The Auteur Theory
In the studio era directors were employees, like the other members of a film’s cast and crew. Even those few directors who wielded some degree of clout in Hollywood, like Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, had to work within the parameters of the producing studio’s dominant style or genre. In the Hollywood studio system, directors, like actors and electricians, were under contract; rarely did they have the right to final cut. Yet while some directors floundered against the pressures of the studio system, many in fact flourished, using the rules of genre as convenience rather than constraint, as guidelines from which to deviate or deepen rather than blueprints to follow.
By providing the received framework of genre, Hollywood gave filmmakers a flexible tradition within which to work. Some directors developed their vision within particular genres, such as Samuel Fuller with the war film, John Ford with the western and Douglas Sirk with the melodrama. The auteur approach provided a way of looking at directors’ style foregrounded against the background of genre. As Lawrence Alloway notes, ‘the personal contribution of many directors can only be seen fully after typical iconographical elements have been identified’ (1971: 41).
Auteurism, the examination of films by the same director for a consistent personal vision, began in the mid-1950s in the film journal Cahiers du cinéma. Critics writing for the magazine, many aspiring to be directors themselves, tended to look at and favour films that could be understood as expressing an authorial viewpoint on the part of the director. Their rallying call was provided in a number of articles written by François Truffaut, then a young critic writing for the magazine. Truffaut launched an attack on the French ‘Tradition of Quality’, big studio films adapted by writers from literary works popular at the time, arguing that such films were impersonal because they left little room for the director. In the polemical 1954 article ‘La Politique des Auteurs’, Truffaut argued that a more artistic and truly cinematic style of filmmaking could be achieved with smaller budgets and a more personal approach to production. For many of the Cahiers writers, the auteur approach became a critical practice of discovering a worldview, a philosophy, across a number of texts by one director by looking for stylistic and thematic connections from film to film. Auteurs are perceived through a basic pattern of repeated themes and motifs (Nowell-Smith 1968: 10).
Although Cahiers writers paid attention to European art cinema directors, they focused on Hollywood – a provocative gesture given Hollywood’s studio system and its emphasis on entertainment rather than art. It is not surprising that when many of these critics eventually did become directors, they often made films that were takes on genre films: Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) winks at crime films and thrillers, and La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin, 1964) is a domestic melodrama; Claude Chabrol’s many thrillers include À double tour (Web of Passion, 1959), La Scandale (The Champagne Murders, 1967) and Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970); and Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959) was a meditation on Bogart and the gangster film, his Les Carabiniers (1963) about the ideology of war and the war film. Both Godard and Truffaut ventured into science fiction, the former with Alphaville (1965) and the latter with Farenheit 451 (1966).
Auteurism came to English-speaking film culture via the British magazine Movie, which began publication in 1962, and in the United States through Andrew Sarris, who in the early 1960s sought to provide auteurism with a theoretical foundation. Sarris posited what he called the auteur theory as three concentric circles – technical competence, distinguishable personality and interior meaning – and claimed that this vaguely defined interior meaning ‘is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material’ (1973: 51). Sarris does not explain this tension any further, but it may be understood, at least within the context of classic Hollywood cinema, as the way a director mobilises, inflects or deploys the elements of genre he was obliged to use. Genre provides a frame within which auteurs can animate the elements of genre to their own purpose. Virtually all genre movies except those driven entirely by formula – those ‘purist’ genre movies dismissed by Robin Wood as existing in the ‘simplest, most archetypal, most aesthetically deprived and intellectually contemptible form’ (2003: 63) – reveal something of their maker.
The auteur approach caused considerable debate, in part due to the excessive claims made by its proponents. Chabrol, for example, argued that the less significant a film’s narrative, the more room there is for the director to express his vision (1968: 77). Romantic and apolitical, auteurism again was attacked in the 1980s as film theory became more concerned with ideology, with the social, political and economic forces influencing both individual movies and cinema as an institution. In Peter Wollen’s famous formulation (1972), critics were now interested in ‘Howard Hawks’ (a critical construct, signified by inverted commas) rather than Howard Hawks (the biological person). The director’s name was no longer an artist but a concept that linked a series of film texts; no longer the source of the text but a reading strategy. Roland Barthes and others claimed that the author was dead, that he carried no authority over the meaning of the text, and that textual meaning thus could be appropriated by readers (1972: 142–8). Politically-oriented critical theory saw the author’s personality as itself moulded by ideology and merely one of numerous codes shaping a given text. In France, in the wake of the events of May 1968, a new editorial board for Cahiers du cinéma grew more political and theoretical. Taking a position opposed to classic auteurism, they published a collectively written article on John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, a detailed analysis of the film showing how it was affected by studio politics, the Depression and cultural codes of representation, all of which are seen as influencing the film as much as the director’s personal artistry.
In the end, the denial of the author as an embodied person was as excessive as earlier exaggerated assessments of greatness for many second-rank directors by zealous auteurists. Today critics, while acknowledging the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, still discuss directors – and occasionally producers, screenwriters, cinematographers and actors – as auteurs, although such discussions are more grounded in historical, industrial and ideological contexts than in the past. The auteur approach has also been applied to other forms of popular culture, including television and popular music. Auteurism, although changed, has survived because, as Bruce Kawin points out, ‘the special merit of the auteur theory is that it is capable of acknowledging the collaborative structure of the cinematic enterprise and the evidence of patterns of coherence that have the integrity of authorship’ (1987: 293).
Auteurism was less a theory than a concept for approaching a group of films and understanding relations between them – not unlike the idea of genre. Whatever its shortcomings, auteurism succeeded in turning critical attention from the content of films – Truffaut’s tradition of quality – to their visual and formal qualities. Within the Hollywood context, this meant genre films. In the heyday of Cahiers du cinéma’s embrace of auteurism, André Bazin, editor of the journal, responded with his own article on ‘La politique’, concluding with the caution: ‘Auteur, yes, but what of?’ (1968: 155). As Bazin understood, auteur and genre are inextricable.
