Films I Love #46: Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

Dead Man is Jim Jarmusch's feverish American nightmare, a poetic vision of the American West — and the movie Western — as an endless plain of absurdist violence and senseless destruction. In the film's opening scenes, the accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) rides on a train bound West following the death of his parents, towards the promise of a new job. But a coal-smeared train worker (Crispin Glover, in one of many memorable cameos dotted throughout the film) prophetically warns him not to trust in anything, not to expect sense or justice from the West. After all, he points out, as behind him the men on the train hoot and holler, shooting at buffalo through the windows, this is a land where millions of animals have been killed for no apparent reason. It's this idea that carries through the rest of the film, the idea of the American West as a surrealist frontier, where buffalo skulls line the walls, where friendliness is greeted with gunfire, where even sensual pleasure is deadly. Blake arrives in the West to find he doesn't have the job he was promised, but his true downfall comes after a gunfight in which he's wounded, fleeing with a bullet in his chest and an unjust dual murder charge chasing him.

Wounded and weak, Blake is discovered by the Native American Nobody (Gary Farmer), who believes that his new ward is actually the poet William Blake. Together, they embark on a metaphysical journey towards Blake's eventual death, a spiritual adventure that Nobody approaches as if the other man is already dead, which maybe he is. In any event, Blake and Nobody's journey causes them to cross paths with Iggy Pop as a cross-dressing outlaw, an aging Robert Mitchum as a shotgun-toting factory owner who always appears in front of his own self-portrait, and Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott and Eugene Byrd as a trio of ornery bounty hunters. The film's bursts of violence are darkly comic and ridiculous, with Depp's Blake evincing a serene detachment while his enemies are dispatched through Rube Goldberg-like bullet trajectories. The film is a fable of the West, a deconstruction of the scrubbed-clean Hollywood Westerns of old: Jarmusch makes his film about the exploitation of the Native Americans, the casual brutality and violence, the greed and power lust that drove men into the West, grasping at everything they could find. Jarmusch's poetic dream-story suggests an alternative to the cowboys vs. Indians mythology; this is the West in all its raw, nightmarish intensity, a West awash in blood and grit.

Rio Bravo

[This review has been cross-posted at Decisions At Sundown, a blog started by Jon Lanthier and dedicated exclusively to the Western genre. From now on I will be cross-posting all of my Western reviews with this blog, where I am one of several contributors.]

Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo is the pinnacle of the director's late style, in which he increasingly stripped his films down into ambling, nearly plotless examinations of his signature themes and the interactions of his characters. Hawks' cinema was always more about relationships than stories: relationships between male friends, between men and women getting to know one another, between professionals working on dangerous jobs together. Rio Bravo is about all these things, and as in much of Hawks' other late work, all the extraneous stuff, like the narrative, is pared away to focus more directly on these relationships as they develop and change. The plot itself is utter simplicity. Small-town sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) arrests Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), the brother of the notorious outlaw Nathan Burdette (John Russell). Chance holds Joe in the town's tiny jail, while Nathan schemes to break his brother out. The film was famously inspired by Hawks' well-known hatred of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, in which Gary Cooper's small-town sheriff must plead with the unwilling townspeople to help him face off against an outlaw who's coming for revenge. The macho Hawks obviously despised this show of weakness, and conceived of Chance as standing virtually alone against the encroaching outlaws, aided only by a motley assortment of true friends: the drunken former deputy Dude (Dean Martin), the old cripple Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and eventually the quick-shooting young Colorado (Ricky Nelson).

From this slight material, an archetypal white hat/black hat story, Hawks developed one of the great works of cinema. His patient pacing allows plenty of time for the character arcs to develop naturally. Dude was once a proud, tough man, brought low by a woman and reduced to a pathetic drunkard, memorably introduced in the opening scenes stooping to pick up a coin that a man throws into a spittoon for him. Throughout the film, he struggles with his alcoholism, trying to regain control of himself, to reassert his dignity and intelligence and bravery, as well as his formidability with a gun. Chance is, in comparison, a bedrock of stoic self-confidence and moral rigor, though Hawks emphasizes that he's merely human too by including all of the fumbling, awkward love scenes with Angie Dickinson's ambiguous bad gal Feathers. These scenes play off of Wayne's own obvious discomfort in romantic scenes, infusing a layer of metafiction into each of them: is Chance thrown off balance by Feathers, or Wayne by Dickinson? Seemingly the only thing that can ruffle Wayne's drawling onscreen persona, pushing him out of his comfort zone, is the presence of a pretty girl, a fact Hawks would take advantage of again in Hatari!, to equally amusing effect.

There's a lot more going on in this film, too, even as virtually nothing actually happens. The film simply rambles along, the connective tissue between set pieces often consisting of lengthy scenes where the characters just sit around and shoot the breeze. Much of the film takes place in the tight, constricted space of the jail, where Hawks is comfortable filming tight, constricted compositions crammed with people. The joy of the filmmaking is palpable in every frame; there are few Hollywood movies that are so relaxed, so carefree. Watching Rio Bravo feels like spending a few hours on the set with Wayne, Brennan, Martin and Nelson, hanging out, cracking jokes, sparring sometimes in jest and sometimes in earnest, shifting between the two so smoothly that it's hard to tell when the characters' jokes bleed over into genuine hurt. The film is packed with incident, but somehow it never seems to add up to a real forward-moving plot, perhaps because the whole film is based around stasis: it's a waiting game. That's what gives it its unique charm.

The easygoing pace also allows Hawks the time to examine his themes and characters in depth, with subtle touches rather than broad gestures. There's surprising nuance and emotion in set pieces like the one where Stumpy nearly blows off Dude's head when the latter enters the jail unexpectedly. On its face, its a comic bit of action, a near-miss that the men can laugh about because it wasn't a hit. But it also lays bare some of the deeper emotions at the core of the story. Stumpy doesn't recognize Dude to begin with because the former drunk has cleaned up and gotten sober, has taken a bath and donned some new clothes, replacing his old threadbare, filthy rags. He looks like a real man again, and Stumpy, accustomed to seeing him as a ragged beggar, doesn't even realize it's him. It mirrors the earlier scene where the rancher Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) doesn't recognize Dude because he'd never seen him sober before. Underneath the violent humor of the incident, there's this poignant undercurrent, as Dude is reminded yet again of how far he'd fallen, while Stumpy, behind his ornery chatter, is horrified by what he almost did to his friend.


Hawks treats these complex emotions seriously, but he never allows them to truly overwhelm the film's surface charm, its low-key wit and humor. After all, this is a film in which, at a pivotal moment, the characters decide to take a break and have a good old singalong, showcasing the star voices of Nelson and Martin. It's a wonderful moment, a perfect indication of the film's total commitment to its anti-narrative languor: when the tension is at its peak, the final showdown approaching, the characters break out into not just one but two folksy songs in a row, as though they had all the time in the world. Dude is lying on a cot with his hat shading his eyes, Colorado plays the guitar, and Stumpy hollers and plays the harmonica, all while Chance looks on, smiling benevolently, too stiff to join the fun but not to enjoy it. Indeed, one would have to be pretty stiff not to enjoy this film, which encourages the audience to revel in the sparkle of the dialogue and the ways in which the charming personalities of these likable actors blend seamlessly into their characters. Hawks, though he appreciated fresh faces too, was always adept at using star personalities in interesting ways, zeroing in on the essence of an actor and channeling that into his or her onscreen persona.

Here, the confined space of the jail allows Hawks to play these personalities off of one another, ricocheting Brennan's manic grouchiness off of Martin's slouching, half-speed delivery, while Nelson's boyish confidence resonates as a nascent version of Wayne's mature persona, his unflappable manliness. The film juggles these different personalities admirably, and the film's tone shifts smoothly between comic patter, hesitant romance, slow-building suspense, and action. Indeed, despite the laidback pace, Rio Bravo boasts some exceptional action sequences, not only the justifiably famous final shootout, in which Chance and his allies finally defeat the bad guys with dynamite, but also an earlier scene in which Chance and Dude track an assassin to a saloon filled with Burdette's men. This scene is formally precise, rigid in its geometry and use of the bar's space. It's through angles that Chance and Dude control the room, lining up the men at gunpoint in a straight line on one side of the room. The way Hawks frames this scene emphasizes how the two heroes remain on opposite sides of the room, both angled towards the disarmed bad guys, forming a triangle with the bar at its base and its point balancing on the line of criminals. The scene's denouement, in which Dude discovers the hiding assassin by noticing the man's blood dripping down into a glass of beer from above in the rafters, is similarly precise in its formal mastery.

