Lance Mannion

The Good Raylan, the Bad Raylan, and…Don Draper?

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, not to be confused with Don Draper…or, for that matter, with Raylan Givens.

May not seem the best way to begin a book review, making comparisons between two TV shows.  But here goes.

The book in question is Raylan, Elmore Leonard’s latest novel.  Makes sense, then, that one of the TV shows I’m going to look into here is Justified.  Justified is based on a character Leonard introduced in two novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap, and a short story, "Fire in the Hole"---Deputy United States Marshal Raylan Givens, a slow-talking, quick-shooting, white cowboy hat-wearing lawman helping to bring law and order to the coal mining region of 21st Century Kentucky, which is for all intents and purposes Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone circa 1880 with reliable cell phone coverage.

Towns---whole counties---are wide-open. Crime is a bulwark of the economy, particularly the dealing of meth and oxycontin and the growing and selling of marijuana. Armed robbery is a daily hazard. Buses get held up like stage coaches. Banks get held up like...well...banks. People cross back and forth across the line between outlaw and honest citizen, sometimes in the course of an afternoon. Guns are everywhere and it seems more people die by bullet in car accidents or from old age. And many of these casualties met their justified demises after making the mistake of drawing on Raylan Givens.

I’ve lost count, and I suspect Justified’s producers have too, but over the course of three seasons Raylan may have carved more notches in his gun than Marshall Matt Dillon carved in twenty.  It’s getting embarrassing to the point that the show has become conscious of itself on that point.  Cracks appear in the fourth wall whenever characters discuss Raylan’s latest showdown.  In some episodes now, you can feel the writers scrambling to contrive ways for Raylan not to shoot anyone. 

Raylan, the novel, chronicles some of Raylan’s adventures outside what we’ve seen so far in episodes of the TV show and recapitulates a few things we’ve seen in episodes of Season Two. So I can hardly write about the book without writing about the TV show.

But the other TV show I’ll be writing about?

Mad Men.

Different types of shows. Different settings. Different genres. Different styles. Different aesthetics. Different ambitions. Different almost everything.

But their leading men have more in common than just both being tall, dark, and handsome.  Don Draper and Raylan Givens are both men with burdensome pasts.  Both have mean streaks that get them into trouble and get them out of it.  Both have self-destructive impulses.  Both can’t walk away from situations they know they’ll regret not having walked away from later.  Raylan is not as self-indulgent as Don but he is not a paragon of self-denial.  Put something in front of him he wants bad enough and he’ll reach for it.

Fortunately, Raylan is a man of few needs and ordinary desires, mainly love and sex.

Which is how he’s wound up sleeping with a witness in one of his cases and having an affair with his ex-wife while she’s married to the man she left him for.

Don can’t be happy because everything he has is stolen, in a way.  I should say he can’t be allowed to be happy because he is a fictional construct in a moralist’s universe.  Matthew Weiner is making an example of him to make a point.

Don is what is wrong with America.  He can’t be content or enjoy himself because that takes discipline and focus.  He is living a life that many people would consider ideal.  On other TV shows and in movies it is ideal.  But he’s not living his life.  His mind is too much in the past and in the future. 

On Mad Men, all the characters are being contradictorily punished. They're being punished for the sin of being themselves and punished for the sin of wanting to be somebody other than who they are. Don is only the chief sinner.  The character all the others double.  Roger, Peggy, Pete, Joan, Betty, and Lane are just as divided between who they are and what they want to be as Don.  Damned if they do and damned if they don't because they are just damned.  Their lives are little, private hells of their own making.

Leonard is not a moralist.  In his fictional universe, life is what it is.  People are happy or they're not. It depends on their circumstances, but more on their temperaments. In Leonard’s world, there are cheerful villains, grumpy ones, soft-hearted ones, tortured ones made miserable by doubt, conscience, personal sorrows, worries, ulcers, headaches, bad backs, bad marriages, leaky faucets, insomnia, or congenital irritability.  And it’s the same for the good guys.  Sins aren’t punished here.  Mistakes can cost you, but not always and when they do not as much as you’d expect or far more than they should.  There is no purpose or meaning to life except what we bring to it. It's full of pleasure and pain, sorrow and bliss, but it's all mixed up and spread unevenly, not available to everyone equally.  Up to us to make the best of it as we can.

One of the great favors we do for each other is treat each other as if our existence matters and our lives have meaning. The threat from the sociopaths, people for whom order and meaning have no meaning and not the least bit interested in helping you maintain the illusion that you matter, isn't only physical, it's metaphysical.

Like Don, Raylan gets himself in trouble over women. Unlike Don, however, he is loyal and chivalrous and always ready to help a lady in distress. Don requires rescuing.  Raylan, in riding to the rescue, has done things for Ava and Winona that he knows could cost him his career, his freedom, and his life.

Both men are heroes in the eyes of others, but far from heroic in their own minds.  They are conflicted, tormented, guilt-ridden, and tempted towards self- destruction. Raylan’s life is as full of turmoil and worry as Don Draper's and, although not as much or as constantly, still requires some lying, deception, and double-dealing to keep it together.  The differences are that Raylan, although by necessity, is a liar he is not a fraud so he can take some pride in himself for doing his job well .  Work for Don is at best an escape from himself. He can lose himself in the act of creation, which is to say, by creating new fictions or, if you’re a cynic about advertisting, new lies to sell to the public.   Raylan can be himself at his best while at work.  And he's basically a cheerful man.

Not a happy one.

Just a cheerful one.  And that makes him capable of the kind of small moments of pleasure and joy Draper is denied.

He's also a friendly man. He likes people. He enjoys their company. He gets a kick out of their quirks and idiosyncrasies. He's tolerant of their flaws and foibles, forgiving of their mistakes, and sympathetic in their moments of vanity and weakness. He is glad to see things from other's points of view.  To a degree, and, again to a degree, this includes criminals he's come to arrest.

The point isn't that Raylan is a better person than Don Draper. That’s irrelevant to a discussion of fictional characters.  But the point isn't that Raylan is a superior creative achievement either. He's a more easily likable character and that makes it more fun in the usual sense to watch Justified than Mad Man. The point is---because remember this is still a book review---that none of that cheerfulness, good nature, or friendliness is in the Raylan we meet in Leonard's novel.

The Raylan of Justified is full of displaced and barely sublimated angers and resentments.  The Raylan of Raylan is more ornery than angry.  The Raylan of Justified is mostly in control of his wants and desires. Mostly.  Raylan’s Raylan is not self-indulgent but he's not self-denying either.  The TV Raylan is a social drinker. The novel's Raylan likes a drink and has one when he wants one.  He has more self-regard.  He is full of self regard, in fact. But he is less self-regarding. He takes himself for granted.  It's enough for him that he's one of the good guys and nothing that happens in the book makes him doubt that even in the way the TV Raylan doubts it about himself, by recognizing that he's tempted by the same things as people he knows are bad guys or sinners. The book's Raylan isnt tolerant or forgiving or the least bit sympathetic.  He's just indifferent.

People's motives or characters make him no never mind. He doesn't like or dislike anybody. He gets along with them or he doesn't. If it happens that he has to put someone he gets along with in jail, that's how it breaks. Doesn’t mean though they can't go right along getting along until he has to out the cuffs on them...or shoot them.  Which is how he nearly winds up in bed with each of the book's two femme fatales, even though he knows both are murdering sociopaths who intend to kill him.

That’s not something it’s easy to imagine happening to Raylan on Justified.  His weakness lies in the opposite direction.  Justified turns the film noir convention around.  It’s not the femme fatales who undo the hero.  It’s the good women.

The two Raylans are that much different that as I was reading I wondered what Leonard was up to.  I’d expected that the novel would be a companion to the TV show but as it went along it seemed more like a critique and a correction.  I suspected Leonard of trying to steal his character back from himself and bring him back in line with Raylan as he was in Pronto and Riding the Rap. 

Then I got to thinking that what I see in the character of Raylan on Justified has been put there by Timothy Olyphant who plays him as an affable, easy-going, self-effacing, hopeful and, let me repeat, cheerful man.  On the surface, at any rate.  He’s turned his lawman from Deadwood, Seth Bullock, inside out.  Bullock wore his anger and self-doubt along with his righteousness, his resolve, his grit, and his potential for violence on the outside, symbolized by his black hat, black frock coat, and black mustache. Olyphant plays Raylan as more Jimmy Stewart as Tom Destry by way of Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp than himself as Seth Bullock. 

But it’s not just Olyphant.  The show’s writers and producers, who include Leonard, although Graham Yost is the creative guiding hand, routinely put Raylan in the company of or up against characters he can interact with with kindness and warmth or at least react to with kindly and warm amusement.

He has his friends among the other marshals and lawmen and women.  He has, on and off, Winona and Ava.  He had someone I won’t mention by name in case any of you who watch the show haven’t made it through Season Two yet.  He has bonds of sympathy and history with any number of villains he’s crossed paths with.  Most dramatically intriguing he has his complicated relationship with his sometime friend, sometime enemy Boyd Crowder.  And then there are the victims of the bad guys’ crimes and depredations towards whom Raylan is usually, although not always, comforting, protective, more than necessarily and professionally helpful, and deeply sympathetic.

In the novel, the other marshals are on hand only to provide exposition.  Ava is offstage entirely. Winona only enters to be quizzed about Raylan by the femme fatale but never gets near Raylan himself.  Boyd figures prominently in the story but he and Raylan barely come into contact.  The villains are all either lowlife scum with no redeeming characteristics even as comic relief---except for Dewey Crowe who appears pretty much as he does in the TV show, being so stupid you can’t help but feel sorry for him and rooting for him to survive even though he’s put himself in a position where his continued survival isn’t just in doubt it would be a gigantic mistake on the part of fate---or they are grinning and leering sociopaths, including the femme fatales.  And the only victim Raylan has any fellow feeling for is himself.

But the even bigger disappointment waiting for fans of Justified is the immediate recognition of having been there and done that.

The central storyline of Raylan is taken pretty much straight from three episodes of Season 2 of Justified in which Boyd is hired as a “security expert” and bodyguard by a scheming mining company executive who intends to manipulate him into committing murder. And if the Raylan as written in the novel makes you appreciate what Timothy Olyphant has brought to the role, then Boyd’s appearance in the novel will have you in awe of what Walton Goggins has been doing with the character on Justified.

Meanwhile, the chief villain of the subplot, Dewey Crowe’s uncle Pervis Crowe will seem awfully familiar and sadly imitative.  He’s a male Mags Bennett.  Almost.  He runs a criminal fiefdom similar to Mags, being, like her, the chieftain of all the marijuana growing and the attendant criminality in Harlan County.  He runs the same legitimate business as a front, a general store.  He has two equally dimwitted sons with the same first names as Mags’, Dickie and Coover.  He even repeats many of Mags’ lines of dialog, word for word.

But since he’s not played by Margo Martindale or written to be played by Margo Martindale, he has none of Mags’ superior intelligence, none of her deceptively cuddly parental warmth, none of her wit, none of her manipulative charm, and none of her capacity for real hate and violence because he doesn’t have a heart, even a black and twisted one like Mags’.  He’s just a mean and greedy old coot who doesn’t care who gets hurt as he pushes people out of his way as he schemes for what he wants.  We believe it breaks Mags’ heart to have to smash her own son’s fingers to bloody pulps with a hammer, because for her it’s the case that a mother has to do what a mother has to do.  And we believe that Pervis could shrug off without a tear or a pang anything that might befall his boys as long as it also doesn’t befall him.  But who’s the more interesting and fun to believe in, the dirty old man with a hole where his soul ought to be or the devoted mother whose love is perverted to the point that she can think of torture as just her version of a grounding and who assures a man she’s just poisoned that she will look after his about to be orphaned teenage daughter as if she’s confident he will appreciate and be grateful for this kindness as he writhes in agony?

Which brings me back to the question of just what Leonard is up to with the novel?  Who did he write it for?  For fans of the show looking for something to enjoy while waiting for Season 3 to come out on DVD or Season 4 to roll around, it fails for the obvious reason---if you want repeats you can watch Season 2 on DVD.  As an introduction to the TV show for fans of Leonard’s writing who may not have watched any of Justified yet, it has the problem of leaving out just about everything that is likeable, enjoyable, and intriguing about the show.  And for fans of Leonard’s writing who don’t care that there’s a TV show with the same characters, I think it’ll be a disappointment.  There’s a slapdash quality to Raylan, as if it was put together in a hurry out of spare parts with the intention of just putting something on the road until something better rolls out the shop doors.  And I think I know why.

Raylan is a cut and paste job.

I think what we have here is a hastily stitched together collection of adaptations of scripts and treatments Leonard wrote for Justified that Graham Yost and his writers re-wrote and made better.

Damn.

In the last fourteen or so months I’ve written around twenty-five book reviews and only two have been negative.  This one makes three and wouldn’t you know, it’s of a book by one of my favorite writers.

But there are reasons Leonard’s one of my favorite writers and those reasons are on display in the book, so reading it wouldn’t be a total waste of time.

I just think that if you haven’t seen Justified yet, you’ll have more fun introducing yourself to that.

Raylan by Elmore Leonard, published by William Morrow, available from Amazon in two varieties, hardcover and kindle.

Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the short story collection that includes “Fire in the Hole” are available in paperback and kindle editions.

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as politics by other means

Wyatt Earp, second from left in the front row, with other members of the ironically named Dodge City Peace Commission, including Luke Short, second from the left in the back row, and, to the right of Short, wearing a bowler, Bat Masterson.  The photo was taken about a year and a half after the shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.  Earp was back in Kansas because, as shown in Jeff Guinn’s The Last Gunfight, the political and legal repercussions from the gunfight made life in Tombstone rather uncomfortable for him.

Wyatt Earp wasn’t Wyatt Earp.  The gunfight at the O.K. Corral wasn’t the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  Or My Darling Clementine.  Or even Tombstone.

Earp was a grouchy part-time civil servant and three-quarters time gambler with pathetically small political ambitions, and the gunfight was an attempt to roust a bunch of drunks that got out of hand partly because Earp, who really had no business being there, was in a foul mood over a series of disappointments brought about by political rivalry with the county sheriff, who should have been there to break things up before the shooting started, who in fact had been there, but had decided that it was in his political interests to get the hell out of the way.

In The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West, author Jeff Guinn’s take on the showdown between the Earps and the Clanton Gang is that instead of its being a tale of western adventure and derring-do of now legendary proportions, it’s a story of local politics of the most typical and banal sort, except that, unfortunately, a number of people involved were in the habit of carrying guns.

The gunfight and its bloody aftermath came about as a roundabout result of the political rivalry between Wyatt Earp and the county sheriff, Johnny Behan.

Let’s get this out of the way right off.  As most people know by now, what happened in Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881 wasn’t a heroic showdown between the forces of good and evil. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday weren’t there either as gunslingers with murder in their hearts or as avenging agents of law and order.  They were there as deputies to Wyatt’s brother, Virgil, who himself was there as a police officer on what should have been a fairly routine drunk and disorderly call.  And they didn’t shoot it out with a gang of dangerous and deadly desperados.  Only one of the men they faced down, Billy Claiborne, qualified as any sort of gunfighter and that only by way of Claiborne’s own boasting and one barroom murder, and he ran for it before the shooting started.  The others were a hot-headed young rancher with more pride than sense, a pair of teenage boys with too much to prove in their own eyes, and a drunken loudmouth and coward who conveniently had no gun on him and successfully begged for his life when Earp had him in his sights.

They would Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton, and Ike Clanton.

And they’d all had too much to drink.

They didn’t stand a chance.

Which everybody on both sides would have known going in.

The afternoon should have ended with the Clantons and the McLaurys being sent home to sleep it off.  How it turned out to end in bullets and blood has a lot to do with local politics at the time.

Guinn doesn’t exactly argue that what happened in down a back street in Tombstone---it wasn’t actually fought in the corral, that was just the most well-known local landmark for the newspapers to point to when describing where it went down---was politics carried out by other means.  He has set out to show that Wyatt Earp and his brothers and Doc Holliday were where they were, doing what they were doing that day and the Clantons and the McLaurys and Billy Claiborne were where they were, doing what they were doing, and everybody involved was in the moods they were in as a result of a series of events that grew out of local politics.

To put it briefly, if, among other things that might have happened in the political arena, Sheriff Johnny Behan hadn’t felt it politically expedient to break a promise he made to Wyatt and Earp had been appointed deputy sheriff as he felt he should have been, things probably would have worked themselves out differently.

At the center of The Last Gunfight is an extended comparison and contrast between the characters of Wyatt Earp and Johnny Behan.  Behan’s at an unfair advantage in a competition for readers’ sympathy because it’s hard to see the real Wyatt Earp through the layers of superimposed images of James Garner and Hugh O’Brien and Burt Lancaster and Henry Fonda.  Even so, when Guinn is able to strip away the myths and the legends so we meet Earp as he was, unsociable, mean-tempered, and not particularly devoted to any cause or principle except the main chance, Behan still comes out the worse. basically because of this.  Behan was a born politician.  Wyatt Earp wasn’t.

Earp came from a struggling middle class family of small farmers with vague ambitions of rising in the world by any means except farming.  Wyatt Earp and his brothers---and there were several more besides Virgil and Morgan, the two who were with Wyatt outside the O.K..Corral---drifted around the West, sometimes separately, sometimes in pairs, trying their hands at this and that, usually to not much success.  Wyatt routinely found work as a lawman and in Kansas he developed a reputation for being able to handle the cowboys who liked to celebrate the ends of cattle drives by getting drunk, getting into fights, getting into places that had no business getting into, and then reaching for a gun or a knife or a broken bottle when someone tried to tell them the fun was over.  Earp was big, strong, brave, and ornery, and very convincing when he told someone it was time to break it up and go sleep it off.

He was almost always able to do this convincing without firing his own gun.

Other men he worked with and worked for, including Bat Masterson, admired him for his courage, toughness, and reliability.  He was also relatively honest.  Too honest for his own good sometimes.

It’s not clear why Earp never stuck with any of these jobs for long.   As Guinn tells the story, it appears that a mixture of factors contributed to Earp’s developing a spotty resume as a lawman, a key one being that the jobs were political, that is, they were in one way or another patronage jobs, and Earp didn’t have a continuous streak of luck in choosing his patrons.

He also had a way of rubbing people he needed to like him the wrong way and of letting his temper get the better of him.  And he was restless, in spirit and in his ambitions, small as they were.  He seems to have had a habit of convincing himself that success was always over the next hill.

But early in his adult life he also developed a taste for running for office himself.  He ran for and was elected to several minor positions over the course of time, all of them some form of policeman---town constable, deputy sheriff, and the like.  He doesn’t seem to have been the type to have taken naturally to the glad-handing and back-slapping and public displays of good nature running for office requires, but either he was able to do what he needed to do despite his temperamental inclinations or his reputation or his connections carried the day for him, because he won often enough that by the time he landed in Tombstone in 1879, he was confident enough in his political skills to believe that this was it, his big opportunity.  There were several offices he was suited for and he managed to obtain a couple of them, including deputy U.S. Marshal and, for a time, deputy sheriff.  But the one he had his eye on, the one he coveted most, because it was the one that would raise him farthest and fastest on the social and economic ladders, was county sheriff.

Among their duties, sheriffs collected taxes and as part of their pay they got to keep a percentage of what they collected.

Seems, appears, possibly…these are words that occurred to me rather often in connection with Wyatt Earp as I was reading The Last Gunfight whenever Guinn is trying to give some insight into Earp’s thoughts and motives.

