions—influence the national character, and that the selfsame alterations, taken as a system, structure, and pattern, become not only the major constituents of American culture but also the presumed methodology that articulates it” (Invisible Natives, 3).
14. See Prats's introduction (“Representation and Absence in Northwest Passage”) to his Invisible Natives, 1–20.
15. See Prats, Invisible Natives, 19.
16. Prats observes that Konkapot's “Otherness” is expressed most clearly, not by his drunkenness or simplicity, but by his complete dependence on Rogers: he even has to be introduced to Langdon, which is accomplished by Rogers's degrading description of him. See ibid., 16–17.
17. See ibid., 2. Slotkin's trilogy is composed of Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860; The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890; and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.
18. Prats, Invisible Natives, 10.
19. Richard Slotkin calls such a person “the man who knows Indians” (Gun-fighter Nation, 16).
20. See Prats, Invisible Natives, 13–14, as well as his chapter 4 (“‘Chartered in Two Worlds’: The Double Other”), which explores in detail the theme of the white Indian-knowing hero.
21. Fenin and Everson, The Westerns, 245–246.
22. According to Glover, “In another reversal, while we are told about the savagery of ‘the Indians’ as Rogers prepares his men on the eve of the attack, we are shown the savagery of the Rangers as they silently enter the sleeping village and massacre the men, women, and children” (“East Goes West,” 123).
23. McGee, introduction to From Shane to Kill Bill, xv.
24. Fenin and Everson, The Western, 164.
25. Ibid., 163–164.
26. The Westerner provides evidence of Toland's brilliance as a cinematographer, with gorgeous desert backdrops poised in perfect tension between light and shadow. Toland had recently won the Oscar for Best Black-and-White Cinematography for his efforts in photographing Wuthering Heights for Wyler. Toland shot The Westerner in a highly productive year that also witnessed his work on two John Ford classics: The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home (which, like The Westerner, were both released in 1940). He was soon to teach Orson Welles the basics of camera technique when they worked together on the landmark Citizen Kane (1941).
27. Stanfield, “Country Music and the 1939 Western,” 29–30. For more on this period of Western movie production and its relationship with its social and historical context, see Stanfield's important books Hollywood, Westerns, and the 1930s: The Lost Trail and Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy.
28. This connection between these images in the film and Depression-era Dustbowl images is drawn by McGee in the section on The Westerner in his book From Shane to Kill Bill, 52–53.
29. Ibid., 55.
30. Stanfield, “Country Music and the 1939 Western,” 29.
6. HOWARD HAWKS AND JOHN WAYNE
1. Early in the film there is a nighttime scene inside the ranch quarters of the cowboys, which look more like part of a convivial saloon than a bunkhouse, when Dunson and Garth sign up the men for the cattle drive to Missouri. Near the end of Red River there are two brief interior scenes: in the office of the buyer Melville, and later that night in Garth's hotel room, after Garth signs the contract. On first walking into the office, Garth winces and looks up, saying he is surprised to be under a roof again. The only other interior scenes concern the heroine, Tess Millay, first in her wagon when she asks Cherry and Groot to tell her all they know about Garth, and then later in her wagon when she offers Dunson dinner. After signing the contract, Garth walks into the final interior scene in his hotel room and finds Millay there to warn him about Dunson.
2. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 417.
3. Ibid., 427.
4. Ibid., 419.
5. Ibid., 411.
6. Springer, “Beyond the River,” 119–120. As Springer also tells us, “The film suggests that the men who think they can live without the companionship, guidance, and the help of women who are their equals often are doomed to an obsession with work (read: ‘career’) that isolates them from a larger community of shared human values to which women provide access” (123–124).
7. The excellent print reissued in 1997 by United Artists is the “book” version. Tag Gallagher notes that it was John Ford who suggested the use of a narrator (John Ford, 531).