For all these reasons and many more, Rio Bravo is one of Hawks' most sublime achievements: it's more like an old friend than a film, a familiar place to visit and revisit over and over again, always enjoying the company and the ragged charm of its storytelling.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

[This review has been cross-posted at Decisions At Sundown, a blog started by Jon Lanthier and dedicated exclusively to the Western genre. From now on I will be cross-posting all of my Western reviews with this blog, where I am one of several contributors.]

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is John Huston's epic exploration of American greed, paranoia and violence, of the ways in which material wealth can corrupt the soul. It's a dark, relentless parable, setting up its central tensions very early on and then simply letting its characters slowly build up pressure until they inevitably boil over. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) is an American drifter in Mexico, scraping by without any dignity by begging for coins from American tourists. A running gag throughout the first segment of the film is Dobbs' habit of asking for change from the same American man in a clean white suit (played by Huston himself in a cameo). He asks the man for change three times, each time in the same way, each time receiving a coin, but finally the man blows up at him and asks to be left alone. It's both a moment of humor and a demonstration of just how pathetic and beaten-down Dobbs is; he hadn't realized that he was continually begging from the same man because he never looked people in the eye when asking for money, looking only at their hands and the money itself. Dobbs is a slave to money, debasing himself for it, obsessed with getting more of it. He soon meets a fellow American bumming about, the equally poor but slightly less desperate Curtin (Tim Holt), and the two of them decide to hook up with a wizened old prospector named Howard (the director's father Walter Huston) to look for gold.

This trio heads off into the mountains together to search for gold, but it's obvious from the beginning that there's too much tension between them for this to end well. Huston masterfully foreshadows the explosions to come, in tightly packed frames where the characters seem jammed together, pressed against one another, their fates intertwined as they share the same cinematic space. In one early shot, Dobbs and Curtin shake hands, agreeing to become partners, and Huston frames Howard in the background, looking on sadly at the hands joining in the foreground. It's obvious that he already knows: this union will be only temporary and fragile, will shatter as easily as two hands drawing away from one another after a handshake. (Or as easily as the film's illusion of verisimilitude is shattered whenever Huston awkwardly stages a fistfight.)

Throughout the film, Huston's images have this kind of clarity and insight into his characters. His deep-focus compositions are strikingly beautiful, but more than that they have texture, they have weight to them. The scratchy beards of the prospectors look as sharp and spiky as the spines of cacti in the rocky area around their camp. The dirt and exhaustion of their labor is palpable; they move with the feel of men who have actually just spent all day in the sun hauling rocks and swinging pickaxes. Huston immerses his audience in this world, and thus he allows the quarrels between the men to develop organically from their frustrations and daily toils. Dobbs' innate greed and ornery nature, already evident in the early scenes of him as a beggar in a Mexican town, becomes even more dangerous once he's at the gold mine.

In one of the film's most telling early scenes, immediately after Dobbs had begged enough money to get himself some food, he is approached by a young Mexican boy (played by a very young Robert Blake, of all people) asking for money for a lottery ticket. Dobbs simply snarls at the kid and tries to chase him away, even throwing a glass of water at his face. Dobbs has no sympathy for those like himself, no understanding of the parallels between his own situation as a beggar and that of this boy — once he gets some money, he doesn't care about anybody else. It's as though he's forgotten that only an hour earlier he'd been approaching strangers as well, begging for money without even a lottery ticket to offer in return. Later, when he's dreaming of what he'll do when he's rich with all his gold, he describes a rich man's day of indulgences: a Turkish bath, ordering fancy food at a restaurant, and treating the staff with contempt. Dobbs seems to see money as an excuse to act superior to others, to become what he hates when he's poor.


There's a not-so-subtle socialist undercurrent to the film in scenes like this, and at times it's startling just how much Marxist critique Huston was able to smuggle into the film. At one point, Howard all but quotes from Karl Marx, applying the labor theory of value to the search for gold, theorizing that gold is valued so highly because its price factors in all the labor that went into searching for it, not just of those who actually found it but of all those men who didn't find it as well. More pointedly, Dobbs is oblivious to his own class status, and he's such a miserable figure because he never recognizes any companionship with those who struggle, like him, for every coin that falls into their hands. Instead, Dobbs — like Curtin and Howard to a lesser degree — embraces the race for wealth, the all-encompassing greed that dictates that there is never enough. Instead of truly uniting himself with his partners, developing a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship, he sabotages everything with his paranoia and every-man-for-himself ethos.

Dobbs is, essentially, the ugliest incarnation of a popular American icon, the rugged frontier iconoclast, striking out on his own to make his fortune. Huston completely undermines this figure, suggesting that his determination is far from admirable, and Bogart plays Dobbs with ratty, nervous energy: he's both hunched-over and wrapped up into himself. He's cruel and vicious, a hard contrast against the compassionate, righteous Curtin and the vivacious, doggedly cheerful Howard. As Howard, Walter Huston continually steals the show, infusing his character with a touch of the eccentric old codger charm of a Walter Brennan role, as well as a quiet dignity and decency that shows through especially in the scene where he tries to read the last letter a dead man had received from his wife, and keeps stumbling over the words but determinedly pressing on. He's at his best, though, in the film's final moments, when he reacts to tragedy and defeat with hearty, heaving gales of laughter, his body shaking, his mouth wide open, letting out gasps and howls of convulsive laughter. It's the only possible reaction to the unfairness and absurdity of what's happened, the way all his struggles and labor have led, ultimately, to nothing, at least in material terms.

For Dobbs, of course, such laughter would never be possible. He's too obsessed with money to ever laugh so genuinely over its loss. He's trapped by money, and trapped by the things it drives him to do. In one of the film's most memorable shots, Dobbs lies down for a guilty, sleepless night beside the campfire, and Huston has the flames lick up across the frame, obscuring Dobbs' face from view, swallowing him up. Dobbs is sentencing himself to Hell, to a self-imposed Hell of greed and perpetually unfulfilled desires. He can never have enough, and so he's devoured and cast aside, with no one to protect him and no one to mourn his loss.

Night Passage

[This review has been cross-posted at Decisions At Sundown, a blog started by Jon Lanthier and dedicated exclusively to the Western genre. From now on I will be cross-posting all of my Western reviews with this blog, a valuable resource for the Western genre.]

Night Passage is best known as the film that ended the fruitful period of collaboration between director Anthony Mann and star James Stewart. The pair had made eight films together, and this was to have been the ninth, until Mann walked off the picture, citing the poor script and costar Audie Murphy. The finished film, directed instead by James Neilson, proves Mann right, and one can only regret that the Mann/Stewart friendship was ended by such a slight film — Stewart never worked with Mann again. The film itself is melodramatic and convoluted, surrounding a relatively straightforward story with all sorts of distractions and ornamentation, populating it with an oddball cast of bit players who keep wandering into the story for no apparent reason. It gives the film a weird, faux-folksy vibe, a very stagey, artificial idea of frontier life. The core of the film is a story of redemption, about the former railroad troubleshooter Grant McLaine (Stewart), who was fired from his job, suspected of working with train robbers after he allowed the outlaw the Utica Kid (Murphy) to escape. Now, Grant still hangs around the train camps, playing his accordion for money, until a string of payroll robberies cause the train management to ask him back.

This story is the film's center, and one can imagine it being made with Mann's characteristic toughness and single-mindedness, with a driven Stewart willing to do anything to redeem his shattered reputation. One can also imagine it, with twenty minutes cut out, as a stripped-down low-budget B Western. Instead, it's bloated and torturously overwritten, with so many characters crowding around the fringes of the film that it never really acquires a forward momentum. There's Grant's former girl Verna (Elaine Stewart), now married to the train company boss Kimball (Jay C. Flippen) because she'd believed Grant was a crook. There's the local restaurant girl Charlie (Dianne Foster), patiently waiting for the Utica Kid to go straight so she can marry him. There's crooked railroad man Renner (Herbert Anderson), struggling cross-country on a mule, trying to reach the robber gang to give them information. There's a kid named Joey (Brandon de Wilde) who was formerly a lookout for the gang but ran away and started hanging around Grant instead. There's an ornery old frontier woman named Ma Vittles (Olive Carey), who seems to wander into the frame whenever things are starting to get slack, to provide a bit of eccentric humor. There's a big group of tough Irish railroad workers waiting for their pay and getting antsy, brawling and dancing and running after the prostitutes kept around the camp for them. And of course there's the wild outlaw leader Whitey (Dan Duryea doing his best whiny, cackling impersonation of Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death) and his gang, among them, of course the Utica Kid.

