Harry Carey Jr. (in one of his first movies) makes the mistake of talking about his lovely wife waiting at home, so he gets killed in a stampede brought on by some idiot who steals sugar from chef Brennan – the movie’s way of saying that life is meaningless. Harry Carey Sr. (in one of his last movies) plays the happy-ending cattle buyer at their destination town. And John Ireland (the coward Robert Ford in I Shot Jesse James) is set up as Clift’s big rival, then his plot thread fizzles out. IMDB says Hawks wanted Cary Grant for the part – I guess Ireland wasn’t an exciting enough player to justify adding another twenty minutes to the film. Remade in the 80′s with James Arness, Ray Walston and LQ Jones.

As usual after we watch a Hawks movie, Katy and I shared an uneasy conversation about auteurism. She accused me of being a Hawksian auteurist, but I still can’t tell a Hawks movie from, say, a Billy Wilder or William Wellman movie. I just tend to like them is all.

I shouldn’t have to look up web articles about this movie since I have the BFI Film Classics book, but it turned out to be way boring. Senses of Cinema talks up Wayne’s oedipal relationship with Clift, then Intl. Cinema Review compares Clift’s and Ireland’s competitive gunfight to an orgasm, so apparently the movie was all about sex and Katy and I didn’t realize.

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Red River DVD

Eventually the viewer picks up that a small wagon train (three families) is being led by a paid guide named Meek (Bruce Greenwood, guy who hires Kirk in the Star Trek remake), who seems to be lost. Action is shown somewhat from the women’s point of view, so when the men converse, making big decisions that affect our trip, they don’t get to participate much, until the semi-liberated Williams starts butting in. The group’s fresh water supply is running out when they capture an Indian who’s been following them, and the men appoint him their guide instead of Meek. One family’s wagon is destroyed when traversing a hill, and the others pitch in to help, but nobody is ever shot, or even gets sick – unusual for a Western. The Indian leads them to a large tree, someone points out that water must be nearby, he wanders off unchallenged, end of movie.

It’s a weird choice, that ending, so to understand the screenwriting I turned to T. Stempel’s column “Understanding Screenwriting.”

I heard a sound from the audience I can’t recall ever having heard before. They laughed, and they seemed to be laughing at themselves for having been taken in for 100 minutes by a movie that is not even going to bother finish telling the story it started out to tell.

So he doesn’t know either, but it seems to me like a self-consciously indie thing to do, a Cache move, as if the director thinks her film will be less artistic if she gives us too much information. Anyway, Stempel also says “the picture is slow, which makes sense because journeying by covered wagon was slow,” but it’s not as slow as Old Joy. I don’t suppose I’ve fallen in love with any of her three films so far, but I always enjoy the experience enough to turn up for the next one.

A woman is singing a song about the virtue of virginity at the Palace when head honcho Greaser’s son Lamie Homo freaks out, getting himself shot dead for interrupting the entertainment. Soon “Jessy” parachutes into the Western movie, resurrects Homo, and goes about impressing everyone with his magic tricks such as walking on water and bleeding from his hands. Meanwhile, a woman wakes up finding her husband and son (cameo by six-year-old Robert Downey Jr.) dead, then loses all her worldly possessions and gets shot a bunch of times, crawling through the desert with no water. It all seems like it might be a metaphor for something.

The son and the holy ghost:

I didn’t get all the metaphors, though – Hervé “da plane” Villechaize is married to a bearded guy in a dress, Greaser has a constipation problem, Jessy’s entertainment agent walks around the desert as if underwater, characters are named Cholera, Coo Coo and Seaweedhead. On one hand it seems like a fun bit of anarchy – the movie can have a Monty Python-like comic sensibility – but if you check the web you’ll find articles willing to draw biblical connections to every last detail. Downey himself underplays it: “The idea of the trinity of the father and the son and the holy ghost parachuting into a western to get it right this time is all I went with.”