8. Springer, “Beyond the River,” 117.
9. The analogy between America and a “city on a hill” was first made by the Puritan John Winthrop in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he addressed future Massachusetts Bay colonists while aboard the ship Arbella. The phrase was later used by President-Elect John F. Kennedy (in his address to the General Court of Massachusetts in January 9, 1961), who explicitly referred to Winthrop and his phrase. The comparison between America and a “shining city” was later used by President Ronald Reagan in his farewell address to the nation (January 11, 1989).
10. Corkin, Cowboys and Cold Warriors, 24–25.
11. According to Beard, “Wayne's power sustains the dominant ideology but is also derived from it. In many of his post-war westerns and in the many roles which placed him in the armed services, he is a warrior and an enforcer of order…. Wayne's heroic stature is coterminous with his individual mastery, but the individual qualities that allow him to rise above the others are also the expression of a social ideology of individualism: the ideology which holds that the specialness of America lies precisely in its creation of a society where individualist values hold the seat of honour” (Persistence of Double Vision, 4).
12. Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors, 28–29.
13. See McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, 82–83.
14. Ibid., 84–85, 89–90.
15. Ibid., 85–86.
16. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 427.
17. Ibid., 410–411.
18. Ibid., 419.
19. Springer, “Beyond the River,” 123–124.
20. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 425.
21. See McBride, Searching for John Ford, 102.
22. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 616–617.
23. Ibid., 618.
24. Ibid., 621.
25. Ibid., 622.
7. THE POSTWAR PSYCHOLOGICAL WESTERN
Epigraph on page 156: Bazin, “The Evolution of the Western,” 51.
1. For a detailed account of John Ford's service as head of the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, see chapter 10 (“Yes—This Really Happened”) in Joseph McBride's biography Searching for John Ford: A Life, 335–415. For Ford's own account of his wartime service, see the interviews “Reflections on the Battle of Midway: An Interview with John Ford (August 17, 1943),” 102–110, and Peter Martin's “We Shot D-Day on Omaha Beach: An Interview with John Ford,” 111–121, in John Ford in Focus: Essays on the Filmmaker's Life and Work, ed. Kevin L. Stoehr and Michael C. Connolly (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008).
2. Scott Simmon focuses on the Hamlet-like delay of action in his fascinating chapters on My Darling Clementine (chaps. 18–20) in his book The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre's First Half-Century. See also Simmon, “Concerning the Weary Legs of Wyatt Earp: The Classic Western According to Shakespeare,” in The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight, 1998), 149–160. As Kitses states in opposition to the “Hamlet” thesis in interpreting the film: “Is there any hint of the character indulging ‘the whips and scorns of time, the law's delay’? The action in fact only occupies a weekend—remarkably, given the sense Ford creates of relationships developing, of characters and the community changing” (Horizons West, 59).
3. Gallagher, John Ford, 225. This excerpt from Gallagher is also quoted in McGee's From Shane to Kill Bill, 78–79, where McGee refers to Fonda's Wyatt Earp as a “first sketch of the masculinist Cold Warrior in all of its contradictions” and views the cattle-rustling Clantons as signifying “the threat of fascism” (79).
4. Jim Kitses, “Introduction: Post-modernism and The Western” (1998), in The Western Reader, ed. Kitses and Rickman (New York: Limelight, 1998), 1531, 29–30.
5. Kitses, Horizons West, 66–69.
6. Ibid., 69.
7. Bogdanovich, John Ford, 83, 91.
8. While paying due attention to the psychological dynamics of Duel in the Sun, Patrick McGee concentrates on the class, race, and gender conflicts around which the movie often revolves. See From Shane to Kill Bill, 59–68. He also refers substantially here (see p. 61) to Laura Mulvey's emphasis on the film's gender and sexual dynamics in her book Visual and Other Pleasures.
9. Freud expounds upon the dialectical tension between the Eros and Thanatos principles (or instinctual drives) in his later work Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur).
10. Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in Perspectives on Film Noir, ed. R. Barton Palmer, 105.