This is a big cast for a short little Western actioner, and director Neilson can never quite manage to balance the film's many different tones against each other. The ragged comedy relief of Ma Vittles and the railroad workers, including a bickering married couple, sits uncomfortably against the darker undercurrents of Grant's beaten-down depression. And then there's the musical numbers, with Stewart lip-syncing along with a couple of accordion tunes. There's even a dramatic showdown with the Utica Kid — who turns out to be his brother — where he wins over the Kid by playing a song their father always used to play on the accordion. Neilson captures the moment by focusing on the Kid's foot as it starts tapping along with the rhythms of the music. It's silly and kind of goofy, as is the sight of Stewart lugging his accordion around with him everywhere he goes, including into battle.


The film does have a few virtues, mainly in the grandeur of its Technicolor compositions of the open range, a virtue it shares with even the worst of the period's Hollywood Westerns. Its action sequences are also satisfying, particularly the robbers' assault on the payroll train, with the Utica Kid watching it all from a high cliff, as below the other men break off into groups, each accomplishing their tasks with mechanical efficiency. Later, the multiple shootouts of the climax are inventively staged, with real urgency. The first is a confrontation in a darkened saloon after Grant smashes out all the lights and hides behind the bar, shooting through the darkness at the robbers while he makes his escape beneath the floorboards. Then, after a chase through a (suddenly sunny) valley, shot from a distance to emphasize the wide blue sky, Grant and the robbers settle in for an extended siege at an abandoned mining camp, where Grant picks off the gang one by one. Neilson obviously knows how to stage action, and these scenes are as tense and well-crafted as the rest of the film is aimless and talky.

Night Passage is obviously a second-rate Western, a meandering mess of a film that only really comes together when the trite dialogue (including Grant's corny speeches about good and evil and "the soul") is replaced by gunfire.

3 Godfathers

Three outlaws ride into the town of Welcome, Arizona on a clear, calm day, planning to rob the local bank. They're not particularly hard men. They're cattle rustlers, used to making money off a few stray cows here and there. This will be their first bank robbery, maybe, their first attempt at something bigger and badder. Not being hard men, they exchange pleasantries and share coffee with a man they meet on the outskirts of town, a man named Buck Sweet (Ward Bond), who turns out to be the local sheriff, the man who will dog these outlaws relentlessly for the next few days of their lives — for some of them, the last days of their lives. John Ford's minimalist Western 3 Godfathers begins with this easygoing introduction, with three friendly, good-natured men passing the time before a robbery with the man who will shortly become their worst enemy. The three outlaws are Robert (John Wayne), William (Harry Carey, Jr.) and Pedro (Pedro Armendáriz), and their first appearance in the film makes it clear that, despite their shiftless ways, they are not bad men, merely misguided, perhaps with few other options available to them besides making money in various dishonest ways. They are sympathetic bandits, driven not by greed but by simple necessity to rob and pillage.

Ford introduces these men in an economical, fast-paced prologue, establishing their essential decency and then staging the bank robbery itself as a quick flurry of motion and gunfire, a harsh interruption of the tranquil, friendly atmosphere of this town, which seems to have earned its name as a welcoming place. The men then flee into the desert, where they'll wander for the remainder of the movie, hemmed in by the forbiddingly dry, desolate land and the sheriff's posse cutting off both their routes of escape and their access to water. With the sheriff's men staked out by the two closest water supplies, the three bank robbers must make a dangerous trek across the desert towards a more distant water tower where they can slake their thirsts and tend to the worsening bullet wound in William's arm. Ford, always a master of landscape and location, makes the isolation of the desert felt intensely, shooting his three anti-heroes as fuzzy silhouettes within wide shots in which the blank white expanse of the cracked desert hardpan is matched only by the open blue of the sky, a stray fluffy cloud or two scrawled across its surface. Many of Ford's compositions divide the frame horizontally between sand and sky, with the outlaws' staggering forms positioned right at the boundary line, trudging through the sand and pushing forward against high winds and overpowering heat.

The film's visual palette is thus simple, in the way that a Mark Rothko painting is simple: an area of pale blue hovering above an area of white, with a hazy horizon line and a few indistinct black blotches separating the two color fields. These stark compositions, like Rothko's, create subtle tensions and resonances between the halves of the frame. Sand and sky both serve to isolate the protagonists within large open spaces. The sheer scope and grandeur of these images suggests spirituality, or at least an understanding of man as insignificant within the scale of the world — let alone the universe. This is why the opening bank robbery is quickly forgotten, and the motivations behind it and the outlaws' other crimes never explained. Those are petty human concerns, and this film quickly positions its protagonists in a setting where concepts like material wealth are increasingly remote. As soon as these men are out in the desert, it doesn't matter that they've made off with a sack full of money, and indeed the money is never mentioned again. The money is perhaps in one of the parcels they shed during their trek, shrugging aside their worldly possessions as these things become too burdensome. As with Rothko, one gets the sense that for Ford, size itself is a signifier of spiritual feeling and philosophical inquiry: the pale expanse of the sky and the salty white ground envelop these men, inescapably confronting them with their own mortality. One begins to suspect that this film, and not the more recent antecedents so often mentioned, is the true predecessor to Gus Van Sant's existential desert movie Gerry.


The three outlaws of the title wander endlessly through the desert, trying to reach their amorphous destination, which is at best only a momentary resting place, a way station for them to recover slightly before continuing their flight. But even these uncertain plans are disrupted when the men stumble across a covered wagon abandoned at a water station whose tanks have been drained dry. Inside the wagon, they find a dying woman, pregnant and on the verge of delivering her baby, left behind by an incompetent husband driven half-mad by lack of water. They help her deliver the child, a boy who she names after all three men — Robert William Pedro — and then, before she dies, she exacts a promise from them, a promise to protect her baby, to take him from the desert and bring him to safety.

This is an extraordinary situation, but the three outlaws take this promise very seriously. Despite the constant threat of the posse catching up to them, and the desperate lack of water and food, they are determined to bring this child safely out of the desert. In his quiet way, Ford completely shifts the driving force of the movie: the men are no longer trying to escape themselves, but only trying to help this baby survive, even if it means forgoing water for themselves completely, even if it means that some of them will not survive the journey across the desert. Ford never makes a big deal of it, but finding this baby is a moment of redemption for these men, the moment at which they cease caring about themselves and start caring about the pure, innocent fledgling life they hold in their arms. There's no sudden shift, no hesitation, because these are three decent men to begin with; being charged with the care of this baby simply reminds them of their inherent decency, redeeming them from their outlaw lives. In the latter half of the film, their journey increasingly takes on Biblical overtones, reflecting the journey of the three wise men to visit the baby Jesus on his birth. That the film's denouement takes place on Christmas is only the most obvious of the parallels between the stories, though this heavy-handed symbolism merely makes explicit the themes and ideas already apparent in the film's more subtle moments.

At the same time, Ford's treatment of these symbolic religious elements gives the film's final act a kind of sentimental poetic spirit, embodied in the broad emotional strokes of the climax, which subverts traditional Western ideals and denies the lawman his cathartic showdown with the last outlaw standing. Instead, the ending is a moving affirmation of family bonds and community, providing John Wayne's Robert with a much more optimistic resolution than the one he'd receive as Ethan Edwards a few years later in The Searchers, another film that ends with Wayne's character returning a child to its proper family. Ford holds out the hope of redemption to his characters, the idea that one can re-embrace society and family and spirituality after stumbling off the path. This is a warm, moving, often even humorous film, inflected with patches of folksy comedy to offset its bleak, deadly landscapes. Painting with the earth tone palette of the desert, Ford composed a large-scale tribute to spiritual redemption and determination.