As a law officer, and also as a defendant, Earp did a lot of testifying in court over the years.  Court records show him to have been intelligent, articulate, self-aware and reflective.  But these records and some newspaper articles are about all the primary sources we have to draw on in trying to get to know the real Wyatt Earp.  He wasn’t a letter-writer, he didn’t keep a journal, and if he was any sort of a conversationalist he didn’t do his conversing with anyone inclined to write down in detail what he said at the time or later.  Towards the end of his life he decided to write his autobiography, but he didn’t chose the most talented of ghost writers and, because his point was to make money and Earp hoped to sell his story to the movies, he shaped it accordingly, which is to say he lied.

It’s worth remembering that movies were still silent at the time.  So the emphasis was on Wyatt Earp as a man of action, defining himself through deeds of derring-do, a heroic and dashing figure constantly putting himself in danger in the line of duty and getting himself through it all with a cool head and a keen eye and quick draw.

The trouble with this was that Earp’s solid reputation as a lawman was based on his not having had to shoot it out with the bad guys in the line of duty.  Except for what happened at the O.K. Corral, which was a mistake, and then what he may have done on his infamous Vendetta Ride, which was murder, almost the only times Marshal (or Deputy or Constable or Police Officer) Wyatt Earp drew his gun was to hit a drunk over the head with it.

In short, in order to sell himself as the fit subject for a movie, Earp pretty much had to make himself up.

The resulting autobiography, which was never published, was a badly written assortment of tall tales, exaggerations, idealizations and romanticizations, white lies, black lies, gray lies, and out and out whoppers intended to turn Wyatt Earp into the sort of heroic character who could be played by the cowboy star, and Earp’s friend, William S. Hart.  It was not meant to be at all helpful to future historians intent on telling the true story of what happened in Tombstone in October of 1881.

What this means for scrupulous biographers like Guinn is that they have a subject about whose personality there is no  reliable record.  At the center of The Last Gunfight is a character who has no inner life, not one that can be known in depth or even plausibly inferred.  Seen on his own, Wyatt Earp comes across as a man who didn’t do all that much and had less to say about it.

Johnny Behan is more knowable, at least as a type of young politician on the make.  But he cheerfully made himself more of a public figure and so more people were paying attention to him.  Guinn’s Wyatt Earp gets defined for us as not like Johnny Behan.  So where Behan is outgoing and gregarious, Earp appears gloomy and taciturn.  Where Behan is cheerful, good-humored, and fun-loving, a man who never entered a bar he wasn’t immediately at home in or was handed a drink he didn’t down in a gulp, Earp comes across as morose, irritable, and something of a prig---there was a period after his first wife died when he drank heavily, but he gave it up and was stone-cold sober all the rest of his life, and if he never actually ordered milk in a bar, he rarely ordered whisky for himself either or anything else more potent than water.

Behan enjoyed attention and he courted scandal.  He was a compulsive philanderer with a penchant for seducing other men’s wives.  Although this doesn’t appear to have ever gotten him in enough trouble with the husbands to put his life in danger, it did earn him a scandalous divorce, and threatened to derail his political career a couple of times.  Somehow he managed to survive the scandals and bounce back.  Which probably, possibly, likely, I’m guessing infuriated his political rivals like Wyatt Earp.  But probably, possibly, more likely, I’d bet what made Earp madder was that Behan got himself elected and re-elected sheriff without being all that good at the job.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t out and out incompetent.  But he wasn’t particularly tough and nowhere near as physically intimidating or resilient as Wyatt Earp and that meant he wasn’t the best man to break up a bar fight or, considering what a chase after outlaws through the bare mountains and desert plains of southeastern Arizona entailed, lead a posse.  And he wasn’t quick to act, possibly because it took him some time to work up his courage, but also because he took too much time weighing the political consequences of any and every decision before making them, which contributed to what happened at the O.K. Corral.

Behan was was an opportunist.  But Wyatt Earp could be as self-interested and self-serving.  The big difference between the two is that when Earp was on the job, he was on the job.  He thought that doing the job well was the point and he believed that if the right people saw him do the job they would recognize and reward his good work. 

Behan understood that life didn’t work that way.  Not a life in politics anyway.  Behan knew that getting the right people to see him do the job and convincing them that he was doing it the way they wanted it done was part of doing the job.

At the end of the day, Earp expected to hear, “Good job, Wyatt.”  Behan expected to hear it too but he knew that the proper reply wasn’t a laconic “Thanks, pard.”  It was, “I couldn’t have done it without your help and advice, sir.”

He knew that the people who were glad to have you doing their bidding while you were doing it had a tendency to forget your existence when you were out of their sight so he learned never to be the first person to leave the room, so to speak.  Earp didn’t even know which room to enter.

Apparently, seemingly, possibly, etc…

But that would go a long way towards explaining why Behan was sheriff and Earp wasn’t.  And although for other reasons I’ll get to Sheriff Wyatt Earp might not have done a better job of defusing the situation that fateful day, it’s probable that had he been sheriff the situation wouldn’t have arisen.

To see how that would have come about you have to know that Behan was a Democrat, and Wyatt Earp was a Republican and understand that in Arizona Territory in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Democrats and Republicans stood for almost exactly the opposite of what they stand for today.

The Republican Party was still the party of business, but businessmen in Tombstone understood that in order for their businesses to succeed and thrive they needed some things that only a strong, centralized government could provide, law and order and infrastructure.  Because Arizona was still a territory not a state, they looked to Washington for that government and consequently Republicans tended to see Arizona as a part of much larger whole.  The Republicans were then the party of public works, civic improvement, and putting national as opposed to regional interests ahead of other political considerations.

The Democrats in Arizona were dominated by transplanted Southerners, many of them Texans.  The Civil War was still raging in their heads and antipathy to the federal government, that is, to government by the Yankees in Washington, was reflexive.  And many of them, because so many were Texans, were ranchers and cowboys or small business owners in small towns that depended on and served the ranches.  Tombstone was a mining town, booming on silver.  But it fed itself on beef.  So the ranchers had their representatives among Tombstone’s elite, as well.

But here’s where the trouble really starts.  Ranching was something of a semi-legitimate business.  That part of Arizona was not the best cattle country, to put it mildly.  Most of the ranches were small outfits, the ranchers unable to afford to maintain large herds or to buy cattle to restock their herds on the open market.  Many of them, then, depended on rustling to keep themselves afloat.  Some of them, like the Clantons, actively engaged in it.  Most though, like the McLaurys, did business with rustlers while pretending not to know where the rustlers got the cattle they bought from them.

This meant that it was in a lot of Democrats’ interest to protect the rustlers.  The movies have promoted the Clanton Gang as the bad guys in the story, but the actual Clantons were just a family of ne’er do wells who sometimes ranched and sometimes rustled.  There was a gang of outlaws in the area, known as the Cowboys---at the time, the word didn’t have the more innocent and romantic connotations it soon came to have.  When people talked about cowboys as “cowboys” it was something like people today talking about motorcyclists as “bikers.”---and Ike Clanton, at least, was friends with some of the Cowboys and sometimes rode with them.  And many of the Cowboys did not limit their criminal activity to rustling.  They liked to supplement their income by robbing stage coaches.  But they felt protected by their Democratic rancher friends and felt free to come and go in Tombstone as they pleased.  Which did not sit well with the Republican business owners and other solid citizens and their representatives in local law enforcement, including and especially Wyatt Earp.

As a good and trusty Republican representative of law and order, Earp despised the Cowboys and resented the Democrats who protected them.  But it got personal.  And while his quarrel was really with more notorious and dangerous Cowboys like Curly Bill Brocius and the truly deadly Johnny Ringo, Ike Clanton, by virtue of being a drunken idiot and shooting his mouth off too often while being in the wrong place at the wrong time, earned Earp’s especial enmity.

Earp wasn’t any too fond of the McLaurys either and they returned the favor.

A string of events caused the feelings of Wyatt and his brother Morgan and his best friend Doc Holliday to be running even more than usually high against Clanton and the McLaurys that day and the McLaurys to be feeling just as angry.  And then Ike Clanton tied one on really good.

The McLaurys had had a few themselves.

Things were coming to a head, and it should have been up to Johnny Behan to take care of it.  But as usual he was slow to act because he couldn’t make up his mind as to what action he should take would be most in his political interests. As a good and trusty Democrat, Behan didn’t feel he could take the side of the Earps against the McLaurys and the Cowboys.  On the other hand, he was the sheriff and if he expected to continue in the job and then move up from it, it wouldn’t look good if he hid in his office all day.

Meanwhile, Virgil Earp, Wyatt’s older brother who was Tombstone’s chief of police, had his own political considerations to worry about.  His instincts, which were usually sound, told him that the Clantons and the McLaurys were just blowing off steam and that if left alone they’d probably calm down and leave town on their own.  But he was under pressure from town leaders, mainly Republicans, to do something.

What he would have liked to have done was nothing.  What he knew would have been best to do, go down to the O.K. Corral with his two police officers to talk sense to Frank McLaury, he couldn’t do because both officers had been on night duty and were home sleeping and Virgil, under pressure from the people who were in essence his bosses, didn’t think he had time to send someone to wake them up.  What he did, then, was probably the worst thing he could have done.

Not thinking it wise to confront the McLaurys and the Clantons all on his own, Virgil turned for back-up to the men he trusted best in potentially dangerous situations, his brothers Morgan and Wyatt.

Doc Holliday fell in with them, partly out of loyalty to Wyatt, probably mostly out of hatred for Ike Clanton who routinely threatened to kill him.

The rest is history…

Well, legend.

The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West, by Jeff Guinn, published by Simon & Schuster, is available from Amazon in hardback and kindle editions.

Excerpt. Frank McLaury isn’t about to let anyone think he’s intimidated by Wyatt Earp.

Meanwhile, just a few yards away on Fourth Street, Wyatt Earp glared into Spangenberg’s through the store’s front window.  After pistol-whipping tom McLaury, Wyatt had gone to Hafford’s Saloon on the corner of Fourth and allen, where he bought a cigar and stood smoking it.  He watched Ike Clanton come down the street and go into the gun shop and then saw Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton join Ike there after they met and briefly spoke with Billy Claiborne, who Wyatt must have known had recently killed someone in Charleston.  Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton were stuffing bullets into their gun belts.  Wyatt could only assume that they were preparing to fight.

Frank led his hose by the reins as he and Billy walked along Fourth Street looking for Ike.  When they went into Spangenberg’s Frank tethered his horse too close to the building.  It clopped up onto the sidewalk and stuck its head into the door of the gun shop.  That provided an excuse for Wyatt to intervene.  He stalked over, grabbed the horse’s reins and began pulling the animal back onto the street.  Frank and the Clanton brothers immediately came outside, and Frank yanked the reins from Wyatt.  “You will have to get this horse off the sidewalk,” Wyatt told Frank, who tied the horse farther out on Fourth Street and then went back into Spangenberg’s without speaking a word.  Wyatt was left to watch and seethe as the cowboys continued to put bullets into their gun belts.  Wyatt was even more convinced that the cowboys wanted a showdown.  As he recalled later, when they briefly left the shop while Wyatt was moving frank’s horse, Billy Clanton clearly “laid his hand on his six-shooter.”

The cowboys, Frank in particular, were just as suspicious of Wyatt.  It hadn’t been necessary for him to barge in and order Frank to move his horse back onto the street.  If he wasn’t trying to goad them into a battle, then he was pushing them around to impress onlookers.  The town was still buzzing; everyone was watching the Earps and the cowboys to see what might happen next.  Frank McLaury was an especially proud man, as he’d proven fifteen months earlier when Lieutenant Hurst accused him of stealing army mules.  Frank cared what people thought about him---about his integrity, about his willingness to stand up for himself, his manhood.  Frank still intended to find his brother Tom and take him home, but he couldn’t leave the impression in Tombstone that Wyatt Earp had scared him into scurrying out of town.  Wyatt’s actions with the horse had been too public.  Prickly Frank McLaury had to make it clear he wasn’t intimidated.

---from The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn.

All trails lead to Deadwood

Timothy Olyphant as Seth Bullock in HBO’s Deadwood, looking an awful lot like various movie versions of Wyatt Earp.  In real life, Seth Bullock was more like Wyatt Earp than the real Wyatt Earp was like Wyatt Earp.

Seems I’ve had a lot opportunities to bring up Deadwood around these parts lately.  My review of Howard Blum’s true-life western The Floor of Heaven.  Last Saturday’s post on the loud and proud conservative playwright David Mamet’s very liberal life in the theater.  A post I wrote while I was reading The Wilder Life, Wendy McClure’s memoir of her lifelong love for the Little House on the Prairie books, The little libertarian on the prairie, doesn’t mention Deadwood explicitly but it is an many respects a recapitulation of post I wrote last year, Deadwood as the model of a Conservative’s Utopia.  And now I have another opportunity, thanks to my having started to read The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West by Jeff Guinn.

The historical Wyatt Earp wasn’t quite like his mythical namesake.  In reality, Wyatt was not a nice guy.  He also wasn’t much of a lawman.  He was brave, tough, resourceful, and, when he pinned on a badge, which he did from time to time mainly to make money and, according to Guinn, always with the hope that doing so would lead to bigger things for him socially and financially, he was determined, fearless, incorruptible, mostly, and a dangerous enforcer of the law. But he didn’t pin on a badge often or wear one for any significant stretch of time and he was always in a hurry to unpin it as soon as he could and move on to more promising money-making endeavors, usually gambling.

The sort of career as a professional lawman we imagine him as having had and the other personal qualities movies and television have usually attributed to him, a certain shy, easy-going charm, an innate chivalry, unwavering integrity, and a commitment to law and order and the betterment of his community actually belong more to his older brother Virgil, although, again according to Guinn, Virgil had his share of foibles and failings too.  In other words, not only was the real Wyatt Earp no Henry Fonda, none of the Earp brothers who took part in the shootout at the O.K. Corral, not Wyatt, not Virgil, and especially not Morgan, came close to being a heroic figure.  And never mind about Doc Holliday.

Life, of course, is mainly like that, a matter of weak and flawed people doing their best to get by while trying not to do too much harm and hoping that they might at least be doing a little good.  But exceptional human beings do ride into town from time to time, and a few of them did wear badges in the days of the Wild West.  One of them was Charlie Siringo, a main character in The Floor of Heaven, a Pinkerton Agent known as the Cowboy Detective, who had a long and illustrious career of adventure that included undercover assignments, threats to life and limb, fisticuffs and gunplay, and even some love and romance, all of it on the right side of the law (although not always on the right side of history.  The Pinkertons were often employed as union busters and Siringo never shirked or, apparently, minded when employed by the bosses against the workers ).  Another was Seth Bullock, a name that will be familiar to you if you were a fan of the HBO series Deadwood.

The real Seth Bullock was a lawman in the real boomtown of Deadwood.  He was also one of the town’s most successful businessmen and prominent citizens.  He was a friend of  Teddy Roosevelt and signed up with the Rough Riders. He’s credited with helping to establish Yellowstone as the first national park, which, by the way, happened when he was 23 years old.  He was one of those people who was born older.  He seems to have had the wisdom and maturity of a 40 year old when he was 14 and he grew up from there.  Deadwood, the show on HBO, not the town in Dakota Territory, begins with Bullock giving up a job as lawman in Montana to come to Deadwood, the town, not the show, to open up a hardware store and that’s true to life.  Where the show differs from the history is in presenting Bullock as not as good, noble, admirable, and successful as he was in real life, not at first, at any rate.

One of the themes of the show was that Al Swearengen, the saloon and brothel keeper and criminal gang leader who is the series chief anti-hero, wants to help turn Deadwood into a decent place to live, a real and functioning, civil and civilized society in which someone like himself has no place.  One of the things Swearengen does to bring this about is to turn Seth Bullock into what we know him to be from history.

Deadwood is about learning to become civilized.  While we watch Deadwood grow into a real town we watch Bullock grow into the kind of person who not only can live and thrive in it but who is its best representative.  We’re going see him become more like Wyatt Earp than the real Wyatt Earp was like Wyatt Earp.

As series creator David Milch has it, it’s a role Bullock isn’t ready for when we first meet him.  He’s a brave man and an honest man and a decent man, but he’s not yet strong or wise enough to be a good man.

His hero’s progress begins with meeting and making friends with Wild Bill Hickock during the last days of Hickcock’s life before he was murdered, shot dead in a Deadwood saloon while playing poker, holding a hand of aces and eights.  Like the real Wyatt Earp, the real Wild Bill Hickcock was more committed to the main chance than he was to public service, and that’s the case with the show’s version of Wild Bill, portrayed brilliantly by Keith Carridine who gives a performance that haunts the series until the end of its three year run, even though Carridine and Hickock are gone after the first four episodes.  Hickcock hasn’t come to Deadwood as a lawman to clean up the town.  He’s come to Deadwood for the same reason that just about everybody else is there, including Bullock, to strike it rich, not in mining, though, in shipping.  But he leaves the actual work of striking it rich to his friends and partners, Calamity Jane and Charlie Utter, and spends his most of his time gambling---and drinking.  He’s not an ideal role-model, in other words.  But he has important qualities Bullock needs to learn to possess.

Hickcock is poised, cool-headed, and in complete command of his considerable store of anger and propensity for violence.  It helps to know that in real life James Butler Hickcock earned his nickname from his large nose and wild temper.   Bullock is full of anger he can barely contain.  If you watch Justified, in which Timothy Olyphant is currently starring as a modern version of a fictional Wild Bill Hickcock or Wyatt Earp, but not a Seth Bullock, real or imagined, it’s amusing to note the different ways he plays his two character’s pent-up anger.  Raylan Givens grins.  Seth Bullock glowers.  Throughout the first season, Olyphant portrays him as being in a perpetual seethe, except for those few times when he loses control and lets his anger get the better of him.  Then he beats an Indian to death in a fight, after the man has already surrendered, and he picks a fistfight with Swerengen.  The two brawl in the street in a knock-down, drag-out that almost kills the both of them. 

Hickock’s anger is well tamped-down but he knows how and when to let the pilot light blaze in his eyes to let someone know they’re about to cross him, something they’d really be better off not doing.   He is also, and this is key, aware of himself as a public figure.  And he understands that this isn’t just a burden that comes with the job.  It’s an important part of the job.  Like I said, he hasn’t come to Deadwood to be a lawman, but people naturally turn to him when they’re in trouble and he steps up.  And when he does, his back straightens, his chest swells, his chin lifts, and his stride lengthens.  It’s not exactly like watching Clark Kent take off his glasses and start to loosen his tie, but it’s definitely the case that Hickcock is assuming a role he knows other people need him to play.

When Bullock takes over as sheriff, a job he accepts not out of civic responsibility but to get legal cover for avenging Hickcock’s death, he has no notion that he’s now expected to be something other and larger than himself and it’s suddenly up to Al Swearengen to teach him how to be like Wild Bill.