Case Study: John Ford and Stagecoach
John Ford made well over one hundred films in his long career, stretching from the silent era through to the 1960s, often dealing with periods and events in American history. In his work, this history is presented as a kind of pageant, like the imaginary cavalry riding by the window, representing the glory of national pride and tradition, at the end of his western Fort Apache (1948). Sarris describes Ford’s films as possessing a ‘double image’, alternating ‘between close-ups of emotional intensity and long shots of epic involvement, thus capturing both the twitches of life and the silhouette of legend’ (1976: 85). This is particularly clear in Stagecoach, which frequently alternates between shots of individual passengers or groups of passengers on the stage and extreme long shots of the coach on its precarious journey through the wilderness. In Stagecoach, the long shots of the coach at the bottom of the frame moving through Monument Valley visually attests to civilisation’s fragile toe-hold in the wilderness.
Peter Wollen declared his preference for Ford over Howard Hawks because, while Hawks’ vision remained consistent throughout his very long career, Ford’s evolved over time, making the thematic oppositions in his work more complex. Ford’s vision of American democracy became increasingly disillusioned, not only giving his films a greater richness of theme, as Wollen argues, but also reflecting dramatic changes within American society. Before Ford was recognised as an auteur, his artistic reputation rested on his social problem films (The Grapes of Wrath) and aspiring art films (The Informer, 1935), but since the 1960s his westerns have attracted the most attention. For auteurists, Ford used the western and American history as a means of expressing his evolving regret for the nation’s past.
The Iron Horse (1924) deals with the successful completion of the first continental rail line in 1869, a legendary moment in American history symbolising the triumph of civilisation over the wilderness. In My Darling Clementine, as already discussed, the celebration on the foundation of the unbuilt church in Tombstone is a lyrical evocation of the potential for true community. Wagon Master (1950), like Stagecoach, depicts a western journey in which an ideal democratic society is forged. In the same year as Stagecoach, Ford also made Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk. The former, although not a western, also shows this optimism in its depiction of the youthful Lincoln as a sagacious leader who in the final scene marches with determination into a gathering storm, metaphorical of the impending Civil War; the latter, a Revolutionary War western, ends with the raising of the new American flag, followed by a short montage of individual Americans in the fort looking at it with awe, including a burly smith (working man), black woman and even native American, who salutes it. The film’s hero, Gil Martin (Henry Fonda, who also plays Lincoln in the other film) concludes Drums Along the Mohawk with a similarly portentous statement that they have ‘a heap of work to do from now on’.
But Ford’s post-war westerns are much darker. The Searchers, whose plot involves a lengthy search for a girl kidnapped by Apaches, exposes the racist ideology of the white civilisation that won the west. Sergeant Rutledge (1960), about a black cavalry officer court-martialled for rape and murder, shows the influence of the Civil Rights movement. Here, in contrast to Ford’s earlier cavalry westerns from the 1940s such as Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) which depict the cavalry as a metaphor for a unified community, it is riven with racial tension. Ford’s last western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), presents the Indians as victims rather than villains, neglected by government bureaucracy on reservations and policed by an ineffective cavalry.
In Ford’s last western, the elegiac The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), John Wayne plays western hero Tom Doniphon, the man who shoots the notorious outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Doniphon secretly shoots Valance from a dark alleyway when the lawyer Rance Stoddard (James Stewart), who knows nothing about guns, shows up for a shootout with the outlaw and fires his gun and misses. But after ridding the territory of evil, Doniphon then understands that he must step aside, literally into the shadows, giving way to the rule of law as represented by Stoddard, the attorney. Returning to the town years later, the now Senator Stoddard finds an unknown Doniphon about to be buried in a plain pine coffin without his boots, an ignominious end for the mythic cowboy hero. The film’s main story is told in flashback, suffusing the action with a sense of time irretrievably past, as in film noir; and in the back room of the railway station an old stagecoach rests on blocks, gathering cobwebs, a relic from a bygone era.
Stagecoach, made at the height of Ford’s optimism, achieves a fine balance of the genre’s specific visual pleasures, the action and mise-en-scène audiences expect from a western, with generic innovation and authorial expressiveness. Frequently cited as the movie responsible for reviving interest in and the production of westerns, which was dominated by formula B-pictures and singing cowboy serials during the 1930s, Stagecoach’s story involves seven disparate passengers, along with the driver and a Marshall riding shotgun, on a perilous journey through the American southwest aboard a Concord stagecoach in the 1880s. The passengers include Mrs Mallory, an army officer’s pregnant wife (Louise Platt); a southern gambler (John Carradine) who considers it his duty to protect her; Mr Peacock, a whiskey salesman (Donald Meek); an embezzling banker (Berton Churchill); and a prostitute (Claire Trevor) and drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell) being driven out of town by self-appointed moral watchdogs. Along the way the stage picks up The Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who has just broken out of jail to avenge the deaths of his father and brother. The omnibus plot allows Ford, in the context of the western, to explore such themes as class and social prejudice, community and democracy. The fact that these otherwise very different characters, a cross-section of American types, are together in the first place is indicative of the democratic promise of the frontier.
The people on the stage travel on an epic journey through territory containing hostile Apaches, forcing the passengers to cooperate and show their mettle in order to arrive at their destination safely. Although the majestic panoramic shots of the stagecoach at the bottom of the frame, dwarfed by and moving through the magnificent mesas of Monument Valley, suggest the tenuous vulnerability of nascent civilisation in the wilderness, civilisation ultimately triumphs as the film imagines the establishment of a virtuous society among the microcosmic group. On the completion of the stagecoach’s journey, the corrupt banker Gatewood is arrested, and class distinctions are erased as the southern gambler Hatfield is killed and both Mr Peacock and Mrs Mallory, who earlier had moved to the other end of the table, away from the prostitute Dallas, at Dry Fork, both acknowledge her as socially worthy.