The Duel at Silver Creek

Don Siegel's The Duel at Silver Creek is a sturdy Western actioner, a minor but enjoyable B-movie built around rugged location shooting and a good amount of fast-paced action and gunplay. A gang of claim-jumpers led by the slimy Rod Lacy (Gerald Mohr) is tearing through the West, forcing the owners of small mines to sign over their deeds before filling their victims with bullets so they can never be identified. They terrorize the small mines scattered around the area, until they run into some trouble at the mine belonging to Luke Cromwell (Audie Murphy) and his father; the gang kills Luke's dad, but the quick-drawing kid takes down three of them, causing the rest to flee. The film then shifts its focus away from Cromwell, turning instead to "Lightning" Tyrone (Stephen McNally), the Marshal of a nearby town, who goes out with a posse after the claim-jumpers, and while he's gone also loses his own father figure, an older lawman who's shot in the back while the marshal is out of town. When Tyrone returns from his unsuccessful jaunt after the outlaws, sporting an arm wound that has crippled his ordinarily formidable skills with a gun, he finds his friend dead and a new mining operation set up in town. He also has a new love interest, the sexy and deadly Opal Lacy (Faith Domergue), whose "brother" Rod is the secret leader of the claim-jumpers. Opal's introduction is certainly memorable: she appears as a fine lady in an ornate outfit, volunteering to help nurse a man who could potentially be a witness against the claim-jumpers. But when everyone's out of the room, she strangles the man with his own handkerchief, while Siegel holds a tilted Dutch angle closeup looking up at her face, her pretty features expressionless, her placid beauty hiding an inner evil.

Opal is contrasted against small-town beauty Dusty (Susan Cabot), the good girl who's waiting for Tyrone at home — but who he thinks of as just a little sister. Enter Cromwell back into the picture, sporting a new nickname (the Silver Kid) and a hard new attitude. The scheming Opal tries to set the Kid and Tyrone up for a gun battle, hoping to get the marshal out of the way, but instead Tyrone makes the younger man his deputy. At this point, the static melodramatics of the small town threaten to bog the film down, as too much time is spent with Tyrone courting Opal while the Kid makes a play for Dusty — and in the background, Lacy and his gang scheme against them all, employing local hoods like the inventively monikered but kind of lame Johnny Sombrero (Eugene Iglesias) and Tinhorn Burgess (a cigar-chomping bit turn for Lee Marvin). In between the rousing action of the opening and the extended climactic shootout, the film meanders around aimlessly, stretching out its meager plot to fill time between action set pieces.

That said, it's fun to watch the two girls fleshing out their cardboard cutout roles, with Cabot projecting a feisty, frontier gal energy and Domergue opting for sleepy seductiveness. And it's equally fun to watch Marvin make the most of his small role, thrusting his thin face forward with his cigar jutting forward even more, as though trying to imprint his visage in the minds of anyone who watches. This scenery-chewing from the sidelines fortunately helps distract from the boring leads, especially McNally, whose soporific narration certainly doesn't help in dragging the film out of its roughest patches. Murphy, with his usual stoic manner and baby face, has a certain low-key appeal, but he's more of a negative presence than anything else: one feels the absence of emotion in him, the absence of acting, even when he witnesses his father being killed.


If the film falters throughout its mid-section, it picks up again for a viscerally satisfying and intelligently filmed climax, in which Tyrone, the Kid and their posse head out after the claim-jumpers to stop them for good and rescue the kidnapped Dusty in the process. There is much to admire in the economy and elegance of Siegel's action filmmaking, in the exciting chase and gunfight sequences at the beginning and end of the film. His set pieces make excellent use of distance, of the space between combatants. This is true not only of the traditional Western main street shootout — shot from behind the back of one of the fighters, the perspective emphasizing the empty space that simultaneously separates and connects them — but of the much more complex trajectories of the final battle scene. When the Marshal is chasing Lacey during the climactic fight, Siegel's wide shots accentuate the space between the pursuer and his quarry, as well as the line-of-sight threads connecting them, the paths along which bullets can travel back and forth. Their showdown takes place not at close range but across a large distance, the two men laying low and warily maintaining their cover and their separation.

The geography is what really drives the action: Siegel is unusually attentive to how the characters get from point A to point B, how the angles of the gunfire are distinct for a gang member hiding high up on a rocky outcropping or a deputy crouched beneath a wagon. This is what makes Siegel's action sequences so thrilling and potent, the impression that everything is in its right place and that complex trajectories are being plotted out in the air, which is thick with bullets. Siegel's maybe a bit like Budd Boetticher in this respect, though unlike Boetticher the precision of his staging is largely confined here to the fight scenes. The violence in this film is frantic and seemingly chaotic, and yet also carefully balanced, every motion carefully planned — like the way the marshal rides off in pursuit of Lacy, sending a bullet at a diagonal towards a henchman on the way. The impressive staging of the action sequences, along with some eye-catching supporting performances and the natural color beauty of the landscapes where these battles take place, redeem the film from being just another mediocre B-Western.

Riding Shotgun

Riding Shotgun is a low-key, static Randolph Scott Western, obviously inspired by High Noon, casting Scott as stoic stagecoach guard Larry Delong, facing down an entire town who are not only unwilling to help him in his fight against a vicious gang of outlaws, but who actually believe that Delong is part of the gang. Delong is lured away from a stagecoach by the promise of finally catching up to his most hated enemy, Dan Marady (James Millican), who killed Delong's sister and nephew many years before. Marady's men separate Delong from the stagecoach and ambush him, tying him up to deal with him later — why don't movie villains ever do things the obvious way and just shoot a guy when they have the chance? — and then heading off to rob and shoot up the coach. Their plan is to use the stagecoach robbery as a way of stirring up a nearby town into sending out a huge posse, thus leaving the town (and its bank) relatively undefended for an even bigger heist. Of course, they don't reckon on Delong getting free and heading into town, with full knowledge of their evil plan — which they tell him before tying him up, like James Bond villains spilling their guts before concocting some delayed method of killing off the hero, leaving him plenty of time to escape.

The film's premise is quite simple, but its script keeps making loops like this, taking ridiculous twists and turns, endlessly delaying to stretch out the film's running time. If there's an obvious action for someone to take, be sure the script will dedicate a long and torturous speech to why it can't be done that way. If there's a smart and reasonable way for a character to act, be sure he'll do the exact opposite as soon as possible. This isn't a script; it's a long and convoluted explanation for why all these people are behaving so stupidly and unrealistically.

Once Delong arrives in town, he finds that everyone there suspects him, for no good reason, of being involved with the Marady gang, and they don't believe his story about the impending bank robbery. Instead, he has to hole up in an empty cantina, surrounded on all sides by the dithering townspeople, who can't decide whether they want to storm the place and string him up or simply keep him contained until the sheriff returns. What they wind up doing, mostly, is waiting... and waiting... and waiting... and waiting. This film copies the High Noon formula of a delayed climax, an hour of slow build-up heading towards a fast, violent denouement. But director André De Toth is saddled with a horrible script, and in any event he doesn't have Fred Zinnemann's precise, mathematical feel for slow-burning suspense. The film's lengthy middle section is slow, static and stagey, a long dull stretch that alternates between Delong sitting quietly in the bar and the townspeople gathering outside and debating in circles.


The film is also dragged down by Scott's voiceover, which is basically a textbook example of the horrible misuse of narration, the kind of voiceover that gives the technique in general its bad name. At the start of the film, Delong's resigned mood and simple, laconic phrases create the impression of an oater noir, the kind of film where the down-on-his-luck hero recounts the tragedies that befell him, speaking directly to the audience in a conversational tone. Later, however, Scott's voiceover is superfluous, simply describing or explaining actions that are readily apparent onscreen and narrating his inner state when his performance should have communicated what he was feeling. It's distracting, and recurs throughout the film. De Toth leans on it as a crutch, a way of inserting some drama into his static setups: there's nothing much happening onscreen for much of the film, so Scott's voiceover at least provides something to pay attention to besides the endless bickering of the townspeople.

The film is mostly a dud, though despite the limping script and the general dullness of the action, De Toth does craft some interesting images. He favors long shots, like the striking bird's eye view that shows Delong chasing one of Marady's men through rocky hills towards the beginning of the film, or the rooftop shot of the portly deputy Tub Murphy (Wayne Morris) walking through the center of the town towards Delong's hiding spot. Tub provides some of the film's comic relief, as a lawman who's continually sneaking away from the action to eat at the local restaurant. The film also gets some comic mileage out of the cantina owner Fritz (Fritz Feld), whose stock sniveling, treacherous coward routine is tiresome, but who inexplicably keeps switching back and forth between speaking Spanish, English and German, a nearly surrealist touch that's a welcome diversion from the film's long dead stretches.