It’s interesting to note how Wild Bill’s death changes Swearengen.  When the series opens, Swearengen is just a bloody-minded criminal boss.  He hasn’t even begun to develop his what will turn out to be self-destructive ambition to turn Deadwood into the kind of town where respectable people can live safe from the likes of the Al Swearengens of the world.  But helping to organize the trial of Hickcock’s killer gives him a taste of what it’s like to be respectable and civic-minded and he enjoys it.  Meanwhile, Cy Tolliver has come to town, bringing his own brand of criminal enterprise with him.  Tolliver is a classier, cleaner, handsomer, more charming, but less intelligent and even less self-controlled version of Swearengen.  He’s also weak and craven, and Swearengen has recognized straight-away that Tolliver presents more than just a threat to Swearengen himself.  A rivalry between them will eat up the whole of Deadwood and drive respectable citizens away.  At first this prospect bothers Swearengen only because it would mean no customers and no victims and therefore no money.  Cynically, then, he determines that Deadwood needs some law and order so that there are limits to what he and Tolliver can do to each other.  But then it dawns on him that the Deadwood he knows, and profits from, is doomed anyway.  Either the rivalry between himself and Tolliver, or between other versions of themselves, will burn the place down or civilization will arrive and with it real law and true order.  Swearengen decides that if he’s going to be washed away in the flood of history, he wants to be replaced by something more than mud and wrack.

He becomes civic-minded and, tentatively, takes some steps to “improve” the town.  He plans to go slow because he wants to keep his businesses, criminal and legitimate, going for as long as possible.  But he keeps in mind that one of the first things that has to be done is the establishment of some real law and order and to do that he needs a real lawman.  A heroic lawman people will automatically look up to and whose leadership they will respect and follow.  He recognizes in Bullock the necessary qualities but the trick will be to get Bullock to recognize those qualities in himself and learn to draw on them.  He’s also keenly aware of other qualities in Bullock that Bullock needs to learn to control.  At the same time he has to convince Bullock to take on responsibilities and duties Bullock has already rejected in order to come to Deadwood.

It’s amusingly ironic that Swearengen sets out to accomplish this by manipulating Bullock into standing up to…Swearengen.  He forces confrontations and tries to maneuver Bullock into fighting back in ways that actually work to thwart Swearengen’s plots and schemes.

Bullock manages to be a maddeningly slow learner and there are times when Swearengen has to essentially step out of character to instruct Bullock in the right way to do his job as sheriff.

The series didn’t last long enough for us to see Bullock graduate, so we were never presented with a Seth Bullock who rivals Wild Bill Hickock or Wyatt Earp as a western hero.  He was always a work in progress and that progress was interrupted as David Milch grew distracted along the way.

In a bit of historical serendipity, it turns out that it’s possible that the real Seth Bullock and the real Wyatt Earp actually met.  In 1877, four years before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt Earp was up in Dakota Territory trying to set himself up in the timber business in Deadwood.

If you’re thinking, wow, that would have made an interesting episode, and you were a fan of the series, that means you’ve forgotten.

It didn’t.

In fact, it didn’t make two interesting episodes.

Wyatt Earp and his younger brother Morgan come to town, loiter there for two episodes, and nothing important to the story comes of their visit.  Morgan’s bad temper and weak nature gets him into trouble.  Wyatt tries to get him out of it.  Bullock has to intervene.  Then he tells the Earps it’s probably best for all concerned if they ride out, and they do.

That’s it.  There’s nothing in this short story-arc that establishes this character as the Wyatt Earp, the real one, the legendary one, or even a revisionist version of one or the other.  Which may have been Milch’s point, that there was no Wyatt Earp, that both the hero of the legend and the sometimes heroic but flawed man in the history books are complete fabrications, and, as Guinn reports regretfully in The Last Gunfight, it is the case that a lot of what people think they “know” about Wyatt Earp is based on tall tales Earp told about himself in his old age.  In the show, the Earps ride into Deadwood claiming to have saved a stage coach from robbers.  It turns out that they faked the hold-up themselves in order to ride to the rescue and set themselves up as heroes.  It happens that there’s a historical basis for this in that when he was in Tombstone Wyatt and Doc Holliday were accused of actually robbing a stage with the intention of framing some outlaws whom they could then bring to justice, thus furthering Wyatt’s political career---Earp wanted the job of county sheriff.  That Wyatt and Doc robbed the stage was a lie spread, according to Guinn in The Last Gunfight, Earp’s chief political rival.  In the show, the Earps’ only reason for faking the hold-up is that they hope that folks will buy them free drinks and meals and maybe offer them jobs, any sorts of jobs, as long as they pay well and don’t require much work.  Anyway, that whole subplot is dropped immediately and the Earps end up just hanging around until it’s time for them to go.  For all they do or matter, they could be any pair of drifters brought in by the writers to cause trouble Bullock has to put an end to in order to remind viewers that while  Milch’s convoluted political and romantic subplots are working themselves out Bullock is still the hero of western.

In the first episode, Bullock makes the one and only direct reference in either of the two episodes to either the historical and legendary Wyatt Earp.  At this point in his life, the real Wyatt Earp had established a solid reputation as a lawman helping Bat Masterson keep the peace in  Dodge City and other cow towns in Kansas.  It’s not clear that this Wyatt Earp shares that reputation.  Bullock has heard that this Earp has worked in law enforcement through this Earp’s own boasting, and he’s confirmed it with an exchange of telegraph messages.  But he doesn’t appear to be impressed by what he’s learned about this Earp’s past exploits.  He merely says to Earp, “Not asking why you’ve put the work aside, I’ll only say that some that do---find themselves ready and uniquely able to work the other side of the street.”

I took this as a reference to the infamous Vendetta Ride.  Surprisingly---well, it surprised me when I learned this when I was a kid who hero-worshipped Hugh O’Brien’s Wyatt Earp---before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the real Wyatt Earp never deliberately killed anyone in the line of duty.  He may not have killed any of the three men who died in the famous gunfight, which, you might know already, didn’t actually take place in the O.K. Corral but in empty lot off a back alley leading up to it.  Things happened so fast and were so confused and confusing that no one was able to sort out who shot whom for sure.  But in the weeks after the gunfight, surviving members of what’s sometimes, and wrongly, called the Clanton Gang, a loose band of outlaws and rustlers known in their day as the Cowboys, ambushed first Virgil and then Morgan Earp, crippling Virgil for life and killing Morgan.  Wyatt and Doc Holliday, with several friends, then set out to track down the cowboys they believed were responsible and gunned them all down, in some cases pretty much murdering them in cold blood.  That’s a true story that is well-told in the movies Hour of the Gun and Tombstone, so Milch isn’t bringing us any news by suggesting that someday Wyatt Earp may cross the line.  But it’s just the case that his version of Earp isn’t either heroic or villainous and there’s no reason to care or even to think that someday this character will be both a champion of law and order and a killer, so there’s no irony here and no potential tragedy either.

So much could have been done in these two episodes.

They could have been about Wyatt Earp learning how to become Wyatt Earp by watching Seth Bullock.

They could have been about Earp not learning how to become Wyatt Earp even though he has the example of Bullock right there in front of him to learn from.

They could have been about Seth Bullock learning how to be Wyatt Earp---that is, learning how to become more like the historical Seth Bullock---by watching Earp and deciding, That’s not the type of person I want to be.

They could have been about various combinations of all of the above, and clearly the costume designer and make-up artists thought the episodes were supposed to be about the mirroring of Earp and Bullock, either as dopplegangers, secret sharers, or good and evil twins, because they dressed and made-up the actor playing Earp to look like Timothy Olyphant, which has the effect of reminding us, in case we hadn’t noticed or had forgotten, that all along Olyphant has been dressed and made-up to remind us of Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp in Tombstone.

But whatever is there thematically in the Seth-Wyatt doubling is there only in the costuming and make-up and, a little bit, in the acting.

It’s not there in the writing.

Nothing comes of it in the plot.  But then nothing comes of anything in either episode.

These episodes are part of the third season, when the series fell apart and nothing came of anything in any episode.

I’m still not clear on what happened, but David Milch was developing another series for HBO at the time, the ill-fated John from Cincinnati and it must have taken a lot of his attention away from Deadwood.  The writers and producers he handed more of the work off to didn’t have his touch.  The show lost energy, drive, and focus.  Even the cursing got blurry, perfunctory, and lazy.  The third season was planned to build to a showdown between the citizens of Deadwood and the private army of the rapacious capitalist monster, George Hearst, but it seemed each episode was more about postponing that showdown than about moving the story forward to it.

Deadwood is---was---about progress, its path and its costs, and in the first season the chief obstacle to Deadwood’s progress from a tent city pitched in the mud to a real town is the residents of Deadwood themselves.  The question is, Do these people have what it takes to civilize themselves, which, Milch being both a cynic and a romantic (often a yin and yang proposition), means Are they ruthless enough to be and do what’s right and good?  So the threat to Deadwood’s future as a community is corruption from within.  In the second season, a threat to Deadwood’s progress arrives in the form of one Francis Wolcott who represents corruption from without.  Deadwood is threatened by an unholy alliance of government and moneyed interests that would turn it off course from becoming a community and steer it towards becoming, essentially, a factory manufacturing wealth for a few powerful men, led by the as yet unseen Hearst.

In the third season, Hearst comes to town to continue the threat in person.  But although he’s named after a real person, a mining engineer and entrepreneur who was the father of William Randolph Hearst, the founder of the newspaper empire, this Hearst is not much like the real George Hearst or like any actual human being.  He’s a monster, a fairy tale dragon in human form.  But he’s a dragon who for some reason can’t be fought.  He can only be held at bay through constant appeasement.  No knight in shining armor can be allowed to ride out to his cave and challenge him.  So every episode of the third season is about a stall.  In one way or another, we’re shown the cowed and craven villagers sneaking out to lay a tribute at the mouth of the dragon’s cave and then sneaking back, hoping the dragon will be content to leave them alone for another day.  In the final episode, the dragon demands one more tribute, a human sacrifice.  He wants to be fed a virgin.  A demand that ought to get him shot dead by Bullock or knifed by Swearengen or both at the same time and then fed to Wu’s pigs.  Instead, he’s fed his virgin and he leaves.  Which makes Hearst not only implausible as a human being but implausible as a dragon.  A steady diet of virgins is what dragons crave.  You can’t defeat dragons by giving them what they want because they’ll just expect more.

In short, if Hearst was meant to represent capitalism’s threat to community, he’s a threat that never should have gone away.  The only reason he leaves is so that the series can appear to have an ending.

I suspect that the theme intended for Season Three was the compromises communities have to make to keep themselves economically viable.  Season Four, which never came about but which I believe Milch meant to be the final season, might then have been about showing the effects of that compromise---Deadwood as a thriving, prosperous community that no longer had places for either Al Swearengen or Seth Bullock the western hero.

And it would have been interesting, and both comic and sad, watching Al and some of the other characters trying to live in this brave, new, civilized world, to watch Al at a loss trying to relate to Bullock the solid citizen and watch Bullock grumpily going about his day with nothing to look forward to but being a solid citizen.

And this would have been the season to introduce a new character, another dragon, but not a dragon out of Western fairy tales, a Chinese dragon, a life-force and a bringer of joy.

Teddy Roosevelt.

As I mentioned above, the real Seth Bullock and Teddy Roosevelt were friends.  They met and became friends when Roosevelt came out West to recover from his grief at the near simultaneous deaths of his mother and his wife and they remained friends until Teddy died.  Bullock was a pall bearer at the funeral.

Milch could have brought in Teddy as a kind of anti-Hearst, which wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch, considering Roosevelt’s future relationship with capitalists like him.  I’m talking about the TV show character named Hearst.  Teddy had a more complicated relationship with a real life Hearst.  In place of a dragon demanding tribute, the citizens of Deadwood would have had to deal with a dragon bringing them gifts, all of which, no matter how well-intended, would have been problematic because they’d all be bound up in Teddy’s ego.

It would have been beautiful.

_________________________

Probably post my review in the next week, but if you’d like to read ahead, The Last Gunfight is available from Amazon in regular and kindle.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Marshall Lance Mannion rounds up a couple of related reruns:

Hour of the Gun, a review.

I’m Doc Holiday! No, I’m Doc Holiday.

Jack Crabb gets “buffaloed” by Wyatt Earp.

“Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true…”

Working on a review of  The Floor of Heaven, by Howard Blum, a history of the Yukon Gold Rush seen through the eyes of three men who were there.  One of the men is Charlie Siringo, a Pinkerton agent who became famous as the “cowboy detective.”  After his adventures in the Klondike, Siringo was assigned to help track down Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall Gang.  Siringo’s undercover work helped in the capture and killing of Harvey Logan, also known as Kid Curry, the character played by Ted Cassidy in the movie.

“Rules? In a knife fight?”

But he wasn’t part of the Superposse railroad magnate E.H. Harriman hired to go after Butch and Sundance (“That crazy Harriman…if he’d just give me the money he’s paying to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him!”)…

“They’re very good.”

So he wouldn’t have been there for this, if it had really happened...

“They could surrender to us, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

 

True Grit and True Grit and…True Grit

Including the epilogue was not a good idea.

The Coen Brothers have been direct about how they were not remaking the John Wayne movie when they set out to film their own version of True Grit.  They were adapting Charles Portis’ novel and they planned on their adaptation being more faithful, in spirit if not in all the particulars, to the book than the Wayne movie was.  They did not think the first True Grit, which was directed by Henry Hathaway and released in 1969, was all that good a movie in its own right either.

I’m here to tell you the Coen Brothers were wrong on several counts.

The Coens’ True Grit is more faithful to Portis’ novel in at least one but impressive way.

Hailee Steinfeld is the living, breathing, braid-wearing embodiment of Portis’ heroine and narrator, Mattie Ross, giving such an indelible performance and making Mattie so much her own character that I suspect that the effect will work backwards on my imagination and when I watch the Wayne movie again Kim Darby will be erased from the screen and I will not be able to enjoy the movie in the old way as I stare at the blank space next to John Wayne that I will be wishing Steinfeld was there filling.

And this is why including the epilogue, which comes straight from the book, was not a good idea.

The epilogue takes place thirty years in the future from when the whole rest of the movie is set and presents us with a middle-aged Mattie Ross, played with no distinction by a non-descript character actress who is given little to do and doesn’t make much of that.  There is nothing in this Mattie that connects her with the Mattie we’ve spent the last two hours rooting for.

 The unfortunate effect is to cut us off from the best thing about the movie, which is not just Steinfeld’s Mattie but her interactions with Jeff Bridges’ Marshall Rooster Cogburn and Matt Damon’s Texas Ranger La Beouf.

Before I take this down the road any farther, I’d better clear away some brush.

First, the existence of Portis’ novel and the Wayne movie are irrelevant to whether or not you should see this movie.  You do not have to have read the one or seen the other or liked either or both.  This True Grit stands as a movie in its own right as neither an adaptation or a remake.

Second, I presume you know from either reading the reviews or from having already seen it yourself, that the Coens’ True Grit is a good movie.  I am about to write about my disappointment with certain things in the film and that might give the impression that I didn’t like it.  I did like it.  My disappointment is due to choices the Coens’ made that reminded me why I like the Wayne movie and why I love the book.  That’s me and it shouldn’t bear on your feelings about the movie or dissuade you from going to see it.

I recommend going to see it, if that matters.

The things that disappointed me happened to remind me of things I liked about the book and the other movie but they are flaws in the Coen Brothers’ movie as a movie.  If certain scenes had been done better or left out entirely, if certain parts had been better cast or given a different sort of attention, I wouldn’t have thought about the book or the other movie, just as I didn’t think about either one during the great majority of scenes that worked.  There are holes in the Coen Brothers’ True Grit that I filled with my memories and feelings.  You might fill them with a trip to the lobby for popcorn.

Now, to get back to the epilogue.

Of all the ways the Coens’ True Grit could have been and is faithful to Portis’ novel, including the epilogue is the least effective, because it’s a five-minute dramatization of a purely literary device.  In the book it’s just Portis writing his way out of his story.  There’s a little more to it, of course, but essentially what the Coens have done is the same as if they were making a movie version of a fairy tale and tried to end it by dramatizing “And they all lived happily ever after.”

I don’t know why the Coens thought they needed it.  Possibly to avoid having to invent an ending of their own.  Possibly they felt duty-bound to include a grown-up Mattie because of their intention to be more faithful to the novel which is a told story.  Mattie Ross narrates her own tale but she does so from the vantage point of her old age.  The elderly Mattie is a character in the book as she can’t help letting details of her life since the main action of the story slip into her telling of the tale.

This, though, is a joke for readers.  There is no point in trying to work the joke into a movie version, even if it could be dramatized, because it’s a joke that arises from the narrator herself being a literary device.

Portis didn’t put the elderly Mattie in there because she’s an interesting character in her own right---she isn’t, at all, that’s part of the humor.  The fourteen year old Mattie is able to do what she does because she is an overly-serious, very conventionally minded, and thoroughly unimaginative person and so it’s not really a surprise that her adventure doesn’t change her and that she grows up to be an overly-serious, very conventionally minded, and thoroughly unimaginative adult. 

By making her such a person, Portis can get away with the Biblically-inflected poetry of the narrative and the dialogue that is the source of much of the novel’s comedy, and it is a comic novel.  One of the jokes is that Mattie doesn’t always know she’s being funny.

The elderly Mattie is a strict Presbyterian and something of a Puritan.  So is the young Mattie, for that matter.  Of course she’s going to have a writing style that is based on the one book she thinks is worth reading.  The result is prose that is often comically at odds with what it’s being used to describe but which is also just as often as lyrical as a psalm and as powerfully and straight-forwardly dramatic as the gospels.

But besides the fact that the middle-aged Mattie we meet to no purpose and with no sympathy in the epilogue isn’t the Mattie who is narrating the book, she is another remembered Mattie, everything to be gained by faithfulness to the novel is already given to us whenever a character opens his or her mouth to speak.  You don’t have to include Mattie the narrator to bring her voice into the movie because it’s in every line of dialogue.

The epilogue is unnecessary.  The mistake of it is that it takes us away from the movie and the performances we just enjoyed and want to savor to make us watch a boring short about pretty much nothing of any interest.  It’s as if the Coens filmed their own version of The Music Man but went out of their way to make sure we didn’t leave the theater singing Seventy-six Trombones.

But it does something else, too.  It highlights a general weakness of the rest of the movie.  The poor casting and lackadaisical directing of the supporting players.

In the epilogue Mattie meets the outlaws Cole Younger and Frank James who are now old men trading on their former notoriety by running their own cut-rate version of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

They are far from the desperadoes they once were, which is the point: that Wild West was dying when Mattie was fourteen and set out on her adventure.  But we should still be able to see the dangerous young men in the mild-mannered old men and here I think that if there was to be any dramatic effect in including the epilogue the Coens should have resorted to some stunt casting.

I would have liked to see Keith Carradine and Stacey Keach in the parts.  Keach played Frank James and Carradine played Jim Younger in The Long Riders---Carradine’s late brother David played Cole in that movie and if he were alive he would have reprised the part if I’d had any say in it.

Even better would have been Cliff Robertson and Robert Duvall who played Younger and Jesse James in The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid.  The actor who played Frank James in that one is gone now too, but he was not a star.  I can see why the Coens wouldn’t have gone for that though, Duvall having played Lucky Ned Pepper in the first True Grit movie.

But the Coens essentially didn’t cast anybody in the parts.  They used actors of no distinction, hid their faces behind ridiculous and greasy-looking facial hair, and then barely focused any attention on them, treating them almost as background characters instead of as the cameos they ought to have been, as long as they were going to be there at all.

And they did the same with all the supporting characters.  Which is one of the holes in the movie that I wound up filling with memories of the Wayne movie.

Steinfeld is terrific.  Jeff Bridges is what he is, the best movie actor of his generation.  Matt Damon and Josh Brolin are both very good.  But considering what the Coens got out of the rest of the cast or seem to have wanted, the four of them might as well be alone on the screen.