Stagecoach relies heavily on genre conventions. Scenes such as the one in the saloon before the climactic showdown, with the piano player who stops playing with dramatic suddenness while the barkeep takes the mirror off the wall and stores it temporarily under the bar, are common to the western. The characters, too, are types familiar to the genre: the comic sidekick, the prostitute with the heart of gold, and so on. They fall neatly into pairs, making for a series of thematic contrasts that are variations of the genre’s essential binary opposition between nature and culture, wilderness and civilisation, that is commonly seen as constituting the thematic core of the western. So, for example, the timid whiskey salesman Peacock is, in some respects, the opposite of the pushy Gatewood, while the respectable officer’s wife, Mrs Mallory, is contrasted with the fallen woman, Dallas. Dallas, in turn, is paired with Ringo in that they are both social outcasts because, as Dallas muses, ‘things happen’. At the same time, Ringo’s code of western justice is set against Hatfield’s outmoded code of chivalry. Similarly, Gatewood and Doc Boone are both professional men, both fleeing from the clutches of Mrs Gatewood (Brenda Fowler), embodiment of some of those dubious ‘blessings of civilisation’ referred to by the Marshall at the film’s end. But while the banker is socially respectable but inwardly corrupt and cowardly, the disgraced doctor is inwardly noble, like Dallas and Ringo, showing his true bravery during the Indian attack and later when he takes the shotgun away from Luke Plummer (Tom Tyler) before his showdown with Ringo.
Figure 7 Stagecoach: Ringo and Dallas are the social outcasts
Ford consistently uses the types and tropes of the western in Stagecoach, but provides them with depth and detail. For example, at one point on their journey when the trail is dusty, Hatfield offers Lucy Mallory a drink of water. The canteen is a familiar icon of the western, but Ford adds considerable complexity to the scene as Hatfield pours the drink for Mrs Mallory from the communal canteen into a silver cup which he takes from his breast pocket. The silver cup provides some important background information about Hatfield’s aristocratic past and serves as a contrast to both the liquor bottles that Doc Boone swills from and to the more egalitarian western hero, Ringo. The latter follows by offering a drink to ‘the other lady’, Dallas, after Hatfield repockets the silver cup, an obvious social snub to her (‘Sorry, no silver cups’, says Ringo, with a guileless smile). The silver cup also functions as part of a network of water imagery across Ford’s westerns, connecting Stagecoach with 3 Godfathers (1948), in which water is crucial for the survival of the men and the baby left in their charge; Fort Apache, in which Captain Kirby York (John Wayne) praises the troopers as the ultimate embodiment of tradition and family because they would ‘share the last drop in their canteens’; and Cheyenne Autumn, where the Indians stand stoically in the sun waiting for the representatives from Washington (who never arrive because of bureaucracy and politics), while water sits on a table nearby for the absent guests.
Similarly, when the baby is born in Stagecoach, all the men gather in hushed admiration in a tight circle, a brief but true community. Babies are important to Ford, part of the nuclear family which he cherishes and the promise of the future which is crucial for maintaining civilisation. Babies and children appear in numerous Ford films, perhaps most emphatically in 3 Godfathers, in which the trio of bank robbers are spiritually reborn by their efforts to deliver a baby safely back to civilisation rather than escape arrest. In Stagecoach Ford emphasises the importance of the baby by inserting a cutaway of the helpless infant in Dallas’ arms at the height of the dramatic Indian attack. The elitist characters ultimately accept Dallas because she helped with the delivery and subsequent caring of the baby for its weakened mother.
Ringo’s quest for revenge, a common convention of the western, is never itself questioned, as it is in later psychological westerns like Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious or Anthony Mann’s The Man From Laramie (1955). According to Roland Barthes, as noted in the previous chapter, ‘the very principle of myth’ is that ‘it transforms history into nature’ (1972: 129). Stagecoach works in this manner in part by suggesting that Ringo’s revenge quest is less a matter of personal than divine justice, a fated restoration of an overriding natural order (itself intimated in part by the contemplative grandeur of Monument Valley). In the end, Stagecoach asserts that there is no conflict between the moral individual and the demands of society, since moral authority will naturally transcend the legal. Curly, the Marshall, (George Bancroft) admits to the driver Buck (Andy Devine), that the territory definitely would be better off without the Plummers – a judgement that is shown to be entirely correct when we finally see Luke Plummer, a gruff, uncouth cowboy who guzzles his liquor, pushing dance hall girls around and intending to take a shotgun to the showdown.
Ringo departs at the end with Dallas, and with the blessing of Doc Boone and the Marshall, who bends the law when he lets Ringo go. In the end, Ringo rides out of town – but with a woman, not alone like Shane. A horseless cowboy at the beginning, now he rides a buckboard, western icon of the family and domesticity. As Doc Boone and Curly send Ringo and Dallas off, Doc says ‘they’re saved from the blessings of civilisation’. The line suggests perhaps that Ford’s vision was already darkening in 1939, and the depiction of the ironically-named Lordsburg, with its saloons and brothels, supports such a view. Nevertheless, the film offers an apparent sense of closure in allowing Ringo and Dallas to escape from society and legal justice. The film also offered an upbeat message for pre-war America in which corporate evil is punished, heroic individual virtue triumphs and an ideal microcosmic democratic community is forged in the process. Even as Hitler was marching into European countries, Stagecoach imagined a cross-section of Americans who establish a classless, morally superior community forged by the crucible of the frontier, and who band together to defeat Geronimo, a ‘butcher’ who has ‘jumped the reservation’.