And there are plenty of them. Even the final shootout is ineptly staged, shot from odd angles around the interior of the town bank, and mostly consists of people scurrying back and forth aimlessly, shooting at and punching each other, while Delong hides in a corner. It's like a precursor to today's Bourne-style rapidly cut fight scenes, except De Toth manages to capture a similar messy obscurity not by cutting but by placing his camera at the worst possible angles to capture the action in any real way. It's a good thing that Delong's plan for foiling the bank robbers involves cutting the straps on their saddles so they fall comically off their horses while trying to get away — this humorous conclusion at least seems to acknowledge just how silly and slight the film is as a whole.

The Furies

When Anthony Mann made The Furies in 1950, he'd been making hard, tough, low-budget noirs for the past decade, and would shortly become known for making a series of hard, tough Westerns. Most of these latter films would star James Stewart in some of the roles that, along with the films he made for Hitchcock, would help the actor rid himself of his "aw shucks" good guy persona. Mann's films, whether he was working in noirs or Westerns, were ragged, morally ambiguous character studies in which conflicted men were tested by harsh circumstances, running through rigorous gauntlets that wore them down both mentally and physically. In ragged poverty row noirs like Raw Deal and T-Men, Mann's heroes were nearly torn apart by the pressures accumulating on them, and the same pressure-cooker intensity is applied to James Stewart in The Naked Spur or The Far Country, films where Stewart seems to be sweating and trembling beneath the glare of Mann's cameras. The Furies is a somewhat different kind of Western from Mann's Stewart cycle. Based on a novel by Niven Busch, it traffics in the Freudian sexual undercurrents of the writer, and its most prominent protagonist is a woman rather than Mann's preferred male lead. But its harsh tone, its emphasis on psychological and physical trauma, its dark but evocative portrait of wide open Western spaces, provides the evidence of Mann's signature on the film.

The film opens with the triumphant return home of the ranching tycoon T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston), a grand man whose best years are perhaps behind him but who nevertheless projects all the rugged splendor of a tough, ornery man of the West. He put together his ranch, dubbed the Furies, through his own hard work, and if in his old age he hasn't been able to exploit the land as well as he might have, it's only a small blot on his outsized reputation. His daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) is every bit the old man's daughter, as hard and tough as him and proud of it, too. Their relationship is nearly incestuous in its intimacy: Vance scratches his back when he aches, kisses him on the mouth and tells him that she'll only marry when she can find a man who's better than him, who can provide to her the same challenge that he does. She's a strong woman, poised as heiress to the Furies because T.C.'s son Clay (John Bromfield) is as quiet and self-effacing as T.C. and Vance are brash and egoistic; he's an anomaly in this frontier family and seems happy to marry off into another clan. Clay's departure, and T.C.'s increasing mismanagement of the family's funds — he spends freely and has even invented his own currency, an unofficial tender that amounts to a personal I.O.U. — places Vance at the reins of the Furies.

The remainder of the film chronicles the fractures and comeuppances of this archetypal family. The scion of an old Jeffords family rival, Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), is aiming to hurt the family by romancing Vance while actually trying to get his hands back on the land that T.C. stole from the Darrow family. And T.C. also complicates things by bringing home a woman of his own, Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), a widow who immediately attracts Vance's fiery hatred. Vance is jealous, seeing another woman enter her father's life and be the one to scratch his back when he needs it, and she feels further resentment towards Flo for attempting to replace her mother, whose room at the ranch has been an untouched shrine since her death. Worst of all, however, Flo is subtly pushing Vance out of her throne as the ruler of the Furies, telling her that running a ranch isn't woman's work, that she should hire a competent manager instead. Mann shoots these scenes with a melodramatic touch, shooting the interiors with deep focus lenses from exaggerated angles, framing the characters together in tableaux-like arrangements that accentuate the strained relationships between them. Whereas the film's exterior shots set the characters' dark profiles against a wide, bright sky, suggesting the freedom and escape they seem incapable of achieving, the interiors are often claustrophobic and cramped.


The film's psychological intensity makes it an unrelentingly taut and compelling experience, but it's not completely satisfying as a story. Part of the problem is that the very overwhelming quality of Stanwyck and Huston's performances makes it difficult for anyone else to hold their own onscreen against this pair. Certainly, the handsome but bland Wendell Corey is no match for Stanwyck, and the nearly masochistic, violent relationship between Vance and Darrow is among the film's most unbelievable conceits. Vance is looking for a man who can stand up to her father, who can dominate her and control her, so the way the script requires her to bow to the utterly conventional Darrow is kind of pathetic. She seems to have a much better match in the Mexican squatter Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), who she's known since she was a child, and with whom she shares a friendship that vacillates between sibling rivalry and sexual frisson: from time to time she kisses Juan and he responds, with good cheer, "the kiss of a good friend." Juan is Vance's equal and friend, and one can imagine, in the absence of the racial/ethnic complication, a satisfying romance between them.

But this isn't the kind of film that can allow for that, and a much more unpleasant fate is in store for Juan, at the hands of T.C. In fact, in keeping with much of Mann's work, this is often a thoroughly unpleasant film, lingering on the ugly realities of the Jeffords clan: their indifferent treatment of native squatters, who are killed and chased off at their convenience; their hateful rivalries and habit of turning everything into a competition; their iron-fisted domination of the land around them; their vengeful violent streak. The Jeffords are thoroughly unsympathetic representations of the American will to spread West, to conquer the land, to take possession and make everything they see their own. The film is at its best when it's tracing the messy ways in which this impulse of manifest destiny works when applied to domestic dramas and interpersonal relationships.

True, the film makes some token attempts to rehabilitate and soften the Jeffords family in its final act, struggling towards a Hollywood happy ending in a film that is clearly painted from the palette of the Shakespearean tragedy. Among the many unlikely twists the script requires to reach this happy ending is the resolution of the romance between Vance and Darrow, a romance that, surely, almost no one in the audience could have been rooting for throughout the film. Even worse, the ending represents the taming of Stanwyck's Vance, her conversion into a docile housewife wanting to deliver a son for her man. The ending attempts to smooth over the ugliness and darkness that preceded it, to move towards a sunny denouement. One senses, at least, that Mann can't get completely behind this goal: he stages the film's final moment, a tender conversation between Vance and Darrow as they return to the Furies, as a dark nighttime scene, the two lovers reduced to silhouettes in the gray outdoors, the black outline of the Furies' metal sign hanging above their heads. The scene's dialogue may be hopeful and upbeat, but Mann's mise en scène suggests the opposite. He understands, even if the script does not, that these people are interesting in the first place because they're hard and cold and unlikeable, because they represent unpleasant truths about frontier living and the foundations of the country, because they are, essentially, incapable of being reformed and in any case don't really want to be.

The Big Sky

The Big Sky was Howard Hawks' second Western after his iconic John Wayne/Montgomery Clift classic Red River, but this second stab at the genre is today largely forgotten, particularly in comparison to Hawks' other Westerns. Considered overlong by the producers and distributors of the time, it was chopped down by 20 minutes after its initial release, and it mostly survives today — on lousy bootlegged prints, when it's seen at all — in this shortened form. Even so, it's apparent that the film is much better than its reputation suggests; it's an ambling, nearly plotless adventure yarn in which a group of frontier men set off down the Missouri River into uncharted territory, aiming to be the first white men to get so far and trade with the notoriously unwelcoming Blackfoot Indians. The cuts made to the film to trim it down to an even two hours apparently haven't done much damage to Hawks' overall aesthetic, eliding some of the subtleties and details from certain scenes and relationships without drastically altering the shape or feel of the film.