11. See, for example, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chameton's essay “Towards a Definition of Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, trans. Alain Silver (New York: Limelight, 1996), 25.
12. And a few years later Schnee would go on to win an Academy Award for his screenplay for Vincente Minnelli's noirish Hollywood melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
13. The choice of the name Jubal is an intriguing one. There is a Jubal in the Bible, a descendant of Cain, who has been regarded as an ancestral “father” of musicians, especially those who play the harp, lyre, or flute (see Genesis 4:21). The connection with Cain may have some relevance since Jubal in Daves's film is also a disfavored son, given his later admission of his mother's hatred of him when he was a boy. There is also a Jubal Anderson Early who was a Confederate army general in the Civil War. There is no specific reference to either of these in the movie, however.
14. Interestingly, Borgnine had just won the Oscar for Best Actor for his title role in the film adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's drama Marty (1955), and Steiger had played that role in an earlier television production (1953).
15. A good discussion of Jubal that emphasizes its connections with Shakespeare's Othello and Freudian psychology is Michael Walker's essay “The Westerns of Delmer Daves.”
16. While Freud later in life came to criticize his own earlier overemphasis on the possibility of sexual traumas in the childhoods of most or all of his patients, particularly traumas related to sexual abuse, he nonetheless always maintained his conviction that dramatic personal experiences in people's earlier lives, especially in their youth, can have strong repercussions on their inner lives as adults. Psychoanalysis is, particularly from a Freudian perspective, a process of coming to identify and connect these causes and effects, especially by means of sharing this process of self-learning with another.
17. While various psychological theories might be applied to an analysis of the main characters in such Westerns, perhaps the most fruitful would be Viktor Frankl's idea of “logo-therapy.” This is an existentialist and pragmatic approach to the problems of the human personality that emphasizes a person's “will to meaning,” the search for an overall goal or purpose in an individual's concrete life. See Frankl's classic work Man's Search for Meaning, a revised and expanded version of his earlier book From Death-Camp to Existentialism.
18. Bazin, “The Evolution of the Western,” 53–54. Bazin's paradigmatic example of the application of this quality is Mann's The Naked Spur (see Bazin, 55).
8. JOHN FORD'S LATER MASTERPIECES
1. “Ethan Edwards is uneven, a character not organically conceived, its tone and emphasis (like that of the film itself) faltering and varying from sequence to sequence…. The style of The Searchers varies continually between the poetic and the farcical, the grand and the mundane, the convinced and the perfunctory…. There is a lot of John Ford in The Searchers, a lot of his splendid craft and his ambiguous, divided personality; but the sense of harmony, of resolution and of faith which gives his work at its best a special grace is not there” (Anderson, About John Ford, 156, 158, 160).
2. Buscombe, The Searchers, 68–69.
3. An illuminating essay on Ford's emphasis on landscape and on his specific use of Monument Valley in this film is Dick Hutson's “Sermons in Stone,” 93–108.
4. Ford's movie The Horse Soldiers (1959), with John Wayne and William Holden, and his “Civil War” segment of the epic How the West Was Won (1962) fell outside of this “project” of deglamorizing and demythologizing the story of the Westerner, serving more as war films than as Western films, despite their general narrative contexts and settings.
5. See especially Peter Lehman's essay “Texas 1868/America 1956: The Searchers.” Lehman states in that essay: “There is a constant tension in the film between Ethan and interior spaces; he does not fit in anywhere” (397). See also Lehman's essays “You Couldn't Hit It on the Nose” and “There's No Way of Knowing.”