Case Study: Howard Hawks and Red River
In its premiere issue in 1962, the British auteurist journal Movie provided a chart ranking directors, and only two were in the top (‘Brilliant’) category: Hitchcock and Hawks. Although hardly the memorable stylist that Hitchcock was (indeed, he once defined a good director as ‘someone who doesn’t annoy you’), Hawks was championed by auteurists because of his ability to work within so many genres and still express his distinctive concerns about professionalism. Hawks was a director who over the course of his long career liked to work within the given constraints of genre, and he forayed into most of the major genres in Hollywood cinema. Along with Frank Capra, he was the most important director of screwball comedies, a genre which he helped invent with Twentieth Century in 1934 and to which he contributed many of the best films, including Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). He also made detective noirs (The Big Sleep), gangster films (Scarface, 1932), adventure movies (Hatari, 1962), racing films (The Crowd Roars, 1932; Red Line 7000, 1965), war films (Sergeant York, 1941; Air Force, 1943), historical epics (Land of the Pharaohs, 1955), musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) and westerns (Red River; Rio Bravo; The Big Sky, 1952). This is precisely why, for Wollen, ‘the test case for the auteur theory is provided by the work of Howard Hawks’ (1972: 80).
Despite their generic heterogeneity, Hawks’ films fall into two basic categories: adventure films and comedies. The adventure films tend to focus on stories of male professionals who are trying to accomplish a particular task or job. The male hero has a group of men gathered around him, also professionals who know how to work within the group to get the job done. The group is often removed in some way from society, and must work by its own rules. Frequently a woman appears who both threatens the professional cohesion of the group and with whom the hero has a romantic involvement. This pattern fits Hawks’ movies as generically diverse as the adventure film Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the science fiction film The Thing from Another World (1951, credited to Christian Nyby but made by Hawks in all but name), and even a comedy like Ball of Fire (1941).
Crucial to appreciating Hawks as an auteur is Robin Wood’s argument that Hawks’ comedies are the flipside or inverse of the adventure films: that is, in the adventure movies, women typically represent emotional or sexual qualities that are distinctly non-professional, which Wood terms a ‘lure of irresponsibility’ that threatens to distract men from the job; in the comedies, however, these values are celebrated as a refreshing release or liberation from the demands of professionalism rather than a distraction from them. Wood cites the ending of Bringing Up Baby as an example of the comic inversion of professionalism. In the film, Dr David Huxley (Cary Grant), a palaeontologist who has spent years assembling a dinosaur skeleton, has had to endure a series of screwball adventures with socialite Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn), whose dog has managed to take the skeleton’s final bone and bury it somewhere on her rural Connecticut estate. Dr Huxley suffers a series of comically humiliating experiences engineered by Susan in order to regain possession of the bone. In the final scene he is back in the city at the museum, completing work on the assembled dinosaur skeleton atop a tall scaffolding when Susan enters and climbs up to him. When Huxley admits that he enjoyed their misadventures, the skeleton sways and collapses in a heap as he lifts her to the safety of the scaffolding. As Wood explains, ‘the dry bones represent his life-work and are an image of his way of life, destroyed finally by the eruption of the Id’ (1968: 71).
If professionalism suggests ossification and repression in the screwball comedies, in the adventure films getting the job done – whether it is defeating the alien in The Thing, defending the jail in Rio Bravo, or driving the cattle to market, as in the case of Red River – is paramount. Hawks’ male groups have their own inner dynamics, and value and morality follow from accomplishing the task at hand by working as a team. In The Thing, when Captain Hendry’s (Kenneth Tobey) crew discover the spaceship embedded in the ice, the men spread apart and with outstretched arms trace its shape and find they have formed a perfect circle: this fellowship of the ring is an essential Hawksian image in that it expresses at once the solidarity of the masculine group and male bonding, and its simultaneous exclusion of the Other, whether the feminine or alien ‘super-carrot’.
Hawks’ first western, Red River, also follows this pattern, but his vision ultimately conflicts with the requirements of the western, resulting in an unsatisfying tension between auteur and genre. The film tells the story of the first drive along the Chisholm Trail, a route used to drive cattle from Texas to Abilene, Kansas in the 1860s and through the 1870s. The film’s sweeping narrative spans the initial settling of the west to the taming of the frontier and the development of a more complex post-Civil War market economy. As the film begins, Tom Dunson (John Wayne) leaves the wagon train with which he is heading west, and also his fiancée, to build his own cattle ranch on the Texas frontier in 1851. Shortly after his departure, the wagon train is attacked by Indians, and everyone is killed, except for a boy, Matthew Garth, whom Dunson and his friend Nadine Groot (Walter Brennan) find wandering in shock the next day. Dunson takes the land he wants from the Mexican aristocrat who currently owns it, and begins his herd. Fifteen years later, with the help of his now-grown adopted son Matt (Montgomery Clift), Dunson begins an unprecedented cattle drive north to Wichita. Dunson grows more tyrannical on the drive, threatening its success, eventually forcing Matt to intercede and take over. Against the wishes of Dunson, who is wounded in a gun battle with some deserting trail hands, Matt decides to gamble and drive the cattle to Abilene, hearing that the railroad has now reached this point further west. Dunson vows to kill Matt for what he regards as a betrayal. Matt completes the drive successfully, falling in love with a woman, Tess Malloy (Joanne Dru), he meets in another wagon train along the way. Dunson rides into town seemingly determined to kill Matt, but in their climactic showdown, at the last minute he relents, the two men are reconciled and Matt receives Dunson’s blessing to marry Tess.