It’s unfair to say that Barry Pepper is no Robert Duvall or Dakin Matthews is no Strother Martin or even that Jarlath Conroy is no Dennis Hopper.  But they aren’t even allowed to be what they are.  Like just about all the other male supporting cast members, they are lost behind their dirty beards and neglected by the camera.  The Coens seem to have had a hard time keeping the camera pointed at them.

As the over-matched horse trader, Colonel Stonehill, Matthews gets the best treatment but his scenes are all with Steinfeld who blows him off the screen.

A star or a great character actor, like Steve Buscemi, who could have held his own against Steinfeld, would have made those scenes even better and, more to the point, increased our admiration for Mattie.

But that assumes that with a Buscemi in the part the Coens would have taken more trouble in their presentation of the character.

And this is one of the ways the John Wayne movie is both a better movie than the Coens give it credit for being and more faithful to the book than their movie.

Most of Portis’ novel is taken up with Mattie’s encounters with the colorful eccentrics she meets up with on her way to tracking down the coward who murdered her father.  The book is full of finely-etched portraits and sketches of even the most minor characters and while not all of them appear in the 1969 movie and not all the ones who do are played by stars or future stars, director Henry Hathaway gives all of them their due, right down to the useless cat who shares living quarters with Rooster in the back room of Chen Lee’s grocery store.

The Coens had their pick of a number of minor characters to include or leave out, but oddly they decided to invent characters and scenes.  It’s their movie, so why not?   But if your stated intention is to be more faithful to a book than you believe a previous adaptation had been, wouldn’t you go looking in the book for characters and scenes to include in your version that weren’t in that other movie rather than dragging in scenes of your own that reference other books and movies?

The Coens have invented three big scenes that look to me to have been inspired by Lonesome Dove, Jeremiah Johnson, and, weirdly, Oliver Twist, and that add nothing to their re-telling of True Grit, either as a supposedly faithful adaptation or an original movie in its own right.

For that matter, the epilogue might be nodding at Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians and there’s a shot of Jeff Bridges framed in the black-edged entranceway to a mine that could be an homage to John Wayne, although the Wayne of The Searchers not True Grit.

But, again, these don’t add anything to the Coens’ movie.

Let me tell you what does add to their movie.

Long before now, you’d probably figured out that I haven’t just read Portis’ novel, I have it memorized.

I was a lucky kid.  I stumbled upon the novel when I was in eighth grade, long before I saw the first True Grit movie.  It became one of my favorite books.  Still is.  I think it’s one of the great American novels.  In fact, it’s on my list of the twenty-five novels Martians should read if they want to understand what is to be an American.  The upshot of this, however, is that for me Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn and Lucky Ned Pepper and the lawyer J. Noble Daggett, who the Coens, in another goof, left out of their movie, are characters unto themselves, not parts played by John Wayne and Robert Duvall and John Fiedler.

I think Wayne did a fine job as Rooster, but he isn’t to my mind the definitive Rooster any more than Jeff Bridges is.  Both got at different aspects of the character but I don’t see either one when I pick up the book or, rather, I can see either one or somebody else as Rooster but not instead of Rooster.

Which leads me, finally, to a way the Coens’ movie is both a better movie than the Wayne movie and a more faithful adaptation.

The Coens’ movie stars Jeff Bridges.

As I said, I think Wayne is just fine as Rooster.  But he’s still John Wayne and he can’t help tilting the movie in his favor.  Mattie, in the book and in both movies, has to learn to see the hero in the one-eyed fat man she hires based on his reputation but whose grit she begins to doubt.  But with John Wayne in the part, we don’t doubt Rooster’s grit for a minute, because, well, because we can see he’s really John Wayne.  One of the pleasures of watching the first movie is waiting for the moment when Mattie realizes that she’s been in the company of John Wayne all along.

“No grit? Rooster Cogburn?  Not much!”

But this, along with Kim Darby’s not having a particularly strong screen presence, makes the movie more Rooster’s story than Mattie’s. 

Bridges, not being a living legend, can give way to his Mattie in a way Wayne couldn’t.  His Rooster doesn’t need to reveal the hero inside him to his Mattie.  There’s no doubt this Rooster Cogburn has grit.  For one thing, as much as the Coens might want us to forget the Wayne movie, at least while we’re watching theirs, it’s still out there and the ghost of John Wayne is going to haunt any Western not just one that features a character he once played.  What’s in question isn’t this Rooster’s grit.  It’s his commitment to using it to help Mattie.

Bridges doesn’t waste much time before revealing to us the hero inside Rooster.  There’s a moment not too long after he and Mattie set out after her father’s killer when he gets ready to draw on a possible threat and twenty years drop away from his figure and face and we find ourselves being stared down upon by a gunslinger as dashing and dangerous as Wild Bill Hickcock who, not coincidentally, Bridges has played.

But because he doesn’t carry Wayne’s baggage as a screen legend, Bridges can also let us see a side to Rooster that try as he did Wayne couldn’t make us believe was a side to his Rooster.

Outlaw.

Killer.

Villain.

Rooster Cogburn is a United States Marshall but not because he’s a champion of law and order.  It’s just what’s paying the rent at that moment.  He will and has gone whatever way the money’s flowing and that’s made him a bandit and hired gun at various points in his career as well as a store keeper and a restauranteur and rancher.

In other words, he’s a man out for himself and motivated principally by money.

Never for a moment do we believe that Wayne’s Rooster is going to abandon Mattie.  We don’t believe that Bridges’ Rooster will either.  But that’s because we have such faith in Steinfeld’s Mattie.  We know she won’t let him.  But he believes he might.  And he believes it right up until the moment when he can’t and then he realizes that he never really had the choice.

Instead of being the story of how Mattie Ross comes to realize that Rooster Cogburn is a hero, the Coens’ True Grit is the story of how Rooster Cogburn comes to realize that Mattie Ross is his own personal heroine.

Which is a way of saying that Rooster has to face up to the fact that True Grit is Mattie’s story.

___________________

On the same trail:

Via Sheila O’Malley, Katherine Hepburn’s admiring reflections on John Wayne’s acting, “You Don’t Catch Him At It.”

Fellow Arkansan Gene Lyons says Charles Portis isn’t as elusive as this New York Times piece makes him out to be.

Roger Ebert says that if he wrote movie reviews like this one Stanley Fish did for the New York Times he’d get himself to a monastery.

Sigh.  Better start calling me Brother Lance.

The first True Grit, starring John Wayne, is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

“I’m Doc Holliday!” “No, I’m Doc Holliday!”

Victor Mature as Doc Holliday confronts his destiny in My Darling Clementine directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp.

Let’s start out with this statement of fact or, to put it another way, let’s start out with this unshakeable prejudice of mine:

The best Doc Holliday of all the movie Doc Hollidays is Victor Mature in My Darling Clementine.

Val Kilmer in Tombstone is very good.  Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is, well, Kirk and Kirk being Kirk was almost never a bad deal.  Dennis Quaid was all right in Wyatt Earp, although too bad for him he’s corralled in the weakest of the movies, paired with Kevin Costner, the weakest of the Wyatt Earps.  Then there’s Jason Robards in Hour of the Gun and I’m going to get to him in a minute.

But Mature’s Doc Holliday---romantic, soulful, introspective, self-destructive, terrified of death and despising himself for being terrified, lonely in his suffering, pushing away all offers of love and friendship that would comfort him because they would comfort him---is the only heroic Doc Holliday, which makes him the most historically inaccurate Doc Holliday but also the most dramatically compelling in his own right.

All the Docs are sick and dying from TB.  In the other movies their imminent deaths are ironies---the dangerous gunfighter is not going to die with his boots on.  That irony provides Val Kilmer with one of his best moments in Tombstone when the joke fate is playing on him is brought home to Doc and there’s no one there for him to share the laugh at his own expense with.

None of the other Doc’s are mere sidekicks to Wyatt Earp. although Quaid’s comes close.  But Kilmer’s definitely the second male lead and while Douglas gives Burt Lancaster as Wyatt a challenge, in the end Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a stand-off, with Douglas burning up the scenery but Lancaster holding his place as the movie’s lead and star. 

In My Darling Clementine, Mature takes the screen from Henry Fonda whenever they share it, although it’s probably more accurate to say Fonda steps back and lets him have it. 

Dan Leo calls Doc Holliday the Hamlet of movie westerns because so many fine actors have found their own particular and intriguing slants on the role.  And one of Mature’s best scenes in Clementine is when he takes over Hamlet’s To Be or Not to Be speech from the befuddled and frightened traveling Shakespearean actor.  Of course the point of the scene is to underline Doc’s suicidal recklessness, but it also suggests a narrative parallel.  In Clementine we’re being told Doc’s story from the point of view of the survivor, Wyatt, as if Hamlet had been written from Horatio’s point of view.

Fonda understands that while Earp is the story’s center and provides its point of view, Doc is its main concern.  Wyatt is the hero, but Doc is the tragic anti-hero and it’s the playing out of Doc’s tragedy that gives the movie its emotional weight.  In this My Darling Clementine parallels something director John Ford did in his other great western starring Fonda from the same period, Fort Apache, in which John Wayne steps back to let Fonda’s anti-hero play out his tragedy.

In the end, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral doesn’t matter because the Earps triumph over the vicious Clantons.  It matters because it brings Doc’s tragedy to its inevitable and unhappy end.

Now, about Jason Robards.

Duncan Shepherd, wrapping up his long career as a film critic, has written a long goodbye to all that for the San Diego Reader.  In it he writes mainly about the frustrations of being an analog writer in a digital age and the ways criticism and movies have changed since he first sat down in a darkened theater with a penlight and notepad.  He makes some points that I think are going to give me a couple of posts of my own over the next week or so, but he includes this aside:

With the flow of foreign films down to a dribble, the legion of independent filmmakers keen to sell out, digital talking-heads documentaries a dime a dozen, I’m more and more inclined, induced, inspired, to pursue some solitary line of inquiry such as why Jason Robards in the role of Doc Holliday doesn’t in my eyes damage or diminish Hour of the Gun, doesn’t dislodge it as my preferred version of the Wyatt Earp legend despite the better Hollidays in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Tombstone. Why (or when) is it that such an apparent weakness doesn’t weaken?

I hope Shepherd puts off his retirement long enough to write about what he thinks is weak about Robards’ performance in Hour of the Gun, which alternates with Clementine as my favorite Wyatt Earp movie, depending on my mood.

I can tell you what I like about Robards’ Doc.

He’s a ghost.

All the Docs are dying, but Robards’ Doc is the one who seems to have accepted the fact and to understand what it means, which is that he has no time left to redeem himself in his own or history’s or God’s eyes.

Hour of the Gun begins with the shoot-out in the street outside the O.K. Corral---which is where it actually happened.  That was Doc’s big chance, the moment that should have made him a hero alongside Wyatt Earp.  It didn’t, and not only didn’t it, but it may have marked the end of Wyatt Earp as hero.

Robards’ spends most of the movie watching James Garner’s Wyatt with a disapproving wariness.  He seems to be searching for what it was in Wyatt that made him think putting himself on the Earps’ side was putting himself on the side of the angels and, as Hour of the Gun is a revenge tragedy, what Doc sees is that whatever it was that made Wyatt one of the good guys is leaking out him.

As good as dead and damned in his own eyes, Doc speaks to Wyatt as if from beyond the grave, trying to warn him off the path to hell Wyatt’s determinedly following.  But Doc doesn’t have the strength or the heart left to speak as sternly and as forcefully as Marley’s ghost warning Scrooge that he still has a chance and hope of escaping Marley’s fate.  All he can do is offer himself up as a bad example.  In a number of scenes, dressed all in black, hunched up against a perpetual chill that is as much spiritual as tubercular, he looks raven-like, glaring down on Wyatt and croaking his variations on “Nevermore.”

This is a Doc Holliday who has felt whatever he had of Victor Mature’s romanticism, Val Kilmer’s dash and humor, and Kirk Douglas’ barely restrained fury draining out of him.  He has nothing left but Dennis Quaid’s sadness and pain and his own guilt and regret, and if director John Sturges had overused him I think Robards would have been a dark and gloomy smudge on the movie.

But here’s how I summed it up in a review of Hour of the Gun I posted here four years ago:

The nicest thing about Robards' performance, though, is the calmness that comes over him when he realizes that it didn't matter that he couldn't stop Wyatt.

It's Robards, not Garner, Sturges gives the last scene and the last lines to.

Before leaving him at the sanitarium, knowing that this is the last time, it's the end of the line for Doc, Wyatt has told Doc a lie about himself, a charitable lie, meant to leave Doc with his illusions about Wyatt's heroism.  Doc pretends to believe it, but he doesn't and there's a heartbroken look on Robards' face as he watches Wyatt ride away.

But it doesn't last.  He turns his attention to a card game he's playing with an orderly and finishes the game and the movie with a rueful but sincere grin.

"Aces," he says as he lays out his winning hand.  It's a description of his mood as well as of his cards.

In Wyatt Earp, Sturges is showing us that the seeds of our moral self-destruction are in our own hands.

But in Doc Holliday he is showing us that the corollary is true too.  The agent of our redemption is our own self.

You can read the whole review here.

“Buffalo Bill! The thrill of my life to have invented you!”

When I was a kid one of my favorite places to go was a theme park up near Lake George called Storytown USA.  It was the nearest thing we had to a local Disneyland, scaled way down of course, with rides and attractions based on fairy tales, fables, tall tales, legends, and, without their ever being actually named, TV shows and movies.

It was a modest place, but not chintzy.  What was there was done well, presented with pride and some dash, and clean, shiny, colorful, and fun.  But my favorite part was also the best part, Ghost Town!

Ghost Town was essentially the set of a TV western with probably as many “buildings” that were just false fronts.  But there were plenty of buildings you could go into, like the livery stable, the blacksmith’s, the saloon, the general store, and the jail, enough places to visit that you could feel as though you were wandering the wooden plank sidewalks of real town in the Old West.  It helped that several times a day masked bandits would ride into town and hold up the bank.  A posse, rounded up from the kids on hand, would help the law track down and capture one of the robbers.  Then members of his gang would sneak back into town and there’d be a jail break followed by a shoot out with the good guys that would include, depending on the bravery or recklessness of the college kids playing the bandits that summer, at least one bandit getting shot off the roof of the hotel.

In between the robberies and the gunfights there’d be shows on an outdoor stage built out from the side of the saloon.  The shows would feature “cowgirls” who did rope tricks, “cowboys” who played the guitar and sang, “scouts” who had knife throwing acts, and saloon girls who danced the can-can lifting their skirts high for the bored dads in the audience.  Frankly, I could never imagine getting so old that I would be bored by gunfights, rope tricks, and knife throwing acts that I would think it was a treat when those acts were interrupted by girls who couldn’t do rope tricks or throw knives.

I still haven’t gotten that old.

All of this was presided over by the town marshal, Wild Windy Bill McKay, who was a quick-draw artist and singing cowboy as well as a daring and resourceful upholder of law and order on the violent frontier.

Now, it was obvious to the most gullible kid that Windy Bill wasn’t a real cowboy.  No real cowboy had stars on his boots or wore red jeans and fringed shirts with multi-colored sleeves, except Roy Rogers when he wasn’t working around the ranch.

But even though we knew the truth we accepted it as fact that he spent his days doing exactly what we were watching and helping him do, chase bandits and shoot it out with bad guys.  Ghost Town, to our minds, was more dangerous than Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood combined, and it would be a hundred times worse if it wasn’t for Windy Bill.

For all we knew and I still know Bill McKay had majored in accounting in college or spent years before coming to work at Storytown selling shoes.

But he presented himself as an authentic Western hero and legend and seemed confident that we wouldn’t doubt it and, son of a gun, we didn’t.

To us---to me anyway---for the time we moseyed the dusty streets of Ghost Town, Marshall Wild Windy Bill McKay was as real a lawman as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickcock.

The irony being, of course, that the Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill we knew and admired weren’t any more authentic than Wild Windy Bill McKay. 

All three of them were creations of a hundred years worth of work by dime novelists, playwrights, movie makers, producers of TV shows, and one William F. Cody.

Buffalo Bill.

What went on in Ghost Town borrowed heavily from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, as in fact did every movie and TV western that came after him.  We “know” what an Indian attack and the cavalry riding to the rescue look like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what a stage coach hold-up looks like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what Custer’s Last Stand looked like because of Buffalo Bill.  We know what an authentic Western hero looks like and how he acts because of Buffalo Bill, and by the way even when he’s short and sporting a crew cut and spits tobacco sideways out of the corner of his mouth he still looks and acts like Buffalo Bill, tall, handsome, noble in bearing and in action and in thought.  No matter how far the anti-hero of a revisionist western departs from the image, the image is always with him.  It’s the shadow he casts except when he becomes the shadow cast by the image.

Buffalo Bill didn’t invent the tropes and cliches of the Western but he codified them, clarified them, and set the standards for their presentation.  He didn’t personally rewrite the history of the settlement of the American frontier to turn it into the set of self-congratulatory heroic legends and lies that stood in the place of truth in our collective memory for over a century.  But his revision of the rewrite brought it all together and because his shows were so “real” and so popular and so widely imitated his story of the Wild West became and has remained the most deeply believed, even by movie directors in the process of debunking it.

We may know it’s not true but we want it to be and the most cynical and revisionist Westerns still express that wish.  Nobody can resist the charm and the will of Buffalo Bill.

This isn’t exactly the theme of Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians.  It’s more like the given.

For one thing, this theme, for it to be a theme, must include the fact of the audience’s complicity.  Wild Windy Bill McKay’s existence depended on our willingness to believe in it and our ability to convince ourselves that we did believe it.  There’s no audience complicity in Altman’s film because as far as the script and the camera bother to notice there is no audience. 

I mean an audience watching the performances by the members of Buffalo Bill’s troupe depicted in the movie.  But the same can be said of the audience watching the movie.  Altman, never one to play to his audience’s expectations, seems to have gone out of his way to ignore his audience entirely on this one.  He makes no attempt to draw us in, either into the story itself or into the Wild West show.  We don’t get to feel what it might have been like to watch these spectacles live.   He seems to take it for granted that because we’ve seen all these tricks and stunts a thousand times before we don’t care if we see them again.

Without the audience’s complicity in rewriting history to the point of erasing it and replacing it with myths, legends, and self-serving lies, there’s no real criticism of the process by which a people hide who they really are from themselves.

Which is fine, as long as you understand that Altman didn’t intend to make a movie that was about that.

He didn’t make a revisionist western.  He’d already made one of those.  McCabe and Mrs Miller.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians depends on our having seen that one and others like Little Big Man, Doc, The Wild Bunch, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and note who starred in the last two.

But Buffalo Bill and the Indians is still about watching a performance.  It’s just that it’s about a single person watching a single person perform with the watcher and the watched being the same single person.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians is about Buffalo Bill watching himself being Buffalo Bill.

It’s about a man who has done things that ought to have made him legendary making his living off being not a legend but a fiction.  The Buffalo Bill who’s the star of the show, the reason people come to see the Wild West, has nothing in common with the young scout who earned the nickname Buffalo Bill.  Bill Cody knows he’s had real adventures that should be famous.  But his fortune, his show, his company of cowboys, Indians, trick shot artists, and their families and support staff depend on people paying money to see the phony Buffalo Bill, the one invented to sell dime novels and now tickets.  This is not somebody Bill Cody knows or even truly believes exists.  It’s no wonder then he’s never sure how to be this Buffalo Bill.  He’s always performing, constantly making it up, and it’s not easy.  He loses track of the plot.  He forgets his lines.  He continually finds himself in situations where there’s no way for him to know how “Buffalo Bill” should act or what “he” should say.  And he’s not smart enough or quick enough or cynical enough for the job.