From the beginning, Hawks is interested not so much in telling any particular story as evoking a time and a place and a type of man: the film harks back to the frontier spirit of early American history, when large swaths of unexplored land were waiting for intrepid men to penetrate them and discover their mysteries. It's surely no coincidence that one of these men, the aging adventurer and Indian trader Zeb Calloway (Arthur Hunnicutt), calls the beautiful Blackfoot lands "wild and pretty like a virgin woman." Hawks has nothing but admiration for these men who are tied down to nothing and go running off caring only about the taste of adventure. There's a reason that the only period films Hawks was ever comfortable making were Westerns. This frontier spirit — the taming of wild country with sheer ingenuity, toughness and determined group effort — is perfectly suited to Hawks' cinematic sensibility. The film plays out like a blueprint for Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo: a journey up a choppy, hard-to-navigate river in which the men's physical exertions often literally push and pull the boat through the worst rapids. When the going gets too tough, the crew gets out and tugs the boat along the shore with heavy ropes.

Hawks films all of this with a raw physicality and intensity that captures the rigor of the journey in all its detail. He seems to care little for the actual plot, which is really nothing much to speak of anyway, just a loose framework on which to hang all the incidents and scenes that contribute to this vivid portrait of frontier life. Zeb and his French partner Jourdonnais (Steven Geray) have a plan to be the first men able to trade in Blackfoot country. They have a Blackfoot princess, Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt), who had been captured by a rival Indian tribe and then escaped, far from home. By returning Teal Eye to her people, the traders know they'll ingratiate themselves to the Blackfeet, thus finally opening up the standoffish tribe to outside trading. The only thing that stands in their way is the local fur company, which certainly doesn't want to see a group of independent operators open up this untouched territory. The narrative is simple: the boat struggles upriver, beset by attacks from the fur company's hired mercenaries and the local Crow Indians who've been stirred up onto the warpath.


In the midst of this adventure, Zeb takes on his young nephew Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin) and Boone's friend Jim Deakins (Kirk Douglas). The two young men are friends in a very Hawksian mold, harking all the way back to his early silent film A Girl in Every Port — Hawks cleverly tips his hat to the earlier film by repeating the bit of business where one of the men, after a fight, pulls the other's finger to pop his joint back into place. Hawks, often predictable in the kinds of stories he's drawn to and the things he finds interesting about them, makes this film about the camaraderie of these men as they head into danger, seemingly for no better reason than having something to do. When the film opens, Boone and Jim meet, fight each other and becomes friends in the process (again, like the heroes of A Girl in Every Port), then immediately set off looking for Boone's Uncle Zeb. When the three men meet up in jail, it's assumed that the two younger men will be coming along on Zeb's latest trip upriver. They all treat the journey like a lark, an excuse to have fun, and Hawks obviously has great fun himself in capturing the campfire bonhomie of the men.

There's an early, very Hawksian scene where Boone and Jim engage in a cheerfully drunken song with a French barmaid squeezed between them, the trio clustered together in the midst of a frame packed with activity and smiling, drunken faces. This cluttered, intimate atmosphere is carried over, once the journey gets under way, into campfire singalongs on the river bank and bull sessions where the men swap stories and pass whiskey jugs back and forth. Hawks even applies this cheery atmosphere to a scene in which Jim, after mangling his finger on a tree branch, has to have it amputated. The men get him good and liquored up, and Boone and Zeb, performing the surgery, get pretty tight themselves, just to be "sociable" with their injured friend. The whole thing becomes suddenly hilarious, the actual surgery performed offhandedly amidst the laughter and drunken camaraderie. Hawks had originally wanted to include a similar scene in Red River, until John Wayne balked at finding humor in something like that. It's obvious that Hawks, more than his actor, understood these kind of men, who wouldn't take a thing like that so seriously that they'd let it get in the way of a good time. The scene ends with an appropriately ridiculous image: most of the camp down on all fours, stumbling around looking for Jim's amputated finger, which somehow got lost in the confusion.


The film is packed with moments like this, and indeed it's structured around such moments. Its narrative simply wanders from scene to scene, taking its time studying the details while the boat meanders upstream towards Blackfoot country. The pacing is slow and deliberate, and the action minimal: there's an Indian skirmish and a pair of tense standoffs with the fur company's men, resolved with lightning-fast economy. Hawks doesn't care about telling a story so much as conveying the texture of the setting, the wild country and wide expanses of open sky that are impressive even in the disappointing prints that are the only way to see the film for now, until a definitive DVD is finally assembled. This disinterest in narrative structure only becomes distracting towards the end of the film, when the love triangle between Boone, Jim and Teal Eye, underplayed subtly throughout the film, abruptly becomes of central importance, with Hawks leaving it to Hunnicutt's folksy narration to fill in the details.

It doesn't help, either, that the central performances of Douglas and Martin are at best likable and slight. Neither actor was Hawks' first choice for this long-delayed project and there's not much energy or passion in their relationships with each other or with Teal Eye. The supporting performances, on the other hand, are uniformly colorful and entertaining, and Hunnicutt is especially great in the Walter Brennan-type old coot role. Zeb's outrageous tall tales and deadpan humor — reminiscent of the Squint character from Frank King's great newspaper comic strip Gasoline Alley — are consistently funny, especially his anecdote about sewing a friend's severed ear on backwards, so that whenever he heard something thereafter, he always turned in the wrong direction. Threatt, too, is compelling, even without a word of English dialogue in the entire film: she acts with her wide, flashing black eyes and the stubborn pride of her posture. The Big Sky is a loose, episodic film, driven by the accumulation of its incidents rather than the meager forward drive of its narrative. It's a true Hawksian Western, a celebration of man's taming of wild nature and the bonds between men that make such grand adventures possible.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch is a brutish, nasty, ugly movie, a film that aims to strip the Western genre of its stereotypes and clichés and instead strips it of its humanity, of any trace of true honor or decency or goodness. The film certainly strips the varnish off of great Western archetypes like the honorable outlaw or the decent lawman on his trail, but it doesn't replace the absence with anything: it's just a big gaping hole that goes unfilled. As such, the film is an unremittingly unpleasant experience, watching rotten people do rotten things to one another, with one band of these rotten people placed in the central position usually reserved for the heroes in these kinds of movies. There's a lot of shrill laughter, but very little true humor: just these men making one another the butt of cruel jokes.

It's certainly hard to work up much sympathy for the gang of bank robbers and bandits led by aging tough guy Pike Bishop (William Holden). Joined by his friend Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), the rowdy, womanizing Gorch brothers (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), the proud Mexican youth Angel (Jaime Sánchez) and the withered old coot Sykes (Edmond O'Brien), Pike and his gang have become the most wanted men in Texas. They're hunted by a band of bounty hunters led by Pike's former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who has no choice but to hunt down his old friend or else be sent back to prison. The bounty hunters are portrayed as a gaggle of cackling vultures, hooting and hollering whenever they come across a corpse, picking at the boots and weapons and gold left behind. These filthy, stupid, nasty men are so thoroughly amoral that Pike and Deke actually begin to seem almost honorable in comparison, almost like the good guys by default, just because there's no one else available who could possibly fill that vacuum.

In fact, though the outlaws claim to have a code of honor, to be bound together by their promises and commitments to one another, there's little honor to their actual behavior. They stop just short of killing one another, but that seems to be just about their only limit. They're hard men, doing anything for some gold, not above leaving one of their own to die and thinking very little of it. When one of the men learns that his grandson has been killed, he shrugs and just wants to know if the boy acquitted himself with honor — a laughable premise since the kid was a typically brutish thug who died while abusing and threatening a group of hostages. Pike and his gang are deluding themselves with their talk of honor and loyalty, of being bound together as a group, as though there's something noble in what they're doing. At one point, Pike talks about doing one last job and then pulling back, the oldest of clichés for Western outlaws getting old, but Dutch quickly puts things in perspective: "pull back to what?" These men have nothing beyond the hard, cold lives they've made for themselves, nothing to look forward to beyond the next gold score and the whores and booze it can buy for them.


Director Sam Peckinpah signals right from the very beginning what kind of a movie this is going to be. As Pike and his men ride into town, dressed as soldiers to rob a bank, they pass by a group of kids by the side of the road, playing with a pair of trapped scorpions being overrun by swarming red ants. The symbolism is obvious, and hints forward all the way to the film's conclusion: a few deadly, dangerous creatures being destroyed, eventually, by the less powerful but more numerous hordes surrounding them. Throughout the film, children frequently appear, as images of lost innocence for Pike, who is, with Deke, alone among these men in seeming to have some regret about what he's become. The laughing faces of children thus often appear as symbols of innocence, but just as often it's apparent that children can be taught to torture, to kill, to serve as soldiers: the innocence Pike seems to remember and cherish is very fragile indeed, easily overcome by a cruel world. On the way out of town, after the failed bank job, Pike and his men pass by the kids again, to see them growing bored of the contest between the scorpions and the ants; the kids cover the whole ground with straw and light it afire.