In marked contrast to Stagecoach, with its embezzling banker, Red River is an unrepentant apology for capitalism. In the film the locomotive, icon of civilisation and industrialism on the frontier, is presented as unambiguously positive. The locomotive’s billowing black smoke and deafening whistle do not despoil the landscape in Red River so much as boldly announce the triumphant advance of industry. Towns spring up along the railroad, allowing entrepreneurs like Dunson and Matt to get their product to market. The cattle buyer Melville (Harry Carey Sr), representative of the Greenwood Trading Company, is honest and straightforward, willing to pay top dollar for Matt’s cattle because he has ‘earned it’, paralleling Dunson’s reasoning for adding Matt’s name to the ‘Red River D’ brand at the end. The dramatic cattle drive may be understood as a microcosm for the American economy and capitalism, an interpretation made explicit in Dunson’s impassioned speech about beef for the nation (‘good beef for hungry people. Beef to make ’em strong, make ’em grow’). The beef for the nation in Red River also represents the new world order of rapidly expanding international markets for American goods – movies included – in a time when the nation was emerging as one of the world’s two post-war superpowers.
From an auteurist perspective the cattle drive offers an archetypal Hawksian situation, as the men must take the cattle on an epic journey through a land of danger. Just as in Stagecoach the journey brings together a group of disparate individuals who forge a new democratic union, so in Red River a group of different men are brought together for the common purpose of the cattle drive. Unlike the group in Stagecoach, however, the group in Red River is all-male, an indication of the significant differences in the vision of the films’ respective directors. While Ford and his male heroes appreciate the ‘feminine’ values of home and family, women have little place on Hawks’ frontier, which is less a desert to be civilised than another space for testing masculine prowess, like the racetrack, the Andes or the Antarctic.
In Red River it is not Tess but Bunk Keneally (Ivan Parry), Groot’s assistant cook, who provides this Hawksian group’s encounter with the lure of irresponsibility. Tess is the ideal Hawksian woman, tough and knowing her place within the group. We first see her shooting during the Indian attack on the wagon train, but when Matt rides in, she quickly realises she is not as good a shot and promptly switches to loading. In Red River, rather than representing the threat to masculine professionalism as feminine, irresponsibility is depicted as immaturity, a metaphor Hawks would later literalise in Monkey Business (1952) in the form of a youth serum which causes people to regress mentally to childhood. In Red River, Bunk’s childish sweet-tooth and his inability to control it causes a disastrous stampede when he tries to sneak one more fingerful of sugar and accidentally topples some pots and pans with a clatter, setting off the cattle and causing the death of one of the men. Dunson angrily accuses Bunk of ‘stealing sugar like a kid’ and wants to tie him to a wagon wheel for whipping (spanking).
Figure 8 Red River: the problem of male heroism
In the different responses of Dunson and Matt as group leaders to such problems, Red River explores what Wollen calls Hawks’ major theme, ‘the problem of heroism’ (1972: 81). The film is full of typically Hawksian dialogue about professionalism, leadership and heroism, and the question of being ‘good enough’. At the beginning of the film Dunson is the heroic pioneer, necessary for carving out the frontier, for helping in the establishment of civilisation. He leaves the wagon train, striking out on his own to begin his own herd. Someone must blaze the trail the wagon trains follow, and if anyone is capable of doing so it is the indomitable Dunson.
The wilderness in Red River lacks the sublime beauty of the Fordian frontier, with the iconic mittens and buttes of Monument Valley majestically thrusting skyward. Rather, Hawks’ frontier in Red River is a harsh and contested space, one characterised by a social Darwinist struggle where only the fittest and fastest survive. When Dunson squares off against Don Diego’s men, who immediately appear to challenge his claim to the land, there is no place to hide on the flat expanse of Texas plain. Only the most professional is good enough to take this land, to keep it, to use it to feed the nation. Dunson kills one of the men, and the next morning the first thing we see are buzzards circling overhead. Later, when the scene fades in after the passage of fifteen years, the elapsed time is indicated not only by Dunson’s rising from a crouched position with the stiffness of age and discernibly greying temples, but also by the landscape, which is now marked by the graves of seven men who over the years had tried to take the land away from him.
With the passage of time, Dunson comes to seem more tyrannical than heroic. In a more civilised context, Dunson seems to grow increasingly tyrannical, declaring himself the law. On the drive, Teeler (Paul Fix) tells Dunson that he is crazy because ‘this herd don’t belong to you. It belongs to every poor hopin’, prayin’ cattleman in the whole wide state.’ Wounded in the leg during the drive, Dunson becomes monomaniacal like Herman Melville’s Ahab in Moby Dick, the obsessive one-legged captain who would also scuttle his command in his singular pursuit of vengeance. In obvious contrast to Dunson, Matthew Garth practises a more democratic form of leadership, thinking of the group rather than himself and leading them in a more consensual fashion.
The conflict between Dunson and Matt promises to reach its climax in a showdown, one of the western genre’s most familiar conventions. But if generic logic requires the resolution of a shootout, Hawks’ traditional notions of masculine professionalism supersede it. Red River obligingly foreshadows such a climax and hardily encourages viewers’ expectation for it; yet in the end Hawks gives us reconciliation rather than confrontation. In fact, there are two anticipated showdowns in the film that fail to materialise. The first, between Matt and the hired gun Cherry (John Ireland), is foreshadowed by Dunson, who says they will ‘paw at each other for a while’ and then inevitably clash. But Matt and Cherry seem to have nothing but mutual respect for each other from the start, and Cherry even attempts (futilely) to defend Matt against Dunson. The second showdown, between Dunson and Matt, begins conventionally as Matt waits for Dunson on Main Street. But it collapses into horseplay between the two men until Tess intervenes, after which Dunson promises to add Matt’s name to the brand and advises him to marry Tess. In the original story upon which the film is based, Dunson is fatally wounded by Cherry and then taken home to his ranch to die. At the end of Red River, though, the entire logic of the story, and the genre, is rejected to accommodate the happy ending that Hawks had said he wanted for what he once described as a ‘love story between two men’.