6. See Paulus, “Ways of Knowing,” especially 83–85. For an illuminating analysis of Ford's use of aperture framing and other cinematic framing devices in his silent films, see Paulus, “If You Can Call It an Art…”
7. Bogdanovich, John Ford, 92–93.
8. The term strategic opacity is taken from Greenblatt's Will in the World.
9. Buscombe, The Searchers, 29. Interestingly, Buscombe interprets Ethan's “savage stabbing” with his knife, right after having discovered and buried Lucy's corpse, as an almost subconscious imitation of the Comanche's rape and murder of his niece. This is certainly likely, though it is also probable that Ethan digs with his knife in the sand, if only for a few moments, because he has just buried Lucy quickly and his mind is still focused on that action. Or, perhaps best interpreted, both actions weigh on Ethan's mind with equal force.
10. Legendary Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck once stated, reflecting on his long career and his association with great filmmakers, that Ford was “the best director in the history of motion pictures” because “his placement of the camera almost had the effect of making even good dialogue unnecessary or secondary” (Gallagher, John Ford, 145).
11. Buscombe, The Searchers, 21.
12. Kitses, Horizons West, 96.
13. Gallagher, “Angels Gambol Where They Will,” 272–273.
14. Kitses, Horizons West, 99–100.
15. Ibid., 100, 102.
16. Tag Gallagher proposes such an interpretation of Ethan's sudden change of mind when lifting Debbie toward the end of the film: “Does he [Ethan] recall lifting Debbie the night before that massacre? Regardless, he finally touches Debbie, grasps the person rather than ideas, and all his hate, fury, and insanity is transmuted into love” (John Ford, 336).
17. Ibid., 22–23 and 338.
18. Kitses, Horizons West, 118, 125.
19. Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 382.
20. Liberty Valance is based on a story by Dorothy M. Johnson published in Cosmopolitan in 1949. Johnson, born in 1905, studied at Montana State University, became a magazine editor in New York, and returned to teach at the University of Montana in the 1950s. She wrote short stories, including “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “A Man Called Horse” (collected in Indian Country, 1953) and novels about Indians and the West; her novels included The Hanging Tree (1957) and Buffalo Woman (1977). In Johnson's story, the funeral of Bert Barricune (Tom Doniphon in the film) takes place in 1910 in Twotrees. Attending is Senator Ranse Foster, who tells the reporter only the legend, not the truth, by saying Barricune had been a friend of his for more than thirty years. The rest of the story is very much a character study of Foster, a man who comes to hate himself as much as he hates Liberty Valance for humiliating him. When he learns from Barricune who really shot Valance, and why, Ranse decides to live the lie.
21. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth.
22. According to Joseph McBride, “Ford took the unusual step of writing Bosley Crowther, the lead reviewer of the Times, to alert him to the fact that the film was deliberately stylized like a silent Western” (Searching for John Ford, 625).
23. Three other Western masterworks by Ford were in color: 3 Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Searchers (1956).
24. Bogdanovich, John Ford, 74.
25. It has been suggested that Picketwire is the Westerner's name for the Purgatoire, a river flowing into the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado near Comanche territory. South of the Picketwire are the New Mexican and Indian territories that will become, respectively, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma; south of Indian territory is Texas, a state since 1845. Thus we are given a clue to where Liberty Valance takes place.
26. Doniphon will not assume the role and will not leave the West to be a part of the national government, any more than Burt Lancaster's Prince of Salina would leave his beloved Sicily for Turin to take part in governing the new nation of Italy, in Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), which was directed by Luchino Visconti and released a year after Liberty Valance in 1963. Odd as it may seem, a few notes of comparison between these two stories, both relating to later-nineteenth-century concepts of nationhood, point up the ambivalent attitudes of their hero-observers, characters who assume a melancholic magnificence as each steps to the side of a key moment in history. Each man, rancher or prince, realizes that the expansion of a central government is certain, each is skeptical of his own participation and suggests instead a man who lacks a traditional code of honor, and each values his personal freedom above all else. Each hero-observer has a notion of a symbolic sacred place, whether the territorial West or the Sicilian landscape. All hope of preserving this place, despite the onrush of the new reality, gives way to what seems either a more generous or simply a practical push by each man to effect historical progress. Since both Doniphon and the Prince wish to die where they were born, both will promote upstarts to conduct the new politics of statehood and compromise in the nation's distant headquarters.