Jesse and Herve:

I’ve seen my share of mad westerns – Straight to Hell, The Last Movie, The Shooting – but this one played more like El Topo, seemed more desperate and dangerous than your usual movie, but never without a script and a plan. Unfamiliar cast – Allan Arbus (who’d later play director Gregory LaCava in a W.C. Fields bio-pic) as Jesus, Albert Henderson (of Serpico and Big Top Pee Wee) as Greaser, his main gal was Luana Anders, a Corman actress who followed Nicholson to Easy Rider and The Last Detail, and the Agent Morris was Don Calfa of Return of the Living Dead.

D. Carter:

Jessy is a meeker version of Christ, clear in his intentions but unsure how to accomplish them. … He is a showman, not a messiah or prophet. Walking on water and raising the dead are part of his “act,” and he only reluctantly offers the people advice after he is shown a picture of the Last Supper, calling into question whether Downey intended him to literally represent Christ or merely a Christ-like figure—though it’s most likely a cheeky attempt to obscure any deliberate meaning. Inspired by the image, Jessy comes up with the idea to tell the townspeople of a malevolent force called “Bingo Gas Station Motel Cheeseburger With A Side Of Aircraft Noise And You’ll Be Gary Indiana” living outside of the town, while reassuring them that he has interceded on their behalf because he believes them to be good people. It is a humorous analogue to the Christian belief of Christ’s intercession with God to save believers from Hell, but one that implies that belief is nothing but a parable intended to give people comfort.

“If ya feel, ya heal”

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Greaser’s Palace DVD

Complicated, exquisitely shot and acted movie, obviously based on a novel (I can’t explain – it just smells novelistic). Stanwyck and Huston have a near-incestual rivalry. She loves Juan (Gilbert Roland, who played bandit The Cisco Kid in six movies) who lives illegally on Huston’s land, and Huston marries gold digger Flo (Judith Anderson, sinister housekeeper in Rebecca). But after Stanwyck stabs her new stepmother in the face with scissors (!), Huston has Juan killed. Katy and I lost track of exactly how Stanwyck then claimed possession of her father’s land. She cozied up to rich gambler Rip (Wendell Corey, Janet Leigh’s dull boyfriend in Holiday Affair) then bought up her father’s outstanding I.O.U.s around the country and used those as payment when he sold off his animals, but then how did that prevent the bank from repossessing the land?

This is the first movie I’ve seen by Mann, who made three other movies in 1950, at least two of them considered great classics. That’s just how it used to work.

R. Wood for Criterion:

All of Mann’s westerns—unlike, for example, John Ford’s—suggest deep psychological disturbance, but those currents never again manifest themselves as blatantly and explicitly as they do in The Furies. Mann’s westerns … show little interest in history or in mythology; they are grounded in a fallen world of existential struggle in which the villains often become the heroes’ dark shadows. Typically, when he shoots down his enemy, the Mann hero experiences not triumph but exhaustion, almost prostration, as if he had forfeited a part of himself, his manhood.

Both Butch (Paul Newman, not long after Cool Hand Luke) and Sundance (Robert Redford, not long before The Candidate) love the same girl, Etta (Katharine Ross, Dustin’s younger love interest in The Graduate). That and the freeze-frame ending make me think director Hill and/or writer William Goldman were Truffaut fans. Conventionally edited (for the late 60′s) with the deaths abstracted away, mostly happening distantly or off-camera – who’d have known The Wild Bunch came out just a few months earlier? I’d find coincidence that the movie’s anti-heroes were hunted down and killed in Bolivia just like Che, except that both movies were based on true events, so instead I’ll just remember not to flee to Bolivia if I’m in trouble.

L-R: Ben Cooper, Crawford, Carradine, Hayden:

Made the year before Rebel Without a Cause, and the acting style seems like a warm-up for that picture. Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge play town rivals. These actresses were so mad that one had a movie made about how she abused her children, and the other voiced the devil in The Exorcist. They play everything so huge that when they finally meet for a shootout at the end, you can see sparks flying off the film. The women are the men in this picture. Town leader (Ward Bond: Rio Bravo and Wyatt’s older brother in My Darling Clementine) takes his cues from Mercedes, and the other two men are named Johnny Guitar and The Dancin’ Kid – not so tough.