From a Hawksian perspective, this narrative closure allows for the perpetuation of the male professional and the maintenance of masculine authority, a subtext exploited by the film’s emphasis on guns as phallic power, particularly in the infamous scene where Matt and Cherry exchange and admire each other’s pistols. Interestingly, no one in Red River, including Matt, disputes Dunson’s right to ownership of the herd, or the necessity of Matt to ‘earn’ his initial on the ‘Red River D’ brand, even though the herd could not have existed without Matt’s cow. Dunson may be a swaggering tyrant, but he is also a bold entrepreneur with a professional code, and as such Hawks is unable to let him die.
Case Study: Fritz Lang and Scarlet Street
Fritz Lang’s work in film spans the silent era almost from its beginnings through the golden era of German Expressionism in the 1920s and the classic studio system in Hollywood to the rise of the international coproduction. In the course of his career Lang directed more acknowledged classics of the German silent cinema than any other director, made the first important German sound film (M, 1932) and directed some of the most important crime films and film noirs of the American studio era, including You Only Live Once (1937), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953). Critics have commonly divided Lang’s extensive filmography into two major periods, the silent German films and the American studio movies. In the former he had considerable artistic freedom, while in Hollywood he worked against the greater constraints of the studio system, tight-fisted producers and B-picture budgets; yet the thematic and stylistic consistency in Lang’s work across decades, countries and different production contexts is truly remarkable.
Lang’s films consistently depict an entrapping, deterministic world in which the characters are controlled by both larger forces and internal desires beyond their understanding. In this cruelly indifferent world, people struggle vainly against fate and their own repressed inclinations toward violence. As in Hitchcock’s films, Lang’s often deal with the violent potential lurking within the respectable citizen and suggest that social order requires controlling the beast within. M is about a serial child killer (Peter Lorre) who explains to the kangaroo court of criminals about to execute him that he is possessed by a murderous rage against which he is helpless. In Fury (1936), Lang’s first American film, a barber tells his customer as he shaves him, razor poised at his neck, that ‘people get funny impulses: if you resist them, you’re sane; if you don’t, you’re on the way to the nuthouse, or the pen’. In The Big Heat good-hearted gangster’s moll Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) is splashed in the face with boiling coffee – hideously scarred on one side but still beautiful on the other, her countenance an exteriorised expression of Lang’s vision of the duality of human nature.
A more abstract, philosophical sense of an implacable fate also looms in Lang’s films, as in Der Müde Tod (Destiny, 1921), where the hero tries to fight off Death. The Langian sense of fatalism comes largely through a mise-en-scène that is dark, geometrically rigid and that uses the frame as an enclosed space. Lang’s work is so insistently enclosed that for Leo Braudy he is the auteur most fully representative of what he calls ‘the closed style’ of cinema, films in which ‘the frame of the screen totally defines the world inside as a picture frame does’ (1977: 48). The doom, paranoia and violence that suffuse Lang’s vision was perfectly suited to the downbeat sensibility of film noir. The genre’s dark vision of life is summed up by the detective (Dean Jagger) in Dark City (1950), who observes that ‘people are like sheep frightened by the smell of death in a slaughterhouse: they run down the passageway with the other sheep, thinking there’s freedom, but there’s a man with a sledgehammer waiting’. Lang perfectly captures noir’s merciless world near the end of Scarlet Street, when Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), about to be executed in the electric chair for a murder he did not commit, screams ‘gimme a break’, only to be answered by the huge iron door of the execution chamber slamming shut, the camera watching dispassionately from a distance.
Scarlet Street tells the story of a loyal, meek company cashier and amateur painter, Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson), who meets a woman, Kitty March (Joan Bennett), on a deserted street late one evening, rescuing her from a man he thinks is an attacker but who is really her boyfriend Johnny Prince roughing her up. Kitty and Chris become involved, each lying to the other. Kitty exploits Chris for money, thinking he is a rich and famous artist, and Chris thinks she is a struggling actress who needs help getting her career started. Looking for an escape from his shrewish wife, Chris sets up Kitty with an apartment and comes there to paint. When he discovers the truth about Kitty, she mocks him, and in a fit of rage he grabs an ice pick and stabs her to death. Circumstantial evidence brings about the arrest, conviction and execution of Johnny, as Chris keeps silent. After the execution, Chris becomes tormented by a guilty conscience which haunts him with Kitty’s taunting voice. As the film ends, he wanders the crowded city streets, a lonely, homeless and tormented bum.
Scarlet Street opens at a company party celebrating Chris’s 25 years of service. Because of actor Robinson’s strong iconographic association with the gangster film, we are encouraged to read the opening as a party scene out of a film like Little Caesar and to take Chris for a criminal. Robinson is shown in the centre of a long dinner table, smoking a cigar like his most famous character, Caesar Enrico Bandello. We quickly come to understand, however, that Chris is a timid, or rather repressed, law-abiding citizen. The deeper Langian irony is only revealed in retrospect, when Chris does indeed become a killer, revealing the criminal behind the common man. At the party, Chris sees his boss leave with an attractive younger woman who is obviously not his wife, and remarks that he would like to have a similar experience but never has. Shortly thereafter, on his way home through the city at night, which Lang presents as an expressionist mindscape – an elevated subway train flashes by, but generates no sound – Chris is presented with his secret desire. As if in a dream (lost, he tells a policeman he is ‘all turned around’), suddenly there is Kitty, dressed in a transparent raincoat as if gift-wrapped, her charms clearly visible, being pushed around by Johnny Prince. Using his umbrella like a lance, Chris enacts the fantasy of a valiant knight coming to the rescue of a maiden in distress and apparently defeating the evil Prince, who flees the scene.