Rather than try to keep it all straight in his head, he’s decided it’s easier to just give in and believe he is who he’s pretending to be.  He’s found that it helps if he never thinks about it and to that end he spends a lot of his time not thinking.

What we have then is the spectacle of one of the most grounded of movie stars playing a man floating through life on his own hot air.  One of the most self-skeptical of movie stars playing a pompous, self-infatuated windbag.  One of the smartest actors going playing someone who has made himself willfully dumb.  One of the coolest of leading men playing a buffoon.

Paul Newman’s performance as Buffalo Bill is a whole lot of fun to watch.

It’s also kind of sad, and I’m not sure all that sadness sticks only to the character.

But that’s something we can work out in the discussion, which is underway…now.

Friday morning update:  Thanks to Michael, Phil, and Bill for making last night’s discussion great.  Comment threads on these posts stay open so feel free to chip in anytime.

Next week’s a double-feature, Secret Honor and Streamers, but we’ll be focusing on how filming plays changed Altman’s style going into the 1990s.

And, remember, in two weeks we’ll be doing Popeye, but instead of a formal discussion I’ll be leading the live-blogging.  We’ll start the fun earlier that night, at 9 PM Eastern.  Mark your calendar and update your Netflix queue.

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A post that requires you to accept that I can do a passable impersonation of Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man

This weekend’s Family Movie Night last featured Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Couldn’t be helped.  But last week the blonde and I were delighted, and relieved, when the guys vetoed Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen in favor of Little Big Man.

Oliver and Ken Mannion saw Transformers 2 in the theater over the summer.  Twice, actually.  I thought they’d enjoyed it, but it turns out they had been disappointed the first time and had only asked to go the second time in the hope that they’d been mistaken in their judgment on the first go round.  I’ve mentioned that they’re developing more sophisticated critical skills, but hope can still trump experience.

But they had other reasons for choosing Little Big Man.  The featured movie here the week before was The Comancheros starring John Wayne and they were in the mood for another western.  They’ve both become Dustin Hoffman fans, having seen Tootsie recently.  And they were curious to find out if my impression of Dustin Hoffman as both the young and the 121 year old Jack Crabb measured up.

They gave me two and a half stars.  I lost half a star for not getting the dialog exact.

Their main reason, though, was they wanted to see just how crazy George Armstrong Custer was portrayed.

Both guys are history buffs.  Their favorite class this year is American History.  Oliver’s class was just moving from Reconstruction to the Indian wars, as it happened---Ken’s class is studying the Constitutional Convention---and his teacher had just given them an account of the Battle of the Little Big Horn making the point that Custer had gotten his command rubbed out through his vainglory, foolhardiness, and racist disrespect for the fighting spirit and skills of the Sioux and Cheyenne, the same point Ken remembered from his eighth grade history lesson on the Little Big Horn.

Their teachers apparently added that Custer himself deserved what he got for leading the massacre at Washita eight years before.

It’d been a long, long time since I’d seen Little Big Man.  Long enough ago that I’d begun to feel like Jack Crabb himself whenever I talked about it.

“My name is Lance Mannion, and I am the oldest living survivor of an audience that saw a movie about the Battle of the Little Big Horn called…”

Movie holds up.  In fact, it’s very good.  But it turns out that the depiction of Custer and the Last Stand are two of the weakest parts.  Richard Mulligan’s Custer is crazy, but it’s a cartoon crazy, without any nuance or grounding in the real Custer’s history or character.  We’re meant to accept that Custer is nuts because only someone who was nuts would think and act as the movie has him thinking and acting.  He’s out of his mind, because he must have been out of his mind.  To the degree that there is any historical basis to his insanity it’s in his being the agent of the United States Government’s policy of genocide.

Considering that Little Big Man isn’t really about that policy or about the Indian Wars---it’s about how generally crazy life in these United States is and how crazy and violent human beings of all kinds are, and it’s key that the Cheyenne refer to themselves as the Human Beings because all of them, even Old Lodge Skins, are as nutty in their ways as whites---this essentially political depiction of Custer seems like a cheap and easy shot.

The movie was made in 1970, so I’m guessing that the director Arthur Penn and screenwriter Calder Willingham intended parallels to Vietnam---Washita as My Lai, for example---and then allowed themselves to think that the parallels substituted adequately for character and plot development.   Custer is carried away by his own legend.  He believes he is invincible and is convinced that his enemies are just as convinced of it.  He persists in an obviously self-destructive course, rejecting all sane advice, without coming up with an exit strategy, because he knows that whatever he decides to do is the right thing to do and doing the right thing will always result in victory, no matter the odds or the obstacles.  And when the end comes, he can’t fathom it.  Defeat like this, at the hands of an inferior enemy---and all his enemies are his inferiors---is an impossibility and he goes stark raving mad, turning on his own troops and blaming everybody else, because he can’t face the truth.  In those things, he is a reflection of the United States in Vietnam---and in Iraq, for that matter.  The trouble is that there isn’t as much dramatic satisfaction in watching a political point being refuted, even through symbolic violence, as in watching a real tragic hero or villain meet his destiny.

Custer may have been mad.  But if he was, he was mad in his own particular way.  What he definitely was was ambitious and vain, and it was those two qualities that sent him charging down into the Greasy Grass.  He disobeyed orders, refusing to wait for General Terry’s army to catch up with reinforcements, because he didn’t want to share the headlines with Terry, and he rejected his own scouts’ report on the number of warriors waiting for him because that fact didn’t jive with what he wanted and needed to think---that he was headed for a quick and easy victory.  His plan was actually a sound one, if only there had been fewer Indians or many more cavalrymen.  He wasn’t crazy, unless crazy is a synonym for all too human.

And I happen to know all this because I read the book.

Thomas Berger’s novel, Little Big Man, is one of my all time favorites.  I read it long before I saw the movie for the first time---like so many of the great movies of the 70s, I had to wait to see them until I was off to college and grad school where they showed up as parts of film fests on campus or at the local art houses.  I was twenty or twenty-one when I saw the movie Little Big Man.  I was fifteen when I read the book.  It made an impression on me that I couldn’t shake when watching the film, then or last week.

In the novel, the possibility that Jack Crabb is a liar is continually raised by Crabb himself.  And since he’s so old, we’re also meant to wonder if he’s maybe a bit senile.  He could be telling a tall tale.  He could be misremembering.  He could be dreaming out loud.  But Berger doesn’t want us to consider these possibilities so that we will simply accept what’s on the page as fiction.  He’s not a game-player like John Barth, whose historical novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, is meant to be admired for its disregard for historical accuracy even when Barth is being accurate.  Berger wants us to doubt Crabb’s narrative in order to make us test it against what we know or what we can look up.  The joke on us isn’t, as with Barth, that it is all a joke.  The joke is that when we do the testing we realize that what we think we know about the events and historical personages depicted in Little Big Men we “know” from movies and television shows that are lies or at best dreams dreamed on film.

Tested against what can be looked up in history books and historical documents, Jack Crabb’s stories come pretty close to the truth.  Where they vary is in their personal nature.

Crabb’s version of things is slanted.  He is biased in his judgments and in what he chooses to remember and in how he remembers it.  He tells the stories he tells in the ways he tells them because what he’s relating is their effect on him.  These things didn’t just happen.  They happened to somebody.  Jack Crabb.  And that’s the only reason he knows about them.  So when Crabb tells us that Wyatt Earp was a mean and nasty son of a bitch, he isn’t trying to make us reject whatever heroic image of Earp we might have from movies like My Darling Clementine.  It’s simply that in their one and only encounter, Earp was mean and nasty to Jack Crabb.

If you look it up, which I did, you find out that that meanness and nastiness fits with what’s known of the real Wyatt Earp.  It’s part of what made him an effective lawman.  It’s not the whole truth about Earp.  But it is a truth, part of the whole.

From an historian’s point of view, Crabb may be telling what amount to lies, but he doesn’t do it to a purpose.  He does it because he can’t help seeing things from his own particular point of view.  He can’t get outside himself.  That’s what makes him such a perfect straight man to the various characters, historical and purely fictional, he encounters.  He can only see them as they present themselves to a gullible audience, himself.  That makes him an unreliable narrator, but a very different kind from Gore Vidal’s Aaron Burr, a consummate liar, who libels George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and every other historical character he deals with in order to make himself look good or, at any rate, not as rotten at heart as he knows we suspect he is.

By the way, Burr was another one of my favorite books from the period when I read Little Big Man.  It just hasn’t kept as warm a place in my heart.

With Custer in the novel, it’s the same for Crabb as with Earp and Wild Bill Hickock.  Crabb isn’t telling us the truth about the man, but he isn’t lying about him either.  He is only telling us what he knows about Custer from his personal encounters with him.  And what he knows is that there was something irresistible about George Custer.  Crabb himself is infatuated with him from the first and he can’t shed his infatuation, not completely, at any rate, even after Custer causes the murder of his wife and infant son and Crabb resolves to kill him in revenge.  It’s a love-hate relationship, but all on one side, because Custer hardly seems aware that Crabb is alive, at least not in the sense of having a life of his own apart from his place in the legend of George Armstrong Custer.

To Custer, everybody else, every thing else, exists only as an extension of his own ego.  The truth about Custer---which is to say one of the truths about him---that Berger is getting at through Jack Crabb is that Custer was intensely charismatic and he had that ability charismatic leaders have of convincing other people to subsume their egos in his and to start seeing the world the way they do, as being all about and for them.  Despite his own better judgment, despite what he knows, despite it being against his own interests, on some level, very close to the surface, Crabb can’t help rooting for Custer and taking a personal pride in the man’s success, even when it comes at the expense of Crabb and the people he loves.  At the very end, when he knows better, after he’s watched Custer die and been glad to see him die, he is still Custer’s advocate and devoted admirer.  He tries to tell his Cheyenne grandfather, Old Lodge Skins, that the Sioux and the Human Being warriors had left Custer’s body untouched and not taken his scalp out of respect.

But the now blind Old Lodge Skins tells him that respect wasn’t the reason Custer kept his hair.

“No, my son.  I felt his head.  He was getting bald.”

That’s a poignant moment because it brings up another quality of Custer’s, his vanity which is very much like the vanity of movie star whose looks are fading and is now facing the fact that his career as a romantic lead are coming to an end.  Custer was a golden boy who had reason to worry he’d outlived his days of youthful glory.  Whatever else drove him to his doom at Little Big Horn, part of what he was doing was attempting to recapture his sense of himself as a hero of the Civil War, now more than ten years in the past.

That gives Berger’s Custer a tragic dimension that the character doesn’t have in the movie at the end of which he’s acting as crazy as the Mannion boys expected but he’s a crazy clown and his death causes not much more than an ironic shrug.

The other big weakness of the movie is the Mrs Pendrake subplot.  Even in the novel, Mrs Pendrake is a minor character, but her short, swift harlot’s non-progress in the movie from hypocritical preacher’s wife to hypocritical whore doesn’t add anything to her part.  It just reduces her from a sketch of a Madame Bovary of the Wild West to a borderline misogynistic cliche that doesn’t even make the satirical point that there are different ways of being a prostitute, since she’s shown going in the wrong direction for that.

It doesn’t help that she’s played by Faye Dunaway, whose presence as the only other movie star besides Dustin Hoffman in the cast gives a weight to the character she can’t carry.  Mrs Pendrake collapses into nothing and we’re left with the sight of a talented but bored actress amusing herself by playing dress-up and trying out a Southern belle accent as if she’s preparing to audition for the part of Blanche DuBois in a touring company production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Plus, and this may just be me, but it’s hard to see how anyone, even a teenage boy who’d spent half his life among the Indians, could mistake Bonnie Parker-Milady de Winter-Mrs Mulray for a mother figure and an ideal of feminine virtue.

Other than that, Hoffman is at his most likeable and he’s doing something I can’t recall seeing him do again until Tootsie and then not again until Stranger Than Fiction, having fun playing the part.  The movie is punctuated throughout by fine cameo turns by some excellent character actors, most noticeably Jeff Corey as a temperamentally mild Wild Bill Hickock and Martin Balsam as a relentlessly optimistic snake-oil salesman who cheerfully sacrifices pieces of himself---a hand, an eye, a leg---as just the price of doing business, but also Alan Oppenheimer as Custer’s second in command at Little Big Horn hopelessly offering the last bit of sane advice Custer will ever reject, William Hickey as the fussy and pedantic historian who interviews the ancient Jack Crabb, and Carole Androsky as Jack’s gunslinging sister Caroline, a part that should have been much more than a cameo.

As good as they all are, though, the movie doesn’t belong to any of them, not even to Hoffman.  It belongs to Chief Dan George who plays Jack Crabb’s Cheyenne grandfather, Old Lodge Skins.

___________________

An historical aside: Not coincidentally, we’ve started watching Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War.  The guys got a kick out of Custer’s first appearance in which we learn that Custer graduated last in his class at West Point and that the first things he did after war was declared was have himself fitted with a fancy tailor-made new uniform then have himself photographed showing it off.

_________________

Your turn: My real disappointment with the movie Little Big Man is that it leaves out some of my favorite scenes from the book Little Big Man, like the one with Wyatt Earp.  This isn’t just another case of “The book is better than the movie.”  The movie could have benefited from the addition of characters.  It’s meant to be a revisionist anti-epic, but even as an anti-epic the screen needs to be a little more crowded.  Earp, Calamity Jane, Jack and Caroline’s no good brother Bill, Jack’s “niece” Amelia are all I think sorely missed.  But even though it isn’t just a case of “The book is better than the movie,” it is the case that the book is better than the movie because the book happens to be one of the best American novels of the last half of the 20th Century.

I’ll leave it to the college professors to sort out which Roths, which Updikes, which Vonneguts, which Morrisons and Mailers, if any, and which novels by Saul Bellows belong on the list, but that list has to include Little Big Man.

It also has to include True Grit, Sometimes a Great Notion (ahead of and I would put it instead of Cuckoo’s Nest), Ironweed, and Continental Drift.

How about you?  What besides the usual suspects would be on your list?

Little Big Man and most of the other movies I’ve written about on the blog that are available on DVD can be purchased through my aStore.

Can a bold-talking one-eyed fat man be a hero-king?

"I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience.  Which'll it be?"

"I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man."

"Fill your hands you son of a bitch!"

The best take on the shoot-out at high noon from a fun movie adapted from a great book .

But what this scene from True Grit really is is an acknowledgement that westerns are our continuation of the stories begun with the sword being pulled from the stone.  Westerns are chivalrous tales of knights-errant on quests or hero-kings arising to save the people from oppression and restore order and peace and justice.

In this scene, Rooster Cogburn is literally a knight on horseback.  In the long shots he might as well be Beaumains confronting the Black Knight and his minions or Launcelot tilting against all comers beneath the castle of Shallot.  In close up, of course, he doesn't look anything like a knight in shining armor---until he twirls his rifle, which he does with the panache of a knight of the Round Table drawing his sword.  But that's the joke that drives the story.  Mattie Ross has come looking for a Launcelot to go after her father's killer and instead she gets Rooster Cogburn.

On the face of things this is a reiteration of the classic theme, Don't judge a book by its cover.  Heroes are as heroes do.  And this is the lesson Mattie herself thinks she learns.

"No grit?  Rooster Cogburn?  Not much!"

But Mattie doesn't know she's living out the shadow of a myth.

Rooster isn't a hero.  Not until she makes him into one.  His drinking and swearing and bad manners and less than noble ideas about how he ought to go about doing his job as a deputy marshal are the least of his unheroic qualities.  He has an unsavory past and his commitment to the law is purely mercenary and opportunistic.   He has some of the qualities of a knight, grit, mainly, and there may have been times in his life when he's been a knight.  But while knights are heroic by nature, they aren't necessarily heroes.  The Black Knight is a knight.   A knight doesn't become a hero until he has a heroic cause to serve.

Although she doesn't know it, Mattie herself is that cause.

The key scene in both the novel and the movie isn't Rooster's joust with Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang.  It's the ride Rooster makes to get Mattie to the doctor afterwards.

That's when he completes the task she's set him for him and which by sheer force of will, her own grit, she's kept him at, becoming her worthy lieutenant.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is a follow-up to Friday's post, Lieutenants, sergeants, squires, free-lances, and the hero-king.

Don't mind me.  I'm just trying to decompress from the election.

At any rate, to answer my own question, Can a bold-talking one-eyed fat man be a hero king:  No.  At least, not in this story.  But he can become a hero, if he's lucky enough to meet a Mattie Ross.

That answer would seem to put Mattie in the role of hero-queen, wouldn't it?

She isn't, though.  Not quite.

In a comment on Friday's post, Dave MB asked, "Hmm... in _True Grit_ Glen Campbell is a free-lance, but how do you classify John Wayne and Kim Darby?"

I'm glad you asked, Dave MB.  And funny that you should, because I was thinking about True Grit when I wrote that post.

You're right about Campbell's character, the Texas Ranger, being the free-lance.

And I've pretty much said what I think Rooster is.

Maddie, however, is an somewhat ambiguous position.

First off, there is no hero-king in True Grit.  Mattie's hero-king, her father, is dead.  Which would make her the princess.   But what is a princess or a prince but a ruler in training? 

Maddie, at the start, is a version of the squire.  She's the apprentice.

She's also at the start in the same boat as Rooster.  She has no hero-king to serve.

This is where a lot of epics and westerns and action-adventures begin.  There is no king.  Chaos reigns.  The story is about how a hero or band of heroes defeat Chaos and bring about the return of the king.

The king, by the way, doesn't have to be literally a king or even literally a character.  In a more democratic age, the "king" is an ideal.  "He" is the ordered and peaceful and just society that the heroes preserve and protect.

The hero, then, doesn't have to be a king or a queen.  The hero can be, and often is, a lieutenant who is waiting for the king's return or who has gone on ahead to act in the king's stead or he can be a free-lance who has been prevailed upon to do the job.  In this story, the hero is a surrogate for the king or queen and he neither wants or expects to continue to be in charge once his job is done.  Robin Hood is a surrogate for King Richard.  All the knights of the Round Table---except Launcelot, Galahad, and Percival---are surrogate Arthurs.  Arthur himself is a surrogate for the real once and future king, You Know Who.  And I'm still convinced that was the path the new Batman movies were headed on, with Batman, the free-lance on his way to becoming a lieutenant, unaware of it but acting as a surrogate for Superman.

Most westerns are stories about lieutenants (any movie with a lawman as the hero) or free-lances ("Come back, Shane!  Shane!  Come back!") who are called by duty or forced by circumstances to take on the job of the hero-king, but who ride off into the sunset, usually more figuratively than literally, once that job is done.

Just talking through my hat here, but I'll bet that if you did a comprehensive survey of movies and literature you'll find far more stories about lieutenants and free-lances than about hero-kings and queens.

And for the record, I'm not trying to make the case that every story is a tale of a hero-king or a hero-king's surrogate or that every main character falls neatly into one of these archetypal roles.

But I'll also bet that if you did that survey you also find that there are lots and lots and lots of stories about apprentices who in the course of learning whatever they need to learn bring about the conditions necessary for the return of the hero-king.

This is the first tale of King Arthur.  It's the story of Luke Skywalker.  It's the story Anakin Skywalker failed to live out.