The Kid offends McCambridge; Ward Bond looks on:

Johnny, a former gunfighter trying his luck as a musician, is Sterling Hayden (still a couple years before The Killing) and the Kid is Scott Brady (who starred in a not-so-well-loved Billy the Kid movie for William Castle this same year) with reasonable henchman Royal Dano and mean, irritable henchman Ernest Borgnine. Those fellows are kind of assholes but they’re not criminals – that is, not until a Mercedes-led mob tosses them out of town. Then they figure they might as well knock over the bank on the way out. Crawford is an entrepreneur like McCabe, opening a bar and gambling hall right where the train is gonna come through town. All she ever did wrong was to steal the Kid away from Mercedes. The mob shuts her down and almost hangs her after the bank heist. Her loyal employee (Stagecoach vet John Carradine) is killed and her place burned to the ground, so she hides out with the Kid’s gang until the mob tracks them town. Awesome final scene – the men all stand aside as the two women face off. Mercedes shoots the Kid in the head then gets blasted by Joan, who walks off with Johnny.

McCambridge stares down Crawford…

…while Hayden hides behind some wood:

Empire calls it “a truly demented Western, with vividly colourful settings and and an almost operatic intensity of emotional and physical violence … Best of all, the film acts as a vigorous indictment of the McCarthy witch-hunts; as a lynch mob rides after Crawford while McCambridge bullies witnesses into false confessions.” I suppose so – unlike the mobs in The Sun Shines Bright the previous year or Lang’s Fury, this one has a ringleader who eggs them on. In fact, as soon as Mercedes is shot, they’ve lost their voice – nobody moves or says a word as Johnny escorts Crawford past them all. There’s little doubt that writer Ben Maddow (blacklisted for being a lefty shortly after winning an oscar for The Asphalt Jungle) would’ve held a grudge with McCarthy.

My favorite shot: the (sharply dressed) mob looks past the body of The Kid:

The Guardian: “It is difficult to describe what makes Johnny Guitar so fascinating, except to say that Ray’s orchestration of Philip Yordan’s almost literary screenplay gives a small budget film, made for Republic Studios, a kind of heady but clipped dignity.”

Bunch of people who do not belong together are crammed into the stage to Lordsburg through dangerous Indian territory and their military escort has vanished. The long-dreaded attack comes, but they’re saved last-minute by the cavalry, and everyone learns a little something about each other. Lots more humor than I expected, too. It’s hardly a dry, stodgy classic. It’s hardly realistic either – you never forget that it’s a movie (in fact, sometimes it feels like a stage play).

John Wayne (in his star-making role after flying under-radar for his last hundred movies) shows up late, out for revenge on some guys who killed his brother, watched closely by Marshall Curley (George Bancroft, star of those Josef von Sternberg movies Criterion just put out). It seems weird now that Claire Trevor (Dark Command, Key Largo, that 60′s remake of Pickup on South Street) was first-billed in this. She’s a hottie haunted by her dark past (as a “saloon girl,” it seems, not a prostitute) and shunned by the right and proper other girl, pregnant Lucy (Hollywood short-termer Louise Platt of Street of Chance, Spawn of the North) who’s trying to meet up with her husband.

There’s an uptight crooked banker named Gatewood (Berton Churchill, the villainous senator in Judge Priest) who gets arrested upon arrival, after irritating everyone the entire way, and for comic relief, nerdy whiskey salesman Peacock (appropriately named Donald Meek, also of You Can’t Take It With You, Peter Ibbetson, Return of Frank James) and the seriously drunk Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell, who won an oscar for this, also with major parts in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, Only Angels Have Wings and The Hunchback of Notre Dame – all this same year!). The doc sobers up just long enough to deliver Lucy’s baby halfway through the trip, becoming everyone’s hero. I can’t tell if gentleman gambler Hatfield (John Carradine, who was playing Robert Ford in the Jesse James films around the same time) is a hero or not, dying in the attack (somebody had to) before he could blast Lucy in the head to spare her from Indian capture. And I loved coachman Andy Devine, whom Katy immediately pegged as the voice of Friar Tuck in Robin Hood. And oh yeah, when they get into town, lawman Curley lets Ford blow away his opponents then escape with Claire Trevor.

