Brandon's movie memory

A very good Wyatt Earp/Doc Holiday movie. Earp (Henry Fonda) is retired from the legendary fastest-gun-in-the-west lawman business, running cattle with his brothers, until his cattle is stolen and his youngest brother killed near Tombstone. Forms a tentative partnership with sickly, drunken badass Doc (Victor Mature) to take out the Clanton clan run by Walter Brennan (a real asshole, far from his lovable drunk character in To Have and Have Not). Schoolteacher Clementine comes to town looking for old flame Doc but finds him a changed man shacking up with his new love Chihuahua (my favorite character: Linda Darnell, conductor’s wife in Unfaithfully Yours) and while she’s hanging around town, Earp falls for her. Leads inexorably to a gunfight at the OK Corral, Doc and all the Clantons getting shot down. Much, much better than I’d expected from the title. I’m getting to like this John Ford fellow. Katy liked it, too.

Katy said it didn’t feel very JohnFordian, but it did to me, because two thirds of my previous John Ford experience consisted of Judge Priest and The Sun Shines Bright. Takes place in a small town in the south – there’s mob violence and a courtroom climax, and along the way we hear “Dixie” more than once. Sounds extremely Fordian to me. In fact I’m thinking Atlanta-born writer Lamar Trotti, who also cowrote Judge Priest, could stand to vary his game.

Two simple men and their simple mother (Alice Brady, the mom in My Man Godfrey, in her final film) were enjoying simple pleasures in town when they got in a fight with a blowhard and he ended up dead. Blowhard’s buddy Ward Bond (John Wayne’s old friend in Rio Bravo) says they stabbed the blowhard, so off to jail they go. Fortunately, hat-wearing slave-freeing superhero Abe Lincoln (Henry Fonda with a fake nose, looking spookily Lincolnesque in the occasional profile shot) stops the angry lynch mob by picking on them one at a time (a la Sun Shines Bright) and agrees to defend the kids, in between watching his girlfriend (Pauline Moore) die and meeting a new girlfriend (Marjorie Weaver, the lady in The Cisco Kid And The Lady). It’s all based on a completely true story! Except that it was a blunt weapon, not a knife, and the accused men weren’t brothers, and one of them (the one not defended by Lincoln) was convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned for six years, and Lincoln got the other guy acquitted but there was no sneaky buddy to take the fall instead.

Movie slides along peacefully and slowly builds. Very pretty in parts. I’d need to read more or study further to figure why this was one of Sergei Eisenstein’s favorite films… missing something, as usual.

Not as interesting as Sam Fuller’s later I Shot Jesse James, but a lot better than I’d expected. Maybe I can enjoy a Western more than I’d thought. Some story differences, too… for instance, Fuller’s movie has Bob Ford re-enacting the murder as a play pretty much the same way it happened, while Lang’s has the Fords camping it up onstage and acting the heroes. Don’t know which really happened, but each version was well-suited to its own movie.

Henry Fonda is James, hears news of Jesse’s death and sets out with young Jackie Cooper (not Jackie Coogan) to get Bob Ford (a nervous bearded John Carradine) and brother Charlie.

Not technically the last Fritz Lang film I have to see, but the last one available until Human Desire shows up on cable again. That’s 36 down, 1 to go! Guess I’ve been trying to watch all of Lang’s movies since college, so seven years. At around five per year, it didn’t go nearly as fast as my Sam Fuller quest. Even if I didn’t pick up on the geometric patterns hidden within Lang’s mise-en-scene that auteurists wet themselves over, it was neat to see forty years of cinema from one director’s perspective. He covered 1920 to 1960, the period I know least about, and Sam Fuller was 1950 to 1990. And they both made so many movies… gives me a convenient handle on chronology. Oh, 1953, that was the year Pickup On South Street and The Big Heat came out. Anyway, on now to Bunuel, Rivette, Marker and Resnais for a western european perspective.