These opening scenes establish the elemental themes of the film to come, particularly in the disastrous bank heist, which backfires when Deke and his bounty hunters are waiting in ambush. In the resulting melee, the two groups of killers shoot up the town, and it's not clear who takes more innocent lives caught in the crossfire, the bandits or the men supposedly working on the side of the law. The streets are soon filled with blood, bright red and blatantly artificial blood, each bullet smearing a big red circle on anyone it hits. After this frenetic shootout, the pace of the film slows down, and the middle section is languid and episodic, following the disappointed bandits as they meander around, trying to plan their next heist while evading capture.

They spend some time in Angel's poor Mexican village, where he is outraged to find that in his absence, Mexican federal troops have stormed the village, killing his father and stealing his lover away as the woman of the general Mapache (Emilio Fernández). Angel is the only character in the film who has some sense of nobility, who wants something beyond himself: freedom from tyranny for his people. The film's middle section drags, though, mainly because Peckinpah seems very interested in capturing the milieu of his characters, but not in delving any deeper into them as characters. Pike gets a few very brief flashbacks, fading in and out over closeups of his face, but neither him nor any of the other characters could really be said to have much complexity or nuance. The closest the film comes to deeper characterization is the blank stares of Pike whenever he's in an ugly situation, like the excruciatingly long sequence toward the end where Pike sits uncomfortably staring at the prostitute he'd just spent the night with, as her baby cries in the background. In overthrowing old archetypes, Peckinpah only replaced them with new ones, crude and ugly archetypes biding time until they next bathe in blood. The film picks up again when the group decides to rob a munitions train and escapes with both Deke's hunters and the US Army on their trail. But no matter how viscerally exciting the film's action set pieces often are, it's hard to escape the overwhelming impression of this film as wallowing, without relief, in dirt and blood and ugly emotions.

Comanche Station

The final film of Budd Boetticher's acclaimed Ranown cycle — the seven Westerns he made with actor Randolph Scott — is Comanche Station, a typically solid, straightforward venture that recycles and shuffles around plot elements from the series' previous film, Ride Lonesome. In both films, Scott plays a man who's initially mistaken for a bounty hunter of sorts, riding the territory trying to strike it rich by trading in people, but who is actually on a private mission of his own. In the aftermath of an Indian attack, he falls in with a pretty woman and a group of no-good outlaws who want to relieve him of his bounty and his life. The two films share these basic elements, though the later film casts them in a new light. In Comanche Station, Scott's Jefferson Cody isn't bringing in a murderer to be hanged, but rescuing Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates) from the Comanche tribe who kidnapped her. Mrs. Lowe's husband had announced a $5000 reward for any man who brought her back to him, and naturally this attracts the attention of the rough outlaw Ben (Claude Akins) and his two younger partners, Frank (Richard Rust) and Dobie (Skip Homeier). Cody, of course, wasn't in it for the money; he'd lost his wife to the Indians ten years before, and had been looking for her ever since, going after any women he heard about in the increasingly slender hope of someday finding his own missing wife.

When attacking Indians throw Cody and Mrs. Lowe in with the three outlaws, the trip back to her hometown becomes a tense journey through some of the most astoundingly beautiful vistas to be featured in any of Boetticher's films. With the threat of Indians signaled in the hills by their pillars of black smoke and bird calls in the surrounding woods, Cody finds himself trapped between the Indians and the potential treachery of his riding partners. It hardly helps that he served as Ben's commanding officer in the army, and presided over the other man's dishonorable discharge. There's a lot of bad blood in their past, though Ben seems to foster a grudging respect for the honorable, straight-talking Cody — just not enough respect to dissuade him from taking a shot at that $5000.


Despite the high stakes, the film has a meandering, lazy feel completely at odds with the dramatic tension at its core. Perhaps Boetticher's defining characteristic as a director of Westerns is his recognition that plot is one of the least important aspects of these kinds of films. He often seems indifferent to concerns like pacing or narrative details or dramatic content, as epitomized by the way this film casually riffs on the plot of Ride Lonesome, essentially retelling the story with slightly different motivations driving the characters. His sense of pacing is deliberate and calm, following up a frenzied Indian attack with a long sequence of dialogue-free shots in which the group's train of horses winds across various Western landscapes. All of Boetticher's films have room for such moments, time to stop and appreciate the pictorial beauty of the surroundings, but this film in particular is as much a celebration of the land where it was made as it is an action story. Boetticher bookends the film with shots of the same rocky, barren terrain, like a strangely beautiful alien landscape, boulders piled high on top of one another. And his camera frequently sweeps across the widescreen vistas his characters are riding through; his takes are often extended enough to follow Cody and his group across a very large patch of land, slowly panning along with the trotting horses.

Boetticher also frequently slows the narrative down in order to allow for moments of unexpected humor, puncturing the deadly seriousness of so many other Hollywood Westerns. Frank and Dobie certainly fulfill the role of comic relief, particularly in the scene where Dobie impresses his friend by proving that he can read — not "books or newspapers," but simple signs at least. Later, after a long and heartfelt conversation in which Dobie describes his father's longstanding advice that a man has to "amount to something," Dobie concludes by lamenting, "it's a shame: he never did amount to anything." This dim-witted pair is comical but also kind of sad, in that they're obviously with the ruthless Ben only because they have no other real options, no chance to make anything of themselves unless they're holding a gun. Boetticher's comedy is never mean-spirited, never aimed at completely ridiculing or cutting down its target; there is always complexity and depth even to Boetticher's comic foils.

He even directs his wit at Scott himself, in a scene where Cody, after being wounded in an attack, is treated by Mrs. Lowe. She pours some harsh liquor on his leg, warning him ahead of time that it's going to hurt, but instead of taking it with the expected stoicism and steely reserve, perhaps emitting a quick rush of breath, Cody whoops and throws his hands in the air, exclaiming in pain and then jumping around on his one good leg for a while, shaking the wounded one around to soothe it. It's a startling moment because it cuts so directly against the archetype of the tough, squint-eyed Western hero. Under Boetticher's direction, Scott's hero can be funny, flawed, even silly, can feel pain: he's no stoic superman with a gunbelt, and all of Boetticher's films with the actor feature at least one moment like this. Boetticher loves Western tropes, and films like this revel in the typical lore of the West, but he loves undermining and tweaking these archetypal elements just as much. It's this sensibility, this love of the Western coupled with the desire to open up the genre, to explore its more unusual facets, that makes Comanche Station, like all of Boetticher's Westerns, such a fascinating exemplar of the genre.

Stagecoach

Stagecoach was the first film to unite director John Ford with both his iconic genre, the Western, and the actor who would come to be his most iconic star, John Wayne. Ford and Wayne both made Westerns before this, of course, but their collaboration on this film sparked something bold and unusual that would breathe new life into the genre and help shape it for the next two decades, the Golden Age of the Hollywood Western. It feels like something new and special is afoot from the moment Ford introduces Wayne as the wrongly jailed outlaw nicknamed the Ringo Kid. The harsh crack of a gunshot stops a speeding stagecoach, and Ford zooms in frantically from a long shot of Wayne to a tight closeup of his face, the ghost of a smile dancing around his lips, his hat brim curved above that chiseled, square-jawed visage. It feels like Ford knew, from the moment he introduced his star, just how strongly this image would resonate: Wayne's entrance into the film is electrifying, the arrival of both the infamous outlaw and the new upcoming star.

Despite this emphasis, the Ringo Kid is only one of the nine passengers who winds up aboard the eponymous stagecoach, all heading in the same direction, braving dangerous territory plagued by warring Apaches, for very different reasons. The lawman Curly (George Bancroft) aims to stop Ringo from triggering a bloodbath at the end of the line, where he knows the three men who killed Ringo's father and brother are waiting. The prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor) and drunken doctor Boone (Thomas Mitchell) are being chased from town by the more "respectable" citizens, some of whom actually aren't as respectable as they'd like others to think. The suave gambler Hatfield (John Carradine) projects a gentlemanly image, but he might just be a cowardly killer, while the pompous Gatewood (Berton Churchill) is fleeing town with stolen payroll money. There's also the ill Lucy (Louise Platt), trying to reach her cavalry husband, the nervous whiskey salesman Peacock (Donald Meek), whose wares provide a temptation to Doc Boone, and the cracked-voice coach driver Buck (Andy Devine), who can't stop complaining about his Mexican wife and her seemingly endless supply of poor relations.