The apprentice is always young, usually a young teen and very often a child.  She---and now it's just as accurate to use feminine pronouns, because the apprentice is quite regularly a girl, because she:---doesn't have to be a knight in training or the heir of a hero-king or queen.  Her apprenticeship can be in a vocation that doesn't require her to wield a sword or a gun.  She's learning something far more important and powerful than warcraft and statecraft.  She's acquiring knowledge.

In many of these stories, the apprentice is a sorcerer's apprentice.

The most popular hero in contemporary literature is a sorcerer's apprentice who just finished up his training and his hero's journey.

In the end Harry Potter doesn't become the hero-king he seemed on the road to becoming in the first books.  He finishes as lieutenant in service to a system instead of to a an actual hero-king or queen.  (Actually, he finishes as a minor government functionary, but I'd rather not dwell on the banalities in the last chapter of Deathly Hallows.)  That's because Harry is the product of a democratic age and an egalitarian-minded author and he has helped bring about a world in which a hero-king isn't needed.   But considering the direction J.K. Rowling took him, even if Harry had been set down into a world more like Middle Earth than like late 20th Century Great Britain, he'd have refused a crown in the end.  He identifies too much with Dumbledore and Tom Riddle and having seen how they were tempted he's become his own greatest doubter.  He's also seen his own father, a more natural hero-king than Harry himself, abuse his own power over lesser wizards like Snape and that's caused Harry to wonder if perhaps if he hadn't met and married Lily, if he hadn't been surprised and murdered by Voldemort, James Potter might have met with some temptations he wouldn't have been able to resist.

Harry really doesn't have to worry about himself because he had an advantage that James didn't.  It's the same advantage Arthur had.  The same that Luke had over his father.  Harry was raised by adults who taught him humility.

On the other hand, I wouldn't trust the almost slavishly worshipful Ginny to have the same effect on Harry as Lily had on James.  Maybe Harry spends a lot of his time at Ron and Hermione's.

At any rate, to get back to True Grit.  Mattie is an apprentice.  I'm not sure what she learns how to be or that it matters all that much.  True Grit isn't a myth, after all.  It's a comic novel.  At the end of the book we're given a glimpse of Mattie in late middle-age.  She has become something of a queen of all she surveys.  She's the richest woman in town, an empire-builder.  But this seems to be a result of her grit and her common sense and her lawyer's investment advice rather than a symbol of her learned wisdom or her nobility.  Mattie is the the teller of her own tale and she's not the kind who brags.  But she's also not inclined to leave out the facts, even ones that are flattering to herself, and she doesn't give any hint that she thinks she's particularly noble or even wise and benevolent.  She's just who she is.   A banker.

Rooster, by the way, isn't able to continue his knightly ways after he and Mattie part company.

In the end maybe the point of the myth is that there are no heroes or heroines.  There are only people who sometimes get lucky enough to attach themselves to a cause that makes them heroic for a time.

Mattie's and Rooster's causes were each other.

Last Train From Gun Hill, a hero's good intentions, and why we can torture without guilt

Last Train From Gun Hill, the 1959 Western starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, has a plot suspiciously similar to 3:10 to Yuma, both the 1957 original and last year's remake.  Our idealistic hero has to put the bad guy on a specific train at a specific time.  Standing between our hero and the train station is a small army of the bad guy's gunslinger compadres.   Looks like there's no way our hero can make that train.  He's bound to get himself killed trying.  But besides the fact that he doesn't particularly want to commit suicide, there's another reason for our hero to second guess his own plan and for us in the audience to wonder if he might---might---decide the effort's not worth the cost.  There's a part of our hero that doesn't want to put the bad guy in jail.

In 3:10 to Yuma it's because the bad guy is charming and intelligent and persuasive in making the case that our hero should just let him go.  Add to this the fact that the bad guy starts to root for our hero to succeed and begins to help him, even though this is obviously not in his own best interest. 

In Last Train From Gun Hill, the bad guy's a whiny coward who's not even a bold outlaw like Glenn Ford/Russell Crowe's Ben Wade.  He's just a spoiled punk of a rich man's son who commits his crime out of drunken impulse.  There's no reason for our hero to sympathize with him, and he doesn't.  But he does feel bad for the punk's father, who is an old friend of our hero.  The friend knows his son's no good but he loves him anyway and he begs our hero to let the boy go for friendship's sake.  Our hero sympathizes and some part of him wants to give in, but we know he's not going to, and it's not just because our hero is a lawman and the law's the law.  The victim of the punk's drunken impulse was our hero's wife.

It's very late in the 19th Century, the frontier has closed.  Civilization has arrived.  People have telephones.  The local marshal, Matt Morgan (Kirk Douglas), is married to an Indian woman and nobody in town thinks anything about this, the Indian wars are that far in the past.  Morgan was one of the last of the gunfighting lawmen but those days are so long ago now that when he tells the kids stories about his glory days he treats them as comic adventures about some guy with his name who wasn't really him.  Everybody in these parts these days is quiet, law-abiding, peaceable, friendly, and decent in their way.  The town bears far less resemblance to Deadwood than it does to Grovers Corners.  We're in an idyllic, small-town, modern America.

And into this idyll wander the punk kid and his punkier sidekick.  They're not from around here.  They're from way over in Gun Hill and civilization hasn't reached that far.  It might as well be another country, and in a way it is.  It's an autocracy ruled by the punk kid's father, a cattle baron named Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn) who owns everything and everybody in Gun Hill and is all the law there is and as far as he's concerned all the law there needs to be.

In short, the two punks are pretty much invaders from a foreign country where our democratic values and laws do not apply, and if you want to see in that an allegory for the Cold War nightmare about the godless Commies crawling out from under our beds to subvert our way of life you're probably not far off.  Fortunately, the movie doesn't make much of it; the filmmakers were just drawing on what was in the in air at the time in order to manipulate the fears and angers of their audience, because that's something popular entertainment does by definition.

One morning, the commies---I'm sorry, the two punks---surprise Matt's wife on a road in the woods and because she's an Indian and Indians don't count as people where they come from---Civil Rights were also in the air---they decide she's fair game for some fun.  They rape her.  But she fights back and makes the Belden boy mad and he beats her head against a rock and kills her.

Spoilers from here on out.

There's a witness to the rape and murder.  The marshal's and her son.  There's evidence.  The quick-thinking boy escapes with the rapists' horses, one of which bears a fancy saddle that the marshal recognizes as belonging to his old friend Belden.  And there's this.  The boy reports that his mother laid open her killer's face with her buggy whip.  He's marked as her murderer for life.

This would seem to be a set-up for the marshal to be able to shoot the punk on sight, and he lets people know that's what he wants to do.

It is not what he plans to do.

His plan is to arrest his wife's killer and bring him back to face trial.  He wants revenge.  He's going to settle for justice, a little easier for him to do since he knows he'll have the killer dead to rights.

When he sees the saddle he knows where he has to go and what man he has to see when he gets there.  He arranges for a pair of John Doe warrants and catches the first train to Gun Hill.

The warrants are important.

Morgan doesn't know the killer is his old friend's son.  He and Belden haven't seen each other in twenty years and all he knows about his old friend these days is that he has built a big cattle empire way over there in Gun Hill.  He's assuming that the killer either works for Belden or he stole a horse from him.  Either way his manhunt has to start at Belden's ranch, but also either way the killer is nobody to him except the murderer of his wife.  There's no reason for Morgan to doubt himself or to feel guilty if he does shoot the killer on sight except that he's a lawman and the law's the law.  Morgan's going to bring him in alive and take what little consolation he can find in knowing the bastard will hang.

We're meant to admire Morgan's restraint and his idealism.  This is the American way.  Even a United States marshal doesn't take the law into his own hands.  But there's a bit too much of having our cake and eating too here.  Last Train From Gun Hill would have been a very different sort of movie if there'd been any reason for us to doubt that Rick Belden was the killer or for Matt Morgan to doubt that if he brought Rick back for trial he might get off.

The deck's been stacked.  Rick has no good qualities.  There are no mitigating circumstances.  Matt Morgan is right to want revenge and he deserves it.  And we know that no matter what Rick is going to die, so what does it matter if it's at the end of a rope or the end of Morgan's gun?

Morgan goes to Gun Hill, learns who the killer is, sets out to arrest him anyway, captures Rick without much trouble---another reason for us not to care what happens to him.  Rick isn't even clever enough to be dangerous---then holes up in the hotel to wait for the last train to leave Gun Hill at nine that night.

Of course, his old friend Belden and his men surround the hotel.  Belden demands that Morgan let Rick go and for the last half hour of the movie various members of Belden's gang get killed trying to take on Morgan themselves, making it clear that Morgan is such a formidable man and gunfighter that if he'd decided to do things another way, not only would Rick be dead already, so would all of Belden's gang and probably Belden himself, to boot.

Again the movie's asking us to admire Morgan for not just his courage but for his restraint and his commitment to what's right.

It just doesn't expect us to want more than the commitment out of him.

Finally, the time comes to leave for the station.  With a shotgun, helpfully provided by Carolyn Jones, as a fallen woman partially redeemed by Morgan's example, wedged under Rick's chin, Matt sets out.  And he just about makes it.  Belden's called off his men.  He seems resigned to letting Morgan take his son.  The train pulls in.  But just as Morgan and Rick are about to step onto the platform, Rick's punkier, and stupider, sidekick jumps from the shadows to come to Rick's rescue.  He comes out with his gun drawn but he's not quick enough on the trigger.  Morgan drops him in the dust.  But the sidekick gets off a couple of shots, one of which gets Rick right in the gut.

Rick dies bloody.  His father, enraged, calls out Morgan, who is about to just get on the train alone and go home.  They square off.  Belden draws first.  Matt draws faster.  Belden joins his son dead on the train platform.

Roll credits.

A well-made, tautly paced, moderately exciting but fairly standard Western.  It's a little less typical in that it doesn't encourage us to stand up and cheer when the bad guys get theirs, and its gunfights aren't staged for maximum entertainment value, they're quick and violent and grim.  But it's not as complex as the Jimmy Stewart-Anthony Mann Westerns the filmmakers probably had on their minds when they made it, and in fact it only rises above what was being done on the best of the TV Westerns of the time because it stars Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn.  They're just too compelling.

In the end though it's another Revenge Fantasy, only we get to cheer the hero's good intentions---and vicariously congratulate ourselves on our good intentions---more than we are encouraged to cheer to final retribution.

Revenge fantasies are the staple of American macho pop art.  From movies to television to comic books to video games, for decades and decades Americans, American young men mostly, have been raised on one simple story.  The bad guys invade, they do the hero wrong, the hero takes bloody revenge.  Virtue, such as it's there, is reactive---good is what opposes evil, period---and narcissistic.  The hero may have a job that makes him the objective champion of others---superhero, cop, private detective, soldier---so that he would at first appear to be acting disinterestedly as an agent for justice.  But sooner rather than later the story always gives him a reason to make it personal.

Last Train to Gun Hill is admirable in that it tries, for a while, to have the hero ignore the personal and act disinterestedly, and in the end he doesn't become the direct agent of vengeance.  The bad guys die by their own hands.  Rick's stupid sidekick kills him and gets himself killed in the process by being stupid on his own accord.  And Craig Belden essentially commits suicide by drawing on a man he knows is far faster and more deadly than himself.  But the effect is almost the same as it would have been if Morgan had completely taken things into his own hands.  The bad guys die to slake our thirst for revenge.  When it's all over, Morgan hasn't succeeded in what he set out to do.  He's gotten his revenge despite himself and the movie ends without letting us know if he feels bad about that.  He boards the train with a look of grim resignation and that's the last we see of him.  We're left to be satisfied with knowing that at least he tried.   He wanted to do the right thing.  His intentions were what counts.

And this is the point where this post stops being a movie review and starts being about torture, war, and John McCain.

This habit Americans have of being content with our good intentions is one of our greatest character flaws as a people.

I won't get into our habit of thinking that in any confrontation we are the good guys---a vain and close to insane assumption by a people whose nation was founded on slavery and a centuries-long attempt at genocide.

But even when we are the good guys it shouldn't be enough that we intend to act as good guys should act.

Here we are, though, a generation after Vietnam, forty years after the murder of Martin Luther King, assuming that we are always the good guys and that as the good guys we're allowed to do whatever we want to do, as long as our intentions are good.

If we go to war, it's because we were forced to.  If we kill women and children when we go to war, it's because, well, war's hell, isn't it, and remember we didn't want to go to war, the other side made us.  If we torture prisoners---well, we don't.  We don't torture anybody.  We may have to do some things that are kind of like torture, but we don't want to and we sure don't enjoy it and when we finally resort to it, it's only because we have no choice, the bad guys have forced us into it.

Our good intentions in every case are proof of our goodness and other people should recognize that and admire us for it.

The Maverick and Commander hates war.  How do we know that?  He tells us so himself and everybody knows that St John McCain never lies and if he ever did it certainly wouldn't be to make himself look good and get himself elected President.  He hates war, so never mind that he has no intention of ending this one and no plan to avoid getting us into any future ones and in fact is offering a foreign policy plan that practically calls for war at the drop of a hat.

The Maverick and Commander is against torture.  We know that because he was tortured himself and nobody in the history of the world has ever done to someone else the same evil that was done to them and St John McCain would never be the first.  He hates torture.  Can't you see how painful it was for him to have voted to allow the Bush Leaguers to continue to torture prisoners?  It's his intentions and his feelings that matter.  What he's forced to do by the bad guys cannot be held in judgment against him.

The Maverick and Commander is a hypocrite.  That should be apparent to anyone with a trace of a conscience.  But it's not apparent to a great many Americans and a large contingent of the National Press Corps because they are hypocrites in exactly the same way.

It's our good intentions that matter.  The Maverick and Commander has good intentions.  He hates war.  He's against torture.  We are glad to make a hero of him for that.

As long as we get to see the bad guys dead in the dust in the end.

Seraphim Falls and the better, and baser, angels of our nature

Third Season of Deadwood's out on DVD now and over at newcritics Al Swearengen himself's giving a preview.

So I'm not going to write about Deadwood today.  I'm going to write about another western.  A movie.  Seraphim Falls, which stars Pierce Brosnan as a former Union officer turned trapper and Liam Neeson as a vengeance-seeking former Confederate colonel who tracks him down and chases him from the Ruby Mountains, across Nevada, and into the alkalai desert for a final showdown, and that about sums up the whole of the plot.

Still it's a good, taut, intelligent film.  Nothing special but exciting.  And in its own quiet, understated, symbolic way almost as cynical about the settling of the Wild West as Deadwood, though not as profane.

The characters don't curse much nor do they speak in blank verse ever.  In fact they hardly speak at all.

Brosnan's character, Gideon, is the focus of the movie.  He's outnumbered and outgunned, usually on foot while Neeson and the gang of bounty hunters he's hired to help capture him---but not kill him.  They don't get paid if they kill Gideon.  Neeson's character, Colonel Carver, is reserving that pleasure for himself.---are on horseback, and he's wounded badly in the shoulder from an ambush in the very first scene, and our rooting interest is in seeing how Gideon will stay alive for the whole movie and arrange it so that there will be, as we know there must be, a final showdown between himself and Carver.

Brosnan isn't given much to say.  He's on his own for close to half his screen time and when he meets up with other characters his conversations with them are short and to the point.  "I need a horse."  "Water!"  "How far to the next town?"

But he's very good at acting without dialog.  Like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive---to which director David Von Ancken gives respectful nods throughout, including having Gideon take a plunge over a waterfall that like Dr Kimble's there's no way he should have survived---Brosnan is excellent at silently portraying inner turmoil and physical exhaustion.  Gideon is a desperate man, in pain, afraid, confused, losing hope, but thinking, always thinking, so that he's always dangerous.

Brosnan's also good at suggesting an underlying guilt and an accompanying sense of resignation.  That guiltiness and the fact that his antagonist is played with nobility by Liam Neeson makes us wonder if, even though Gideon is in the position of underdog hero and has captured our sympathy, he is in fact a hero and if we should be rooting for him.

Brosnan does such a good job with the guilt, condemning himself with a Serves me right look of sadness after every wince of pain from his shot-up shoulder and after every new stroke of bad luck undoes what his last careful plan of escape had accomplished, that well before Carver reveals why he's chasing Gideon we're certain there's a very good reason.

Neeson has far more to say, Carver has to talk to his hired guns sometimes, but he's also usually short and to the point.  His main job in the movie is to be Liam Neeson, the good, heroic Liam Neeson of Rob Roy and Michael Collins, in order to impress us with a sense of an underlying decency in a man who is on a brutal mission, going about it ruthlessly, and is throughout all business, his business being deadly revenge.

We're never meant to believe that his character is the real hero, but we are meant to know without being told that at one time he was a hero.  He's changed or forgotten that side of himself but through Gideon's guilt and Carver's own residual nobility we become convinced before we know the whys and hows that if the change in Carver isn't all Gideon's fault he is still to a great degree responsible.

What we have then are two tragic figures on their way to a confrontation that, because Von Ancken has made Seraphim Falls more visually poetic and narratively symbolic movie than the average horse opera needs to be, we suspect is going to tell us something about role of the Civil War, or war generally, has had in shaping the American character.

But because along the way Von Ancken, who wrote the screenplay with Abby Everett Jaques, is taking us on a cynic's magical history tour of the west to see some iconographic moments and archetypal characters through rather skeptical eyes, we can guess that whatever he finally has to say about the War won't be romantic or as tragic as the main characters.

Gideon himself starts out as one of those archetypal characters, the lone trapper, reluctantly blazing a trail he'd rather the rest of civilization wouldn't follow.  His path of escape takes him from the isolated and unspoiled mountain wilderness---gorgeously photographed---down to a pioneer homestead where he meets a family of settlers, father, teenage daughter, young son.  No mother.  She's dead.  It's never said specifically what killed her---disease, wild animals, childbirth, Indians, outlaws---whatever it was doesn't matter, because the real cause of her death was the frontier itself.  Through the mother's absence and what the daughter who has had to take her place at too early an age goes through Von Ancken is suggesting the important, hard, and brutally dangerous role women played in the settling of the country and the price they paid for it.

Gideon---and after him Carver, always right behind him---goes on from there to a railroad camp where immigrant labor is hard at work industrializing and civilizing the country and where instead of making common cause one despised ethnic group, the Irish, take out their resentment and anger on another, the Chinese.

Gideon and Carver meet up with a band of religious pilgirms who at first encounter appear so wrapped up in their faith and their bible that reality seems to be slipping right by them and they're becoming a wandering mob of delusional psychotics but who reveal themselves to be when they need to be worldly, crafty, licentious, greedy, and dishonest, without dropping their self-congratulatory God-bothering for a second.

They come across the burned out skeleton of a covered wagon and the broken remains of a piano someone had planned to build a new home around, the evidence of the too great hopes and the unfulfilled dreams of too many people who went west looking for a better life.

And they meet up with an Indian, perhaps the last of his tribe, who because he's played by Wes Studi comes across as as noble and wise as Chingatchgook but turns out to be the first of a very different kind of Indian, the kind hucksters sell to tourists.  Indeed he's set up his own little tourist trap, selling not hokey souvenirs but water.  Still it's a forerunner of the shops that will someday peddle little dolls and toy tomahawks and factory-made Navajo rugs to compensate for not being able to offer tourists a real taste of Native American culture because it's been wiped out.

They never come to a real town because that would be a dramatic dead end for them.  A town would have a sheriff who would very likely get in the way of the final showdown.  But they do encounter the chief reason for there being such things as towns, which is that people need somewhere to go to buy and sell, what Al Sweargen would call fuckin' Commerce, and that arrives in the form of Angelica Huston as a traveling saleswoman of patent medicine appealing to the fears and baser instincts of prospective customers to sell them her snake oil.