Repressed and emasculated, Chris works in an enclosed, partitioned office, where he doles out money to others. At home, his wife Adele (Rosalind Ivan) is a grotesque parody of a dominating shrew. Chris’s horrible domestic life is underscored when Lang shows him in his apartment, the railing of the fire escape seeming like the bars of a prison cell while ‘The Happy Household Hour’ ironically broadcasts from a neighbour’s radio off-screen. Chris paints to escape his bleak life, and enters into an affair with Kitty for the same reason (he describes painting to Kitty as being a ‘love affair’). When Chris and Kitty meet for their first date in an outdoor restaurant, the camera cranes down from above the trees, where birds are singing, from the height of sunny optimism to show a more clouded view of relationships, as Chris and Kitty deceive each other about who they really are. As the camera descends, the song ‘My Melancholy Baby’ drops in register, and the romantic violins conventionally associated with romance give way to the more ominous cello on the soundtrack. The camera movement is like the opening of Pennies from Heaven, which shows a blue and sunny sky, but then the camera descends through a thick, dark, cloud layer into a grey world. In Scarlet Street, as in Pennies from Heaven, there are no blue skies, and a romantic vision is merely self-deception.
Chris Cross is aptly named, for the film shows this basically decent and mild-mannered man turning violent and vindictive, similar to the change that overtakes Vern (Arthur Kennedy) in Lang’s western Rancho Notorious after his fiancée is raped and killed. At one point Johnny is shown hiding under a stairway, followed by a fade to a close-up of one of Chris’s paintings depicting a city street with a huge snake wrapped around a pillar of the elevated subway. The snake appropriately occupies the same position within the frame where Johnny had been in the previous shot. Johnny also takes Chris’s name, trying to collect on one of Chris’s paintings that had been sold by a local art dealer. But it is Chris who becomes a contemptible snake toward the end of the film, criss-crossing with Johnny. After the murder, Chris hides beneath the stairs while Johnny comes in the building, in the same place Johnny had hidden earlier when Chris was coming to visit Kitty. As in the horror film, Johnny is like the return of the repressed for Chris.
Chris’s paintings, as everyone observes, lack perspective, meaning that he does not see the depths of his own inner nature. They are described by the art critic David Janeway (Jess Barker) as having a ‘masculine force’, a quality that eventually proves to be true when Chris kills Kitty.
The ending of Scarlet Street, like the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, undermines narrative closure. The fact that Chris goes ‘free’ is not in itself as subversive as it may at first seem, since the Production Code specified that crimes not need necessarily be punished as long as the crime is depicted as wrong. Chris is trapped within his own guilt, just as one of the newspapermen covering Johnny’s execution tells Chris all of us have a judge, jury and executioner inside us. Chris convicts himself mentally, and tries to execute himself by suicide, but is ‘rescued’ by well-intentioned neighbours who only preserve him for a prolonged agony. More importantly, the ending does subvert one of the basic tenets of the Production Code, that the law of the land should not be shown as unjust. In convicting and executing Johnny, the law in Scarlet Street is responsible for a serious miscarriage of justice; on another level it is just, since it is Johnny who is responsible for creating and manipulating the situation and thus driving Chris beyond reason. Johnny is at least as guilty as Chris in Kitty’s death even though he did not wield the knife. In the end, Lang has masterfully used the downbeat genre of film noir to explore his own recurrent theme of the nature of guilt and his vision of an implacable universe that refuses to give anyone a break.
Figure 9 Scarlet Street: violence lurks within the civilised man
Case Study: Melodrama, Douglas Sirk and All That Heaven Allows
Melodrama is a somewhat indistinct genre that refers to films about familial and domestic tensions. Originally the term, a hybrid deriving from a combination of music and drama, referred to stage plays that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, used music to emphasise dramatic or particularly emotional moments. More recently the category refers to narratives in any popular form that seem contrived or excessive in emotion and sentimentality, in which dramatic conflicts and plot take precedence over character and motivation, and in which there is a clear distinction between heroes and villains.
Melodrama tends to reduce history to the emotional problems of individual characters, as in historical melodramas like Gone With the Wind (1939) or Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Applying both psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser has argued that the genre’s frequently excessive style is symptomatic of the repressed emotions of the characters, who metaphorically embody the contradictions of bourgeois ideology that spill over into the mise-en-scène. The nuclear family, as in All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Bigger Than Life (1956), is frequently the site of these tensions. Feminist critics have been particularly interested in women’s melodramas such as Stella Dallas (1925, 1937) and Mildred Pierce (1945), analysing how their representations of women are inscribed within domestic space and patriarchal ideology. These scholars are drawn to melodrama because it is the only genre (other than the musical) that regularly features female protagonists and is often narrated from their point of view.
Detlef Sierck first achieved success in post-World War One Germany in the theatre, directing the work of such classic playwrights as Ibsen, Shaw and Shakespeare. After a successful career at UFA, the dominant film studio in Germany after the rise to power of Hitler, Sierck came to Hollywood in 1937, one of many German émigrés to flee the Nazis. As Douglas Sirk, he made a number of competent studio pictures in the 1940s, but his greatest work was done a decade later. During his association with producers Albert Zugsmith and Ross Hunter at Universal-International studios beginning in 1951, he directed a series of melodramas including All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession (1954), Written on the Wind (1956), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) and Imitation of Life (1959).
At one time Sirk was seen as a filmmaker who simply employed conventional Hollywood rhetoric, but his style is now regarded as a form of Brechtian distancing that draws the viewer’s attention to the methods and purposes of Hollywood illusionism. Thus, rather than seeing his melodramas as mere reflections or endorsements of dominant ideology (category ‘a’), they are read as deliberate, subtle critiques by a socially conscious artist who criticised Eisenhower’s America from within mainstream filmmaking (category ‘e’). Sirk’s style hinges on a highly developed sense of irony, employing subtle parody, cliché and stylisation. The world of Sirk’s melodramas is excessively lavish and patently artificial. The colours of walls, cars, costumes and flowers in his mise-en-scène are often harmonised in a constructed aesthetic unity markedly unlike the cacophony of colour in real life, but providing a comment on the oppressive, orderly world of the American middle class.