D. Cairns:

Stock types, but Nichols and Ford and the cast make them fresh by letting them bounce off one another in surprising ways. Character change elevates Stagecoach far above The Hurricane, where the cardboard figures blow in the wind but don’t bend. Nearly everybody in Stagecoach is either developed or transfigured during the adventure. Snooty Lucy transcends the prejudices of her upbringing via her growing respect for Dallas, and even the timid Mr. Peacock gains a little force. A family man, he is more able to assert himself after Lucy’s baby is born, even if nobody pays much attention. Curley, meanwhile, thanks to his exposure to that noble outlaw the Ringo Kid, abandons his rigid service to the law so a higher justice can be done. … Throughout the film, the Apaches are an anonymous threat, Geronimo a mere renegade with no motivation supplied. It’s the least nuanced portrayal of Indians in any of Ford’s classic westerns, though his relations with the Navajo extras were very warm—he even had a medicine man on retainer to arrange photogenic cloud formations for his camera.

We watched it on crummy netflix streaming, not on the gloriously restored, feature-rich new Criterion-edition blu-ray, so I have no supporting materials. You, however, should buy the Criterion from Amazon. Get two, and send me one:
Stagecoach (Criterion Collection) Blu-ray

Foolish me, I actually thought this wouldn’t be so Altmanesque. He made it right after MASH, but I’ve seen Images from the following year, so I’d convinced myself that he didn’t pick up the ensemble overlapping-dialogue thing again until ’75 with Nashville, making a few movies with a distinguishable soundtrack there in between. But no, this one was extremely ensembley and each noisy scene seemed to have been recorded with a room mic placed a couple rooms over. Katy points out that it may have exploded Western conventions in ’71, but now that they’ve been exploded for so long, we don’t see this as a very daring experiment, just a mushmouthed dialogue-heavy flick full of Leonard Cohen songs with a great chase/shootout ending.

McCabe:

Another disappointment: when Julie Christie finally showed up I was expecting a force of nature a la Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, but she doesn’t do much more than build a bath house and take over the whoring at Beatty’s new pub. As an article in The Guardian points out, our protagonists are “nothing like as confident as they would have us believe.” Recognized Shelley Duvall in a pretty small role as a mail-order bride and Michael “Tanner” Murphy as a businessman who fails to negotiate with Beatty over the sale of his land, leading to a snowy hide-and-seek shootout throughout the town, Murphy replaced by a gang of thugs who do not negotiate. I’m slowly learning my Carradines – a fresh-faced Keith (star of Fuller’s Street of No Return) played a doomed vacationing cowboy.

Mrs. Miller:

Mostly I liked the look, the feel, the light, the editing and pace. I wouldn’t say it had a documentary feel, but it felt like the scenes were happening on their own and the cameras were struggling to keep up (*). Has a good reputation these days, voted one of the greatest-ever westerns by some group or another. At the time, Christie lost her oscar to Jane Fonda, for something called Klute, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s hazy cinematography was only honored at the Baftas, where he was also nominated for Images.

(*) I thought that was a pretty neat thing I’d thought/written there about the movie, but when I went looking for articles I found that everyone else had thought it already. For instance, C. Taylor for Salon:

Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), is a hard-headed madam with dreams of her own, the ones emanating from her opium pipe. The movie feels as delicate, as lulling, as Mrs. Miller’s drug-induced visions, and yet the life it shows us, the town and its people, are so real and sturdy we seem to have stumbled on them. The life the movie shows us is already being lived by the time we turn up. And everything we encounter evolves naturally — the setting, the characters, the story and most of all the mood.