All of this sounds more heavily handed in its irony than it plays.  Von Ancken always keeps the chase and escape story front and center and moving swiftly so that in our excitement we don't notice until after Carver leaves a place or says goodbye to the characters what cynical point just got made.   It also happens that people tend to behave better around Gideon and don't show the darker, or darkest, sides of themselves until they meet up with Carver and his men.  In fact, Carver seems to bring out the worst in them.  Just as a for instance, when Gideon is in their cabin the family of settlers treat him kindly and go out of their way to help him, even though they have good reason to think he's there to steal from them.  The father deals with him fairly and the son is just a curious little kid who is both afraid of him and in awe of him as a figure of adventure and mystery.  But when Gideon leaves and Carver arrives, the father is made a coward and the son shows himself up as little thief and the daughter, who was grown-up and motherly and competent around Gideon, is reduced to a helpless victim.

There is a Do Unto Others of courseness to this.  Gideon treats people better because he needs them to help him, while Carver has not a thought for anything or anybody but his own mission and therefore tends to treat people more directly as means to his ends as opposed to Gideon for whom people are aides to him in achieving his ends.

And I think Von Ancken does intend a moral lesson here.  But it's still connected with the cynical themes of his movie. 

Carver is a former Confederate officer, after all.  There's no reason for us to think that Von Ancken isn't using his main characters in the same ironically iconographic way as he uses his minor characters, so Carver is not just from the South, he is the South.

When we find out what happened at Seraphim Falls in the last days of the Civil War we understand that Carver has an excellent reason for hating Gideon.  But there's something missing in his sense of justice.

Responsibility.

What happened at Seraphim Falls was a result of a war the South started, a war that Carver as a Southern solider then ought to bear some responsibility for too.  He helped cause the terrible thing that happened to him.  And he doesn't see that.  To him it was as if there'd been no war.  It was as if Gideon and his troop of soldiers had come along out of pure malice.  He puts all the blame on Gideon as if Gideon had simply decided to do him a terrible wrong for sport.  His insistence on placing all the guilt on the Northerner and his refusal to shoulder even a little bit himself is even more arrogant and blind because what happened was not just a result of war, it was an accident of the war.  No fighting was underway.  Gideon and his men were just being careless.

A great deal of the West was settled after 1865 by former Confederates leaving their war ravaged homes to start over, but if many of them were like Carver they took with them into the West and ingrained in the Western character, which is the American character, a sense of agrievement without a sense of responsibility.  Self-pity and a baseless sense of moral superiority that makes a man a hypocrite from the get-go without his having an inkling of it are the marks of an American descended from the likes of Carver.

Gideon is compassionate because he is guilty.  He is always reluctant to presume upon others because he cannot forget that at bottom he doesn't deserve special favors.  Which says a lot about the importance of having an oppressed and oppressive conscience.  But it has its drawbacks.  In general, Gideon would rather retreat than stand up for himself and when push comes to shove he almost can't bring himself to defend his own life.

And if a lot of Carvers went west after the war so did as many Gideons.  There are two strains of Americans then, according to Seraphim Falls.  Neither one of them is pure of heart, neither one of them is clearly and cleanly heroic.  But one knows itself to be guilty and is therefore inclined to stay its hand, to think before acting, to doubt its own motives and to try to make sure it's right before it sets out to do anything, while the other is self-righteous, certain, angry at heart, quick to lash out, unable to forgive, and brutal when it decides it wants a fight.

In the end, the Carvers of the world never know themselves to have been beaten, only wronged, while the Gideons never feel they've won or deserved to win and so can't press their advantage, and while the two might be walking side by side in the same direction, trying to cross the same wasteland of history, they aren't walking together.

Seraphim Falls.  Directed by David Von Ancken.  Screeplay by David Von Ancken and Abby Everett Jaques.  Starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Wes Studi, Angie Harmon, and Angelica Huston.  Icon  Productions and Samuel Goldwyn Films.  2006.

Please help support this blog.  Buy the Seraphim Falls DVD at Mannion at the Movies or click on the link to purchase Deadwood: The Complete Third Season.

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Hour of the Gun

Plodding shouldn't be a complimentary way to describe a movie, but offhand I can't think of a better word for the pacing of John Sturges' revenge Western, Hour of the Gun, starring James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Jason Robards as Doc Holliday.

It's as if Sturges set the beat to Wyatt's first, slow, measured steps out into the streets of Tombstone and towards the O.K. Corral, in the opening shots of the film.  The pacing from there on, never speeding up, never slowing down, matches Earp's inexorable march towards vengeance and his final showdown with the man who ordered his brother's death.

That's deceptive.

Wyatt's path to that last gunfight takes him all over the map.  It moves in fits and starts.  There are times when he isn't chasing the bad guys at all, he's off on some other, mundane, or at least non-violent, errand, like taking Doc, who's dying of tuberculosis, to a sanitarium in Colorado, hundreds of miles away from Tombstone, so far off that it might as well be another planet.  Definitely far enough away---and he spends several weeks there, looking after Doc---that you begin to wonder if he's given up his vendetta.

But Sturges hasn't paced the movie to keep in step with Wyatt's geographic travels.  He's matching the progress of Wyatt's thoughts as Earp changes from a decent-hearted and dutiful lawman into a lawless but cold and methodical killer.

This progress is only seemingly inexorable.  The measured pacing, the one foot in front of the other, one step following from the last scene structure---no jump cuts in this movie.  Few close-ups too.  Sturges shoots mainly in medium and medium long shots and lets the characters' movements provide all the action, and since Garner is in just about every shot, he sets the pace, slow and steady.  Too steady.  Inhumanly steady.  Scarily steady.---what we're being shown is that this change in Earp is not inevitable.  One thing does lead to the other, but predictably, and because it's happening slowly, he has time to think about what he's done, where he's headed, what the final results will be.

He could stop himself at any time.

Like I said, there are times when he seems to have stopped; in the scenes in Colorado Wyatt even comes close to looking cheerful, as if he's let it go.  But the measured beat of Sturges' drum is relentless.  In his mind, Wyatt's never given up the hunt.

It doesn't help that Clanton can't give up his obsession with Earp any more than Earp can give up his obsession with Clanton.  Clanton wants to see Earp "cold and in the ground" and just at the moment when Wyatt seems ready to listen to the angel of his better nature, he gets news of Clanton's plottings.

He doesn't have to do anything about the news, though.  He just decides that he will.

He gets back on the trail.  The killings continue, each one more violent and more unnecessary and more like murder.

There's not much suspense in the plot.  The suspense arises from the place suspense arises in all tragedies---from our hope that something will stop the inevitable in its course and our despairing certainty that nothing will.

Hour of the Gun isn't a true tragedy, though.  For one thing, we know going in that Wyatt Earp can't die.  Not if the movie is going to be as historically accurate as the title card after the opening credits proclaims it will be.

This movie is based on fact: This is the way it happened.

And for another thing, neither Sturges nor his screenwriter, Edward Anhalt, do much to make us care about what happens to the men Earp goes gunning for.  They are bad men and their boss, Ike Clanton, is worse.

What Sturges expects us to care about, and to mourn, is a good man throwing away his own soul.

Hour of the Gun has been called a sequel to the movie Sturges made about Wyatt Earp ten years before, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday.

Sequel's the wrong word.  Hour of the Gun is the Wyatt Earp movie Sturges would have liked to have made in the 1950s.  The Jimmy Stewart-Anthony Mann problem westerns had already shown that movie audiences were ready for morally ambiguous stories with conflicted, if not downright unsympathetic, heroes, but apparently the Wyatt Earp legends were still untouchable.  Sturges did what he could to make Gunfight at the O.K. Corral a more realistic story and not another burnishing of the myth, but it is finally an old-fashined shoot-em-up, set in a romanticized Wild West with an idealized Wyatt Earp as its hero.

Hour of the Gun isn't a revisionist western.  Sturges isn't out to debunk the myth he had helped shine.  He's really trying to show what the title card says:  This is the way it happened.

By 1881, when the Earps confronted the Clanton gang at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone wasn't in the Wild West, it was at the very westernmost edge of the tame East.  And Wyatt Earp and his brothers weren't heroes riding in to town to clean up.  They were peace officers---cops---hired by the town to maintain an orderliness that was already established.   In his bulkiness and stolidity, James Garner's Earp is a little bit like John Wayne.  But he's more like the guy who's running for sheriff in your town today, a career lawman who's spent too many nights breaking up fights between drunks and picking up the pieces after an accident and arguing with local politicians about budgets.

Hour of the Gun opens with the shootout at the OK Corral and it's staged fairly close to "the way it happened."  It's over in a couple of minutes.  I think the real gunfight took about thirty seconds.  That's because it wasn't meant to be a showdown.  It was four cops going to tell a street gang to break it up.  The fact that three men ended up dead was enough of a suprise to everybody concerned and seen as something so heinously out of the ordinary that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were actually arrested for murder, although a judge decided there was no case against them and refused to indict.

That's the "wild" west of Hour of the Gun.  Showdowns are not a part of daily life and dead bodies in the street are a sign that something went wrong, not that the good guys have put things to right.

You don't need to have seen Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to know what's going on in Hour of the Gun.  What you do need is enough of a sense of the legend of Wyatt Earp to accept Earp as a hero at first sight.  You also need enough innocence to believe that the legend must have some basis in fact to carry you past any reflexive cynicism that might stand in the way of your seeing Earp as a good guy.

It might help, then, to know that the real Wyatt Earp apparently never killed anybody before the the O.K. Corral.  He was a crack shot and could have killed any bad guy he felt needed killing.  But his preferred method for dealing with troublemakers was to walk right up to them, snatch whatever weapon they were brandishing out of their hands, cold-cock them over the head with his pistol, and drag them off to jail.

This appears to have worked for the real Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame too.

The real Earp didn't look like James Garner or Burt Lancaster.  He was tall, but he was skinny.  So it wasn't his size that cowed people.  There was something about the force of his character.

Whatever it was that kept him alive and saved him the trouble of having to kill anybody didn't work with the Clanton gang.  Gang is the word for them too.  They were more like modern gangsters than like the outlaw gangs of the movies or the real life James and Dalton gangs.  They were cattle thieves and stick-up artists who ran "legitimate businesses" and bought up local politicians and while some revisionist histories suggest that the gunfight at the OK Corral was actually the result of business and political rivalries getting out of hand, with the Earps being in their way as dirty as the Clantons, it's more the case that the Earps shocked the Clantons by deciding to treat them like the criminals they were instead of the honest ranchers they pretended to be.

The shock caused Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers to draw their guns---or have their guns drawn, that's never been clear.  We don't really know if the Earps knew they were walking into a gunfight and went anyway.  The way they just walked straight at the Clantons suggests they didn't, and Ike Clanton may not have been wearing his guns, which would mean he wasn't expecting real trouble either.

The famous shootout was probably a mistake.  Both sides miscalculated.  What happened in the weeks after, though, was murder.  Ike Clanton or somebody associated with the gang ordered a hit on the Earps.  Morgan and Virgil were ambushed.  Morgan was killed and Virgil left crippled.

Then various members of the Clanton gang began turning up dead.

My second favorite Wyatt Earp movie, 1993's Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer as Wyatt and Doc, treats this part of the story as a simple kill or be killed shoot out that takes place over the course of weeks instead of all at once at high noon.

My favorite Wyatt Earp movie is My Darling Clementine, but that's one of John Ford's fairy tales.

Sturges, though, makes it plain that Wyatt Earp does not have to kill any of the men he confronts.  He's a much better lawman than they are outlaws and gunfighters.  He has the drop on them and the ones who make the mistake of drawing on him do it because he provokes them to.

In every confrontation, except the final one, Earp's former method of handling bad guys---stare them down, take their guns, drag them off to jail---would have worked.

In effect then, Earp murders them all.

Each killing seems less accidental than the last, and with each one Earp grows less and less surprised at himself.  When he lets a bad guy live it's only to make him tell him where the next bad guy is hiding out so he can go kill him.

This is the story of a good man who does wrong, but Sturges doesn't ever let us think that Earp has no choice.  Wyatt knows that the citizens of Tombstone have been working, successfully, to run Ike Clanton out of town and have effectively disarmed him by breaking up the gang, arresting and buying off those members Earp hasn't caught up with yet.

On top of which, Sturges makes us doubt Wyatt from the start.  The opening gunfight is shot almost entirely in longshot and although there's some dialogue we don't hear the words, as if we're being kept out of earshot with the camera.  We don't know what the Earps are thinking as they walk down the street or what the Clantons are really planning when they gather at the corral.

But Sturges has James Garner give Earp a moment of pause in which he seems to be re-thinking the situation and even telling himself that this probably isn't the way to go about things and he ought to stop it right now.  It's only a moment, but before it passes Garner suddenly looks very sad, as if he has lost something important and is mourning the loss.

And while Sturges' title card insists "This is the way it happened," he's changed an important detail.

In real life, Ike Clanton was with his brother and the McLaurys.  The reason he didn't end up dead like them is that when the shooting started he ran at the Earps shouting that he was unarmed---he might have thrown his guns away, he might have dropped them when Virgil Earp ordered the gang to disarm, or he might not have been wearing them to begin with.  Whichever was the case, Wyatt Earp shouted at him to get the hell out of the way and even gave him a helpful shove.

In the movie, Sturges has Ike standing across the street with the rest of the gang and then ducking for cover as soon as the shooting starts.  He's wearing his gunbelt, but he takes it off before the smoke clears so that he'll appear to have been an innocent bystander.

He doesn't owe his life to Wyatt then.  He owes it to his trigger-happy kid brother Billy and the McLaurys who started shooting too soon.  The Earps have to deal with them first and while they are shooting it out with Billy and the McLaurys, the rest of the gang scatters and Ike is forced to take cover.

The implication is that Ike meant to be part of the confrontation and that the Earps expected him to be.  And since Ike is played by Robert Ryan and is the only star among the Clantons---although Jon Voight appears in one of his earliest roles as Curly Bill Brocius---Ike is the only Clanton of interest at that point.  So we can't help feeling it was Ike the Earps were on their way to...

...do what to?

Arrest?  Argue with?  Interrogate?

Kill.

That's what I think Garner's little moment of hesitation and sorrow is meant to tell us.  As the movie begins, Wyatt Earp has already decided that he's going to kill Ike Clanton.  He's concluded that there's no other way to deal with him.  The decision is morally wrong because it's wrong for practical reasons.  The town has already begun to make moves to get rid of Ike.  Clanton himself is desperate because, as he tells his bought politicians later, "The East is coming."  He means that the town's honest citizens will finally have the backing of real government and he won't be able to survive that.

Wyatt certainly knows the East is coming too.  But he's lost patience.  Perhaps it's also a matter of pride with him.  He's going to put a stop to Clanton himself, once and for all, and that means he has to kill him.  The thing he's mourning the loss of in that moment, then, is himself.

We're not meant to think that Wyatt is driven to murder by passion and an understandable desire for revenge.  When Clanton has his brothers ambushed it gives him justification not motivation for a course of action he's already decided upon.

Hour of the Gun is a director's not an actor's movie.  There's not much in the way of dialogue.  The characters tell each other what they they need to know, never what they are thinking or feeling.  Garner isn't called upon to do much more than glower and then glower harder.  Robert Ryan's job is to give Ike Clanton the charisma and intelligence necessary to organize, lead, and hold together a collection of thugs, cowards, sociopaths, drifters, and grifters.  It's interesting and fun to see him make Clanton into a precursor of Deadwood's Al Swearengen.  In his speeches to his gang about the threat from the East he sounds very much like Swearengen ranting about Yankton, without the profanity of course and without the poetry either, but he has exactly the same contempt for his bought politicians as Ian McShane has Swearengen show towards the corrupt "decent" citizens that are his allies.

All the real heavylifting is left to Jason Robards.  He only has a couple of notes to sing, going back and forth between world-weary cynic and outraged idealist, but he doesn't go the usual route of having the cynic be the mask of the idealist.  He makes the idealist the creation of the cynic.

As I said, you don't need to believe the myth as much as remember it to accept the movie's premise that Wyatt Earp is a good man.  But it's clear that Robards' Doc Holliday not only believes the myth but needs it to be true to the point that he drags himself out of the hospital in order to try to get in the way of Earp's self-propelled downfall.  If there's killing to be done, Doc Holliday is the one to do it not Wyatt Earp.

Holliday sees himself as having been a bad man, and not just a sinner but a villain.  Somehow and for reasons neither man can probably articulate Wyatt Earp became his friend.  Holliday has concluded that if someone like Wyatt Earp can see something good in him then maybe he's not as irredeemble as he'd supposed.

Wyatt Earp is Doc Holliday's personal savior and now that Doc knows that he can't fight off his TB any longer, that it's going to take much more time to kill him, he desperately needs Wyatt to be what he thought him to be so that he can die thinking of himself as not entirely damned.

I like it that the dialogue doesn't lay this out for us.  We have to see it for ourselves in Robards' anger and anguish at what Wyatt is doing to himself.

The nicest thing about Robards' performance, though, is the calmness that comes over him when he realizes that it didn't matter that he couldn't stop Wyatt.

It's Robards, not Garner, Sturges gives the last scene and the last lines to.

Before leaving him at the sanitarium, knowing that this is the last time, it's the end of the line for Doc, Wyatt has told Doc a lie about himself, a charitable lie, meant to leave Doc with his illusions about Wyatt's heroism.  Doc pretends to believe it, but he doesn't and there's a heartbroken look on Robards' face as he watches Wyatt ride away.

But it doesn't last.  He turns his attention to a card game he's playing with an orderly and finishes the game and the movie with a rueful but sincere grin.

"Aces," he says as he lays out his winning hand.  It's a description of his mood as well as of his cards.

In Wyatt Earp, Sturges is showing us that the seeds of our moral self-destruction are in our own hands.

But in Doc Holliday he is showing us that the corrollary is true too.  The agent of our redemption is our own self.

The Bravados

Revised 7:30 PM Tuesday.

Gregory Peck rides into the town of Rio Arriba, tall, lean, chiseled, the best looking profile in the history of cowboy movies defined in black silhouette under a black hat.

In The Bravados, Peck's playing rancher Jim Douglas and he's come to town to see the four men he believes raped and murdered his wife hang.

He's a stranger here, a stranger to every one but the local heiress and the parish priest, both of whom know him as a very different sort of man than he is now.  People are curious about why he's there and when they hear that he's come for the hanging they think he must be the hangman they've sent for.  Rio Arriba's a small, quiet town and has never had a hanging before, so they have to contract out the job.

When Douglas tells him he's just come to watch, but that if the real hangman doesn't show he's ready to step in,  they're startled, leery, suspicious, a little disgusted.   Douglas could put their minds at ease by explaining himself, but he doesn't.  He can't.  He can barely get two words out.  He's been on the trail of these men for six months and you might expect that he's fallen out of the habit of small talk.  But that's not it.

Judging by the small changes that come over him the longer he's in town, we can guess that over the course of his manhunt Douglas has learned that every time he stops to talk with people, whenever he allows himself to become sociable again, he begins losing his thirst for revenge.

The kind of anger and hatred Douglas has been nursing in himself, the anger and hatred that are necessary to his mission, have to brew in the dark and in isolation.

Vengeance is an emotion, not a cause, and it belongs to loners, angry, desperate men who have cut themselves off from society.  To seek vengeance then is to become a sociopath.