27. The following are only four of many possible examples from Ford's body of work: the flowers that Hannah Jessop (Henrietta Crosman) carries to her dead son's grave in France after the war, in Pilgrimage (1933); the flowers that Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) waters at the grave of his deceased wife, in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); the roses that Sean Thornton (Wayne) brings to the home of his beloved Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara), in The Quiet Man (1952); and the fresh flower that Mayor Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy) leaves before the portrait of his deceased wife each morning, in The Last Hurrah (1958).
28. McBride writes, “Michael Wilmington and I wrote of this scene in our 1974 book on Ford: ‘Once the historical process has been given a catalyst, it can't be stopped: that is the tragedy. And the reason Ford “prints the fact” is to ask the public, “Are you proud?”’” (Searching for John Ford, 634).
29. Folsom, The American Western Novel, 31.
30. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 1–15.
31. Folsom, The American Western Novel, 31.
9. THE EXISTENTIAL AND REVISIONIST WESTERN
1. See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre's lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (L'existentialisme est un humanisme). It must be recognized that Sartre's conception of human freedom as unlimited in its subjective nature is dependent on his atheistic worldview.
2. Kitses, Horizons West, 175–176.
3. Wollen [as Lee Russell], “Budd Boetticher” (1965), 197.
4. Ibid., 199.
5. There are a few Mann Westerns of the 1950s that gain part of their narrative drive from sociohistorical situations. For example, Mann's Bend of the River (1952) revolves around the lives of homesteaders making their way from Missouri to the Oregon territory; and his Savage Wilderness (a.k.a. The Last Frontier, 1955) centers on the moralities of individuals caught up in the Indian-fighting mission of a remote Oregon army fort.
6. Wollen, “Budd Boetticher,” 197.
7. Ibid. He also states on the same page: “For individualism, death is an absolute limit which cannot be transcended; it renders the life which precedes it absurd. How then can there be any meaningful individual action during life? How can individual action have any value, if it cannot have transcendent value because of the absolutely devaluing limit of death? These problems are to be found in Boetticher's films.”
8. Kitses, Horizons West, 176.
9. Ibid., 177–178.
10. Ibid., 181.
11. Ibid., 184.
12. Ibid., 181.
13. See Harris, Pictures at a Revolution.
14. See also Jim Kitses's reflection on the “morality” of Bishop's band of outlaws: “They do what they do because there is nowhere to go. The Wild Bunch represents a way of life, a style of action, a technology, with no vision, no values, no goals. The quiet battle cry of the group is, ironically, ‘Let's go’: but we can only ask where?” (Horizons West, 223)
10. EASTWOOD AND THE AMERICAN WESTERN
Epigraph on page 238: Turan, “A Fistful of Memories,” 246.
1. For the influence of jazz on Eastwood, see Schickel, Clint Eastwood, chap. 1: “Nothing for Nothing,” and especially 29–42.
2. A significant and welcome body of literature has grown around the works and artistry of Eastwood. See Smith, Clint Eastwood; Cornell, Clint Eastwood and Issues of Masculinity; and Schickel, Clint. See also, among other books, the following two essay collections: Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, and Beard, Persistence of Double Vision. See also Hughes, Aim for the Heart, and Bingham, Acting Male. Biographies include Schickel's authorized Clint Eastwood and Eliot's unauthorized American Rebel.
3. As Schickel points out in his Eastwood biography, the label of “The Man with No Name” is actually a misnomer concocted by a marketing person. In all of the scripts for Leone's “Dollars” films, the Eastwood character is named “Joe” (Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 139).
4. The basic plot of Coogan's Bluff would be echoed loosely by the later TV series McCloud (1970–1977) with Dennis Weaver.