A. Danks for Senses of Cinema:

McCabe and Mrs. Miller follows the coordinates of the most rudimentary of westerns; full of archetypal and cliched characters and situations such as the loner/stranger who shakes up a frontier town and the whore-with-the-heart-of-gold. But these classical or archetypal elements are undermined by the film’s opaque view of its characters, its foregrounding of atmosphere and place (including the ‘atmosphere’ of place, weather), and a technique which captures characters (both their bodies and voices) within pictorial tableaux that emphasise their relativity to the unfolding drama. In this respect, parts of, and indeed images within McCabe and Mrs. Miller resemble a painting by the sixteenth century artist Pieter Bruegel; broken up into interlocking tableaux and brought up to date (i.e. into cinema) by the deployment of favourite Altman devices like the zoom, the pan and multi-tracked sound – these devices serving to distance the events and characters from the viewer while opening up the frame, and the relationship between frames, to the scrutiny of the spectator.

From Sam Fuller’s autobiography:

[Writer/producer Myles Connolly] and I started throwing around ideas for his picture. It was supposed to be about a character based on Tom Mix, the cowboy star of silent films who’d made scores of Westerns. Then came the talkies, and Mix didn’t make the transition successfully. Myles and I came up with a story about a silent cowboy star who doesn’t want to play a gangster role in a talkie because he wants to be loyal to his fans. He doesn’t want to disappoint the kids who are crazy about his Westerns. We called it Once a Hero, but after the movie went into production, they gave it the more commercial title of It Happened in Hollywood.

Harry Lachman, who’d been a successful painter in Paris, directed the picture. Lachman is forgotten today, but he made over thirty movies before he stopped directing in the early forties. Fay Wray played the female lead. This was after King Kong distinguished her from all the pretty blondes of the day as the one who could scream the best. the Tom Mix character, Tim Bart, was played by Richard Dix. It Happened in Hollywood was my first real credit on a picture.

Fay Wray, the one who could scream the best:

The name wasn’t changed soon enough – the Once a Hero title card made it onto the film. Celeb cowboy actor Bart is introduced screening his latest movie to sick kids, a real white-hat good-guy honest friendly lunkhead. He and his leading lady Gloria are called back to Hollywood for sound tests – she makes it but Bart, dressed in a silly period suit and made to speak out-of-character flowery dialogue, gets cut. Gloria later gets him a bit part as a gangster but he walks when the script is changed to make him a cop killer.

“The day of Westerns is over. We have to make the pictures indoors from now on.” Recalls The Naked City, which we watched the same week, finally making the pictures outdoors again.

Bart in gangster getup with his director:

Out of work and unpopular when a young fan comes to visit, Bart throws a party and invites all the stars’ doubles and stand-ins to delight the kid – the highlight of the picture. Some stand-ins do the voices better than others – Chaplin’s and Harold Lloyd’s have no problem since they don’t speak.

This is not W.C. Fields:

The improbabilities pile up… a realtor, after Bart to repossess his mansion while the party is being held, is kidnapped. Bart and Gloria tearfully confess to each other that they’re broke. The boy falls ill and the doctor says he can’t be moved. Tim hits his low point, about to reenact the bank robbery for real, ends up foiling a more serious bank robbery and shooting the criminals. Now a hero in the papers, he’s hired back by the studio, Westerns make a comeback and Tim opens a ranch for sick kids. That’s a better ending than Tom Mix got, touring with a circus after leaving the movies, marrying for the fifth time then dying when his car plunged into a ravine.

Did anybody realize that Blake Edwards made a movie in which Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) teams up with Wyatt Earp to solve a murder at the Academy Awards? It came out three months before Die Hard.

A boy in trouble:

Decent movie. I liked Richard Dix (who’d really been a silent film star, and not exclusively in Westerns) but Fay Wray made more of an impression. It all confused Katy, who knows Sam Fuller is some kind of badass and didn’t follow his connection with this movie. I didn’t either, honestly – assuming Power of the Press and Scandal Sheet will show off more of his style (I already know that Shockproof does).