Douglas is by nature a sociable man.  In order to do what he thinks he's got to do he's first had to go after his own self.  He's had to, if not hunt down and kill, then capture and lock up in a gloomy, haunted jail within himself, an important part of his own soul.

When the bad guys, inevitably, break out of jail, Douglas is relieved. Watching them hang, for the wrong crime---they've robbed a bank and killed a teller; nobody knows about Douglas' wife---wasn't going to be enough.  He wanted to finish them off himself and their escape gives him another chance.

I don't remember the movie saying exactly where in the Southwest Rio Arriba lies.  The pine forested hills and deep canyons and open meadows---somewhere nearby there's a dessert we hear about but never see---could be in California, could be in Arizona or New Mexico.  Doesn't really matter.  What matters is that, while not a border town, Rio Arriba is a Mexican town on American soil.  In this part of the country Anglos are the minority, a fact that is only important because it means that just about everybody in Rio Arriba is a devout Catholic.

Douglas himself is probably a Catholic too.  He knows what to do inside a church when the heiress drags him to a night mass in honor of Mary.  He's only going through the motions, but he doesn't need any prompting.  The motions are reflexive for him.

The Bravados isn't a religious movie, but it takes religion seriously.  The director Henry King and screenwriter Philip Yordan are respectful of Catholic beliefs and rituals, but don't go in for any warm, don't you wish your pastor was like Bing missionary work in the form of comic hokeyness.  Andrew Duggan as the priest is a little too much of a paragon, both as a man and a voice of religious authority, but he's not the movie's conscience.

That role belongs to Douglas, which is one of the more intriguing aspects of the Bravados, since Douglas has pretty much buried his conscience, making it impossible for the movie to make easy, moral judgments.  The movie does want us to moralize, but with the character that ought to be the spokesman for the righteous cause silenced and the only other characters up to the task not around to do it---the sheriff is gravely wounded in the jailbreak and can't lead the posse that sets off after the outlaws, the priest, of course, can't ride with the posse, the heiress, embarrassed by the resurgence of her old love for Douglas runs away from him, and the one outlaw with the required intelligence and sophisticated enough conscience naturally keeps as far away from Douglas as he can---the filmmakers have to push us do the job for ourselves.  We have to watch it and take in all the facts as they come.  It's almost like being part of a jury.  Only in the end , when the prosecution rests, are we allowed to pass judgment.  And by that point Douglas has become both the prosecutor and the man in the dock.

The Catholicism, religion generally, is, as I said, treated respectfully, but what's really being taken seriously is people's interest in the state of their own souls.

Whether or not there is a God, if there's a heaven and a hell and how you wind up in either place, the exact definition of sin, are all beside the point.  The immediate problem is how to be good.  In the Bravados, people want to be decent, they want to do right by each other and by themselves, they want to be good, even, it turns out, several of the bad guys.

Being a good man is important to Douglas too, but it's something he's taken for granted about himself, and that turns out to be a tragic mistake.

Goodness and decency turn out to be possible only in the company of other people, which is to say we need each other's help to stay on the straight and narrow.

The movie's not making an authoritarian argument.  There is no authority in the movie bossing people around, making them stay in line.  Authority here derives from the people and serves the people, the people do not serve it.   The sheriff is an exemplary public servant.

And it's not the case that neighbors spy and scold and tattle.  It's simply that left to his own devices, it's too easy for even a good guy, a hero, to talk himself into anything, including shooting down unarmed men who are on their knees begging for mercy, while there's a posse on its way ready to take them into custody.

Folks are just stronger, more capable, more decent when they have each other to lean on.

When Douglas joins the posse, he starts to act like a part of the posse.  Although he's the best tracker, the more experienced gunman, a natural leader, he defers to the deputy leading the chase, and when he gives advice, it's good advice, that is he points out ways to capture the bad guys that minimize the danger to the members of the posse and which, if followed, will bring the bad guys back alive, to face the hangman again, that will bring them to justice.

The bad guys are bad but not that bad.  They're not evil.  They robbed the bank, but killing the teller was a mistake, and they may have robbed the bank on a lark.  There's no suggestion that these guys are career criminals.  Their association is accidental.  They apparently fell in together somewhere, probably at a saloon or a whorehouse, and just sort of drifted into Rio Arriba, with no plans.  They clearly didn't think through their plan to rob the bank since they were easily captured by the affable, middle-aged sheriff and his two not particularly dangerous deputies in the process.

There are hints that their plans for after they get away and are safe in Mexico don't include any more bank robberies.

We're not meant to sympathize with them, too much, at least not with all of them.  But two of them are definitely not beyond redemption.

And only one of them, the ringleader, played as grinning overgrown naughty boy by Stephen Boyd, seems capable of rape and murder.

In short, there are good reasons that these men belong in jail, but there are also good reasons for us, and Douglas, to doubt that these guys are those guys.

Which means that we can see that the right thing for Douglas to do is to stick with the posse and help bring the bad guys back to jail.

He doesn't do the right thing, of course.  He breaks off from the posse and pursues his own course.

The Bravados was made in 1958.  Ten years later a movie like this would have ended ironically or tragically for Douglas, as in another revenge quest film, the excellent Hour of the Gun does for James Garner's Wyatt Earp.

Fans of The Searchers, made two years before The Bravados, can jump in here to point out that that revenge quest ends tragically and ironically for John Wayne's Ethan Edwards and argue that it's not a question of when the film was made.  But The Searchers was a movie both ahead of its time and out its time, which is to say a great work of art.  The Bravados is a good movie and if I was going to compare it to any Western of its period the Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart problem westerns, particularly The Naked Spur, would be more useful to the purpose.

The Bravados ends on a hopeful note.  The movie settles for a different, more forgiving kind of moral ambiguity.

Like I said, the movie isn't interested in whether or not there is a God, but it does seem to believe in karma.  I wouldn't call it a zen western; it's too dark despite its hopefulness.  But it does set things up in such a way that we can be glad that Douglas doesn't do the right thing and stick with the posse.

It turns out that by doing the wrong thing, by pursuing his quest for revenge, Douglas inadvertently brings about a more just resolution for the town and the bad guys.

The real villains are punished and one doomed soul is allowed a reprieve.

Douglas is punished for his selfishness and hatred, but he's rewarded for his mercy and his willingness to admit and own up to his mistakes.

The movie ends with the hero neither triumphant nor disgraced.  He's still in between, like the rest of us.

I can't think of another film that ends with the hero's next step going to be an act of penance.
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This is an excellent time to re-read, or read for the first time if you missed it, Rob Farley's post on The Searchers,  American Kurtz.

Random asides:

The heiress is played by the very young but not very convincing Joan Collins.

It's interesting the things the movie presents without a thought or an explanation, as if we're expected to take them for granted, the most important of these is the fact that Douglas and the outlaws and one shopkeeper in town and his daughter are about the only Anglos in the whole movie.  Joan Collins' character, the sheriff, his deputies, most of the posse, the other townsfolk are all Mexican, which has absolutely nothing to do with their characters or the plot (except for their Catholicism, as I mentioned above); their ethnicity is a geographical fact.  That's the demographic of that part of the Southwest.  There's no stereotyping, but no self-congratulation either.  And when it turns out that Douglas is fluent in Spanish, that his three year old daughter speaks Spanish more naturally than she speaks English because she's being taken care of by Douglas' Mexican ranch foreman and his wife while Douglas is away, there's nothing made of either of these facts either.

Joan Collins' character wears pants everywhere.  No one remarks on this or appears to notice.  She's running a ranch, after all.  She joins the posse, too, and only Douglas has a problem with this.  His problem isn't that a posse is no place for a woman.  His problem is that she remembers him too well as he was before he became a man on a mission.  She might distract him from his quest by making him remember himself as he was.

Joe DeRita has a small role as the hangman.  Yes, that Joe DeRita! He's very good, in an unctuous, smary, sinisterly overly-friendly way.

The colors in the movie are so clean.  When did color in movies get muddy?  Also the compositions of shots are much less cluttered than they are in movies today.  This isn't just a matter of arranging actors.  It's the set decorations and what's placed in the foregrounds and backgrounds.  Movies now are more realistic---there are as many details in any one shot as there would be in real life, which means it's harder to know what to look at it, and nearly impossible to take everything in.  In The Bravados every shot is neat.  You can read each one.  The details are all comprehensible.

Lots less cross-cutting as well.

This is the first of Gregory Peck's westerns I've seen.   He was a much better cowboy than I expected.  Better than Jimmy Stewart even.  And he wears a hat well.

Who was the first movie or TV cowboy to wear those low crowned, smaller brimmed hats that all TV cowboys wore but which no real cowboys ever did?

All things end

This is not another post about Star Trek, although it begins with a scene from one of the Star Trek movies.

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock is having a talk with the young Vulcan officer Valeris in his quarters.  Valeris asks him about a painting on his wall.

It's a Chagall.  Appreciating art is a very logical thing to do, and liking Chagall eminently more so.

The painting is Chagall's Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise.  Spock tells Valeris that he keeps it to remind himself that all things must end.

Of course that's Leonard Nimoy talking right along with Spock.  He's speaking for the whole cast of the original series, letting the audience know that this is it, folks, our last movie together.  From here on out, you have to be content with the Next Generation.

He was also setting us up for Kirk's death, but the producers chickened out and changed the script at the last minute.

But mainly though this is Spock talking to Spock, preparing himself for the end of his life as a Federation officer.  His world is about to change in a way that will mean there will no longer be a use for him and his skills...and his friends...and the old Enterprise.

The changes will be for the good, Spock welcomes them and, in fact, he is helping to bring them about.   Vulcans don't feel regret, they don't get sad, but Spock is not all Vulcan.

All things end, he says, and as illogical as it is, he is sad.  His Chagall is a reminder to accept both his sadness and the change.

Got an email the other day from Blue Girl.  She happened to mention how her teenage son was looking online for posters to decorate his room.

...he wanted to order one from a scene in "Pulp Fiction" -- the scene where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are holding up those guns -- shooting those kids (but it doesn't show the kids) -- I said, "no" -- although I understood it was a cool poster, it was too violent -- and I started telling him about "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" -- the scene where they come out shooting at the end.  And for some reason, I would let him put that one up -- but not the Pulp Fiction one.

And I immediately agreed with Blue Girl.

The question is, though, why?

What's the difference?  Both posters are pictures of men with guns.  Why not let the kid have the Pulp Fiction poster?  Why let him put up Butch and Sundance?

But this is why we have web pages.  To spend time writing about questions like this.

Blue Girl and I decided to each do a post explaining ourselves.  We agreed not to look at each other's posts until both were up.  She finished first.

Because she's actually dealing with the question and I'm just kibbitzing from the sidelines, for now, Blue Girl's post is more about being the mother of a precocious son and mine's about being way too obsessed with movies.

For me, the first difference between the two posters is that I am absolutely indifferent to Pulp Fiction while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of my all time favorite movies.

But that's not a good reason not to let your kid put up a poster.  "Sorry, Junior.  You can only put up posters of movies I liked.  And by the way, tear down that Red Sox pennant.  We're Mets fans in this house!"

My second reason is that Newman and Redford are cooler than Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta.   Not necessarily one on one but as teams.  Jackson is way cool.  But Newman in his prime was way cooler.  And Travolta can be cooler than Redford, but only on his very good days, and he doesn't have that many good days.  Redford, in his prime, was always cool.   There are no Look Who's Talking, Staying Alives, or Battlefield Earths on Redford's CV.  And Travolta's resume doesn't include enough cool to compete with Barefoot in the Park, Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Electric Horseman, Three Days of the Condor, The Way We Were, The Sting, Butch and Sundance, and All the President's Men.

(Trish Wilson would also add Sneakers.)

Mad City and Legal Eagles cancel each other out.

But that's not a reason either.

What does count is that although both posters are pictures of men with guns, the Pulp Fiction poster is, as Blue Girl says, more violent.  Not just because we know who Travolta and Jackson are shooting at.  But because you can tell just by looking at their postures and their faces that they are the threats in the scene.  Butch and Sundance are clearly on the defensive.   Travolta and Jackson look like what they are in the movie, killers.  Newman and Redford look like they're doing what they're doing in their movie, fighting for their lives.

The Pulp Fiction poster is about its violence.  The Butch and Sundance poster is about Butch and Sundance trying to get away from the violence that's about to destroy them.  The first is about causing death, and the second is about escaping it.

I don't think you need to know the movies to see that.

The looks on their faces tell you.  But the way the shots are framed do it too.  In the Pulp Fiction poster the guns---which are very big guns---are as much the focus of the camera's eye as Jackson's and Travolta's faces.  The guns shine brighter than the faces, in fact.  And because of the way the shot is framed Travolta and Jackson's eyes are on their guns, which means that, looking at it, first your eye is drawn to the guns, then after an effort, when you switch to the actors' faces, their eyes re-direct your gaze back to the guns.

The poster is about the coolness of guns and how that power and cool are transfered to the people holding them.

Because Pulp Fiction is a post-modern masterpiece the dynamic works the other way, too.  Travolta's and Jackson's cool flow into their guns.

Either way, that's not a message you want up on your teenager's bedroom wall.

In the Butch and Sundance poster the camera is looking primarily at Newman and Redford, at their faces and their body shapes.  Their guns are almost unnoticeable.  The first poster is about the potential for violence and the second is about a wounded pair of human beings.

But then I don't think either poster is particularly interesting if you don't know the movies at all.

And if you know the movies then you recognize immediately that both posters are perfectly representative of the respective films.

I'm not a fan of Quentin Tarantino.  Here's a guy for whom Uma Thurman will apparently do anything, and all he can think to do with her is have her run around with a big sword slicing people up into cold cuts.  I don't know if Tarantino loves violence or if he is so repelled and frightened by it that the only way he can deal with it is by fetishizing and aestheticizing it.  Whatever demons are driving him, though, he treats violence and death as either comic or beautiful and in that picture shows them as both.  There are those shiny guns and there's the goofy wig on Samuel Jackson.

Travolta and Jackson aren't acting in that scene, either.  They are posing.  This is part of the game Tarantino is playing with the violence in the movie.  His characters are a collection of attitudes arranged artfully for his camera to photograph.  And this is why his work leaves me cold.  Tarantino does with his actors what George Lucas does with cgi---he uses them to show off his technical brilliance.

But in art being technically brilliant isn't an achievement, it's the given.  Tarantino wants to be applauded for doing what somebody like Hitchcock assumed he could do in his sleep.

Tarantino makes movies about his own directing, and egomania like that bores me.  So in addition to any moral objections I have, I think the Pulp Fiction poster teaches the wrong lessons about the art of making movies.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is anti-violence.  It has very little gunplay for a western and Butch and Sundance don't kill anybody until three quarters of the way through the film.  When they finally do draw their guns in earnest, it sickens them.

(Butch and Sundance are acting as representatives of the mining company when they kill the bandits.  Which means they don't kill anybody until they stop being outlaws.  There's a post to be written about how all the killing is committed by the representatives of the state---the Establishment, man---which marks the movie as a product of its its time.  Nixon had just taken office and Vietnam had four more years to rage on when it was released.  That aspect of the movie hasn't dated it as much as the same message in other movies from the era have dated them.)

And up until Butch and Sundance shoot it out with the bandits all the death in the movie has happened at long range, with no blood visible.  When the movie at last turns bloody, the first real bloodshed is caused by Butch and Sundance and after that all the blood that flows is their blood.

Live by the sword...

But that's not what makes the poster more acceptable for a teenager's wall.

If I wanted my kids to put up Bible verses on their walls I'd sew them samplers.

What I like about that poster, what is moving about it, is that it is the last moment of Butch and Sundance's lives.

For most of the movie Butch and Sundance have been on the run, worried most about the lawman leading the Superposse on the trail, Joe LeFors.  Shot to pieces by the Brazilian policemen, trapped inside the cantina, with a squad of soldiers setting up outside the door, they're doomed.  But their last exchange before they charge out the door, intending to fight their way out of this mess goes something like:

Butch:  Wait.  You didn't see LeFors out there?

Sundance:  LeFlors?  No.

Butch:  Good.  For a second there I thought we were in trouble.

I used to think that Butch is joking.  That he's just trying to cheer himself and the Kid up.   Which means that Butch and Sundance know they are about to die.  They're dead and there's nothing they can do about it.  Surrendering's not an option because they're already both mortally wounded.  So what they're doing is resolving to die standing up, fighting.  And when I thought that was the case I saw that final image of the film as heroic.

Courage in the face of impossible odds---there's a message you definitely want on a teenagers' wall.

But now I'm not so sure that's what that scene is about.  I don't identify with Butch and Sundance as closely as I did when I was young.  I can allow myself to see their flaws and admit that they aren't meant to be taken as heroes.  Now I think that we're meant to see that Butch is relieved that Joe LeFors isn't outside, he believes they're going to make it, or at least half-believes it.

And his and Sundance's unwillingness to face the truth, about themselves and about life, is what the movie has been about.

This is not just the last moment of Butch and Sundance's lives.  It's the very last image of the movie.  Is there another film that builds so inexorably toward its last shot?   I can't think of one off hand.

Butch and Sundance are dead men from the beginning of the movie.  The title sequences even says so.  "They're all dead now."   They're dead because time has passed them by.

All through the film we're given reminders that that Butch and Sundance are anachronisms.  They have no place in the world any more.  The movie begins with the future, and change, slapping Butch in the face.

Butch:  What happened to the old bank?  It was beautiful.

Guard:  People kept robbing it.

"Meet the future!" the bicycle salesman cries triumphantly.  "Those days is over," growls Butch and Sundance's friend the sheriff, who delivers the key speech of the film.

You know, you should have let yourself get killed a long time ago when you had the chance. See, you may be the biggest thing that ever hit this area, but you're still two-bit outlaws. I never met a soul more affable than you, Butch, or faster than the Kid, but you're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your time is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where.

The sheriff is too fatalistic.  Butch and Sundance can choose something else.  They can choose to accept that their times is over.  They can grow up.  But every time they think about doing it, they balk.  They go right on as if nothing's different.

I used to think that when after they kill the bandits they go back to being bandits themselves that the message was anti-Establisment:  see what being on the "right" side of the law makes you do!  It turns you into a killer!  Better to be an outlaw than a state-sanctioned murderer.

But that's not what actually happens in that scene.  The bandits draw on them first.  They aren't the killers.  The bandits are.  What Butch and Sundance are in that scene are the grown-ups.  Having to act as a grown-up often has terrible and soul-bruising consequences.  And Butch and Sundance can't handle being grown-ups.  They can't change.

At the end then what they're rushing out that door into is Time.  I own the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  It's by William Goldman and it's one of the best written scripts of all time.  Goldman's stage directions are as intrinsic to the script as the dialogue, and the last stage direction he wrote for the movie was "we hear the guns fire as Butch and Sundance are blasted back into History."   The future arrives and kills them.

Death arrives not as a bullet but as a simple fact of life for all of us.

All things end.

I'm not sure that's a message I would insist a teenage boy learn.  I'm not sure teenagers can learn it.  Anyway, parents can't teach it to them.  Time does it for them.

Valeris doesn't understand what Spock's talking about when he shows her the Chagall.

Anyway, that's why I wouldn't object if my sons want to put that poster up on their wall someday.

I don't see violence in that image.  I see tragedy.

Meet the future.  Those days is over.  All things end.  Time is the fire in which we all burn, which is the last word of the movie.

Officer:  Fuego!   Fuego!   Fuego!

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