5. In his 100 Westerns, Edward Buscombe tells us about The Beguiled: “On one hand, it could be argued that this is not, strictly speaking, a Western at all, but rather an example of Southern Gothic. On the other hand, there is a long tradition of Civil War pictures, such as John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959), with close connections to the mainstream of the Western genre” (9).
6. Eastwood also directed the Lolita-like story Breezy, starring William Holden and Kay Lenz. Breezy was released in the United States in 1973 several months after High Plains Drifter was released.
7. For Eastwood's comments on his dedication of Unforgiven to Leone and Siegel, see Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, 177 and 192.
8. Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, 7–8.
9. As Beard remarks, “The whole of High Plains Drifter is visually distinguished, but at the conclusion of the film Eastwood the director creates his first great visual tour-de-force. The wholesale red-painting, and then the burning, of the town results in an astonishing iconic transformation of the town into an almost literally hellish landscape—a gesture of stylization at least as extreme as anything in Leone (and that is saying something)” (ibid., 25).
10. Mono Lake is the actual main site of on-location shooting, and Richard Schickel discusses Eastwood's scouting of this location in his biography Clint Eastwood (289).
11. According to Buscombe, “Anthony Mann, famed for his use of mountain scenery, was moved to protest: ‘I have never understood why people make almost all Westerns in desert country. John Ford, for example, adores Monument Valley, but Monument Valley, which I know well, is not the whole of the west. In fact the desert represents only a part of the American west” (“Inventing Monument Valley,” 119).
12. Thompson and Hunter, “Eastwood Direction,” 50. Eastwood also said, “I needed a place that would correspond with the mood and Mono Lake is what I finally found. It's a dead lake. It has some very interesting outcroppings and the colors almost change moment by moment, so it gave the film an elusive quality” (Gentry, “Director Clint Eastwood,” 69). Eastwood is quoted in another interview as saying, “I discovered Mono Lake by chance…. I immediately called my art director and had him jump on the first plane. When he arrived, he blurted out, ‘You'd think you were on the moon!’ I told him, ‘It's a weird place, but that's exactly what I want this story to be!’” (Henry, “Interview with Clint Eastwood,” 100–101).
13. Bumstead was also to serve as Eastwood's recurring production designer from Unforgiven to Letters from Iwo Jima, which was released in 2006, the year of Bumstead's death. He had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction and Set Direction for his design of the town of Big Whiskey in Unforgiven, as he had been more than thirty years earlier for his work on Hitchcock's Vertigo. And Bumstead had already won two Oscars in the same category for his earlier work on the classics The Sting and To Kill a Mockingbird.
14. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 289.
15. According to Buscombe, “Shane's classic status means that most makers of Westerns would be familiar with it. But Eastwood seems to have internalized this film to a remarkable extent, since not only Unforgiven but Pale Rider too exhibits many of the same features” (Unforgiven, 33).
16. Henry, “Interview with Clint Eastwood,” 99–100. Eastwood states in another interview: “But High Plains Drifter was great fun because I liked the irony of it, I liked the irony of doing a stylized version of what happens if the sheriff in High Noon is killed, and symbolically comes back as some avenging angel or something—and I think that's far more hip than doing just a straight Western, the straight old conflicts we've all seen” (Frayling, “Eastwood on Eastwood,” 134–135).
17. Eastwood has said, “Well, I was kind of curious, so I read it [the script of A Fistful of Dollars], and I recognized it right away as Yojimbo, a Kurosawa film I had liked a lot” (Cahill, “Clint Eastwood,” 121). See also Henry, “Interview with Clint Eastwood,” 99; and Turan, “A Fistful of Memories,” 248.
18. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 288.
19. Eastwood states, “It was originally written that the Drifter was the brother of the murdered sheriff, but I played it as if it could have been some apparition” (Gentry, “Director Clint Eastwood,” 68). See also Henry, “Interview with Clint Eastwood,” 100.
20. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 291.