In All That Heaven Allows Carrie Scott (Jane Wyman) is a middle-aged widow who falls in love with her much younger gardener, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). The couple are truly in love and want to get married, but the people in Stoningham, the town where she lives, are (as the town’s name suggests) cold and conventional suburbanites eager to cast the first stone by gossiping about her affair. Her children, Ned (William Reynolds) and Kay (Gloria Talbott), similarly disapprove of her relationship with Ron, wanting her instead to marry the elderly, more grandfatherly family friend Harvey (Conad Nagel), whom they praise as ‘remarkably civilised’. Pressured on all sides, Carrie finally caves in and calls off the wedding. As time passes, Carrie suffers from headaches, and her doctor advises her to follow her heart rather than social decorum and return to Ron. Carrie goes to Ron’s house in the country, but he is out hunting and as she drives away, Ron calls for her and in his eagerness falls off a snowy cliff. His injuries are serious but not fatal, and when she hears the news Carrie returns to Ron’s place to care for him, now committed to stay with him.
The bourgeois world of All That Heaven Allows is an oppressive one that, as Barthes puts it, transforms nature into culture. Here it is not God’s will but society that establishes moral sanctions, that determines whether Carrie’s relationship is acceptable or not. This point is clearly established at the beginning of the film, as the camera first looks down from a height above the church steeple, and then cranes down into the street, where people are going about their lives. Later, when Kay tells her mother that her life would be ruined if Carrie were to marry Ron, light from a stained-glass window reminiscent of a church shines into the room.
Carrie’s relationship becomes a site of ideological struggle, embodied in the film as an opposition between the narrow-minded townspeople and the more ‘natural’ Ron. Following Thoreau and his Hamlet-inspired dictum, Ron believes in the idea that ‘to thine own self be true’, while the townspeople all pretend to display social respectability. Sirk emphasises the difference between the two worlds by tending to depict the town in cool hues of blue and bold strokes of colour, while Ron and his space are associated with warm earthy shades of green and brown. A gardener, Ron lives in a greenhouse so that he can see the stars at night. His association with nature takes on connotations of sexual potency with the several references to his ‘silver-tipped spruce’. Both worlds have parties, and are presented in stark contrast: the stiff and formal cocktail party at the country club, where Carrie brings Ron for a ritual of judgement and acceptance that ends disastrously, and the loose and spontaneous party of Ron and his friends, with its makeshift table and infectious good cheer.
Sirk is renowned for his thematic use of mirrors, shadows, glass and other elements of the mise-en-scène for dramatic and ironic purposes. In All That Heaven Allows, the scene of Carrie’s children coming home to learn about her relationship with Ron begins with Carrie’s face reflected in a small make-up mirror, mirroring the good face Carrie wants to project while the mirror’s tight framing also foreshadows the children’s negative response and the pressure they will put on her to end her affair. The guests at the cocktail party gather around the window, framing Ron and Carrie within their gaze as the couple will shortly be entrapped by their judgemental attitude. The gossip begins when busybody Mona (Jacqueline De Witt) spies Carrie going off with Ron; as she watches them from the butcher shop, Sirk adds a touch of irony by including the ‘butcher’ sign behind her.
A similar visual irony appears later, when Carrie’s son Ned expresses his anger at her relationship. Carrie tells Ned that Ron should not come between them as the two speak in the living room where a room divider acts as a graphic wedge separating them within the frame. Her children’s refusal to take Carrie’s relationship with Ron seriously and their encouraging her instead to marry Harvey ultimately turns the family home into a trap. Kay tells Carrie about the ancient Egyptian practice of walling up widows with their dead husbands in their tombs; when she concludes by observing that she is glad such barbaric practices no longer happen, Carrie, whose late husband’s ashes sit on the mantlepiece, asks wryly, ‘Doesn’t it?’ When the children do not come home for Christmas, the camera looks through the window from the outside at Carrie on the inside looking out, sealed in alone during the holidays. As a Christmas gift, the children buy Carrie a television set. When the salesman delivers it, he says that on it you can see ‘life’s parade at your fingertips’ as the camera dollies in so that the screen of the television set looms large in the image, with Carrie’s face reflected in it. Carrie’s children want her to live vicariously, through entertainment, but on that screen she can only see that life’s parade will have passed her by.
All That Heaven Allows provides the kind of narrative closure characteristic of traditional genre films, but through irony and excess undermines it. Admiring the way Sirk was able to offer ideological critique within popular entertainment, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder remade All That Heaven Allows as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), adding an element of race as well as age, while more recently Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002) adds the further issue of homosexuality to the same story. In Sirk’s film, as Carrie comes to the bedside of the concussed Ron, lying prone on the sofa, he wakes up and recognises her as she commits to being with him and nursing him. Just before Ron awakes, as if on a cue a deer trots into view through the picture window (a good description for mainstream film) behind them, a final connection between Ron and nature. Earlier, when Carrie and Ron first explore the old mill adjacent to the greenhouse and Carrie fantasises about living there with Ron, she sees an untended fireplace which she says if working would make the scene ‘perfect’. In the final scene, along with the deer there is, of course, a blazing fire now in the hearth, making the scene in fact perfect. Yet Carrie doesn not really get what she wants, as she remains trapped in the role of caregiver. Sirk himself said that ‘of course I had to go by the rules, avoid experiments, stick to family fare, have “happy endings”, and so on’ (quoted in Halliday 1971: 86). Rather than the denial of closure, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Scarlet Street, All That Heaven Allows provides it so completely, so ‘picture perfect’, that it seems artificial and teeters on the edge of ringing hollow – a final ironic comment on the values of the society that, after all, is the audience for whom the film was made.