This motley crew is comprised of stock types, and the subtexts about social class and respectability are as broadly played as the humor: the other coach passengers are huffy and scornful of Dallas and Doc Boone, until they realize that both of these downtrodden people have much to offer in their generosity and compassion. Only Ringo, an outcast himself as an ex-con and a wanted outlaw, cares little about caste, and insists on referring to both Lucy and Dallas as "ladies," which of course earns Dallas' gratitude. The film's settings and characters are standards, familiar representations of the Old West, etched into the hard stone of the landscape: the wide expanses of dusty hardpan, the flat-top mesas and rocky abutments jutting up out of the ground. Ford draws with broad strokes, crafting iconic images of the stagecoach winding through the open country, kicking up a wake of dust behind it, the big dome of the sky overhead dotted with cotton fluffs of cloud. The film is painterly in its treatment of these Western vistas, which serve as a contrast to the more claustrophobic interior of the stagecoach, where Ford's compositions are necessarily simple in the cramped space.


Throughout the film, the threat of Indian attacks — and the inevitable showdown awaiting Ringo at the end of the line — looms over the stagecoach's journey, but it's mostly a slow-building tension until the climax. Things are relatively quiet for most of the ride, at least outside of the coach. The arguments among the passengers, largely motivated by class divides and various perceived slights, aren't nearly as interesting as the pictorial beauty of the surroundings. There's energy and poetry in Ford's exterior shots — a shadowy image of a silhouetted Ringo stepping up behind Dallas in the darkness, the countless shots of the coach speeding across the plains — even when nothing much is actually happening within the stagecoach. And of course the film's finale is exhilarating, with the Apache attack providing a perfect excuse for some fancy stuntwork, with jumps from one horse to another and daredevil leaps amidst the fray. The whole film was working towards this explosive action showcase, and one can't miss Ford's enthusiasm when, at the last minute, the cavalry rides in to save the day: a storied movie cliché that Ford invests with such vitality that it's hard to resist. The whole sequence is fun and fast-paced, and sets up Ringo's final shootout with the three brothers who killed his family and sent him to jail.

As one of the defining landmarks of the Western genre, the influence and importance of Stagecoach is hard to avoid. But it's far from a staid, outdated relic of its time, despite the extent to which its language and narrative devices have filtered down through the history of its genre ever since. The film's big cast of stock players is sometimes unwieldy, and its themes overly pat, but Ford's images project such grandeur, such a romantically beautiful image of the Western country and its heroes, that it's always obvious just why this film has remained so influential and well-loved.

Ride Lonesome

The penultimate film in Budd Boetticher's Ranown cycle of Westerns starring Randolph Scott is the masterful Ride Lonesome, one of the director's finest films. As the title suggests, Scott's Ben Brigade is certainly a loner, a bounty hunter on the track of cowardly killer Billy John (James Best), but throughout most of this film Brigade does not, in fact, ride alone. After catching up with Billy, who's wanted for shooting a man in the back — his jittery insistence that it was "a fair fight" seems pretty hilarious in light of the facts — Brigade soon enough finds himself tangled up in all sorts of problems beyond just getting Billy back to Santa Cruz to stand trial and, most likely, be hanged. Not only is Billy's vicious brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef) hot on Brigade's trail, but the bounty hunter runs into the stirrings of an Indian war that threatens to erupt at any minute. He finds the lovely Carrie Lane (Karen Steele) holed up at a waystation where she's waiting for her husband to return from gathering some lost horses. In her husband's absence, she's unwillingly acquired the company of Boone (Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn), two thugs and bandits whose bad reputation Brigade knows well. When it turns out that Carrie's husband has been killed by the Indians, who are now preparing to attack, the whole group throws in together, heading towards Santa Cruz with Frank and the Indians in pursuit.

This plot is basically a compendium of all sorts of Western standards shuffled together: the Indian attacks, the outlaws chasing the good guys towards a final showdown, the frontier woman who needs to be protected (though Carrie is, as usual for Boetticher, pretty tough in her own right). The film also borrows some of the basic scenario from Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur: like James Stewart in that film, Brigade is a somewhat unwilling bounty hunter, not the kind of man you would normally expect to be tracking other men for money. It's always obvious that not everything is as it seems here, that Brigade has some ulterior motive for what he's doing. This film also shares with Mann's film the tension of three men all vying for the same bounty, with their prisoner trying to play them against one another. Boone and Whit want to bring Billy in because there's an offer that anyone who delivers the outlaw will get their own crimes erased by amnesty — this is particularly appealing to Boone, who desperately wants to go straight, to be able to sleep without fear and set up a ranch of his own, that most common of Western goals. To achieve this, he's willing to endure this one last run, and even a possible face-off with Brigade, with whom he shares a good-natured, friendly rivalry.

As usual, Boetticher is remarkably even-handed in dealing with these characters, investing all three of the rival bounty hunters with well-developed personalities, never allowing Boone and Whit to become the villains of the piece despite their designs against Brigade. To some extent, this is because Van Cleef's Frank, who's barely present in the film, is established as such a horrifying villain entirely through exposition. Brigade describes a long-ago act of outrageous nastiness that only seems worse when Frank casually admits that he barely remembers doing it; he's such a thoroughly evil guy that even the worst crimes imaginable don't seem to make much of an impression on him. In comparison, Boone is simply a guy who's made some mistakes and wants his chance at redemption, while Whit is the folksy comic relief — who even gets a wonderful scene where he's genuinely surprised by his partner's generosity and friendship, shocked that he's viewed as more than just the goofy sidekick. This generosity is as much Boetticher's as Boone's: the director seldom views bit players and stock types as extraneous.


The recycled nature of Ride Lonesome's plot ensures that Brigade and his companions progress through a relatively predictable sequence of scenes familiar from countless other Westerns. The Indian attack sequence, in particular, feels like it could fit neatly in virtually any Technicolor Western of the period, with the heroes crouching down behind a low stone wall, the Indians charging around in circles along the perimeter like targets in a shooting gallery, waiting to be picked off. Boetticher dutifully hits notes like this, but he seems far more interested in the overall journey these characters are taking — and the final destination where all expectations are brilliantly upturned — rather than the stops along the way. Boetticher's Westerns are almost always formalist takes on the genre, whether in the taut suspense of The Tall T or the claustrophobic chamber set pieces of Decision at Sundown. Here, Boetticher is working in the wide open spaces of the West, resulting in some of his most stunning images. Much of the film takes place in long shots of flat vistas, where groups of horse riders are just black dots in the white sand, kicking up clouds of dust in their wake. Unlike, say, John Ford, who often used geography loosely and expressively, for its visual qualities rather than to convey a specific location, Boetticher's sense of space is precise. He uses landmarks and recurring scenery to indicate the progress of Frank's pursuing party, who pass through the same ground, framed from the same angles, as Brigade and his group. This gives the latter half of the film a rhythmic quality in its pacing, as scenes are repeated with different characters in the shot.

It all leads inexorably towards a stunning denouement, staged beneath the foreboding "hanging tree," a misshapen and sinister-looking cross that is a focal point for the bad blood between Frank and Brigade. Boetticher expertly builds tension leading up to the final scenes, with striking overhead shots where the characters are framed between the crooked limbs of the hanging tree. But Boetticher then defuses the tension twice over: the showdown with the dreaded Frank, who has been mostly built up while offscreen, is fast and economical, while the expected confrontation between Boone and Brigade never even comes. Instead, the film slows down for a finale centered more on the emotional conclusions of the character arcs (Brigade's thirst for revenge, Boone's desire for redemption, Carrie's quiet grief) rather than on action and violence. This unexpectedly moving ending is the payoff to Boetticher's attentive handling of character and location. Rather than delivering the fast and furious gunplay he seemed to be building towards, Boetticher makes the finale definitively about the characters, about their pain and desires and ambiguous plans for the future. Conflicting, complex emotions waft through the final scenes like the black smoke of the burning hanging tree, signaling the close of a circle of violence and the possibility of new, more hopeful paths branching off.