21. Biskind, “Any Which Way He Can,” 202.
22. Ibid., 200.
23. For Eastwood's reflections on Siegel's “economic” mode of directing and his influence on Eastwood, see Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, 10, 30, 43, 79, 128, 171, 174, 177, 210. For example: “I think I learned more about directing from him [Siegel] than from anybody else” (128).
24. The idea of Ford's “vignette” style is emphasized by Gallagher (see John Ford, 466–468).
25. Gourlie and Engel, introduction to Clint Eastwood, 1–23.
26. Gentry, “Director Clint Eastwood,” 68.
27. Turan, “A Fistful of Memories,” 246.
28. Ibid. Eastwood also mentions The Ox-Bow Incident as a personal favorite in the interview by Jousse and Nevers, “Interview with Clint Eastwood,” 183.
29. Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, 54.
30. See Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 452–453. See also Béhar, “Portrait of the Gunslinger as a Wise Old Man,” 188.
31. Buscombe, Unforgiven, 44.
32. See, for example, Joseph McBride's biography of Ford, where the author says that the term grace note was used by Ford himself: “By that he [Ford] meant directorial touches, often nonverbal, that reveal character or capture emotion. Such frissons are the cinematic equivalent of the compressed, allusive phrasing of lyric poetry. In his best work, Ford values these seeming digressions above the sometimes laborious necessities of narrative” (Searching for John Ford, 175).
33. Tibbets, “The Machinery of Violence,” 174.
34. As Beard tells us while emphasizing the immorality of Munny: “But even before the frightening concluding scenes of the film, this Eastwood character has been morally compromised. This is not just a matter of Munny's earlier in-humanness…. It is perhaps even more crucially a matter of what can only be described as the criminality of the reformed Munny: the criminality, that is, of engaging in assassination for hire” (Persistence of Double Vision, 51, 52).
35. Jousse and Nevers, “Interview with Clint Eastwood,” 185.
36. Tibbets, “The Machinery of Violence,” 176.
37. Ibid.
38. According to Buscombe, “Yet though one need not look far to find parallels to Daggett in contemporary actuality, there are plenty of instances in the Western too of corrupt and sadistic lawmen. One of the most memorable is that played by Karl Malden in Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks (1960). Significantly he too, like Daggett, is fond of the whip, generally a cowardly weapon in the Western” (Unforgiven, 37).
39. Tibbets, “The Machinery of Violence,” 177. Also quoted in Gourlie and Engel, introduction to Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director, 10.
40. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 454–455.
41. Quote taken from ibid., 458.
42. Turan, “A Fistful of Memories,” 247. Eastwood also remarks that he was trying “to make a statement about violence and the moral issue of it” (Tibbets, “The Machinery of Violence,” 177).
43. According to Buscombe, “The writer of the script, David Webb Peoples, is more circumspect, but does try to draw a distinction between Unforgiven and earlier films: ‘There's certainly no intention on my part to write an anti-violent picture. On the other hand, I think violence is horrifying and I think the reason people think this is an anti-violent picture is that so many other pictures are at least intellectually pro-violence, in other words they suggest if the good guy just beats up the bad guy this will make everything better, and I don't think life's like that, I don't think it's ever as simple as that, I think it's really hard to figure out who the good guy is and who the bad guy is to begin with’” (Unforgiven, 73).
44. Kitses, Horizons West, 312.
11. CODA
1. See, for example, Hoberman, “How the Western Was Lost.” See also Lejeune's article “The Disappearing Cowboy”; Alan Prendergast's article “They Died with Their Boots On”; and the preface to Scott Simmon's The Invention of the Western Film, where he states, “The many premature obituaries for the Western film—the first few published in 1911—might warn us off such a pronouncement, but the genre is beginning to feel clinically dead, especially if a living genre requires a critical mass of productions” (xv).
2. For a good discussion of the concept of the posttraditional Western, see Jim Kitses's introduction (“Post-modernism and the Western”) to The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight, 1998).