Lance Mannion

"I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad..."

Posted Sunday morning, October 18, 2020.

Sundance stalks down the tracks from the engine of the train he’s just stopped at gunpoint. The fireman jumps from the cab to follow him. He’s excited that his train is being robbed by the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Sundance gives him a look. “Just want to watch,” the fireman says. “Bring the kids, why don’t you?” the Kid says. They continue down to the mail car where Butch and the rest of the gang are gathered. Butch is arguing with someone on the other side of the locked and barred car door.

Sundance: “What’s going on?”

Butch: We got ourselves a patriot.

Fireman: That’s young Woodcock. He’s awful dedicated.”

Butch: Woodcock?

Woodcock (talking through the car door): Yes, sir?

Butch: You know who we are?

Woodcock: You’re the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Mr Cassiday, I understand that. But you got to understand that Mr E.H. Harriman himself, of the Union Paciic Railroad, gave me this job, and I’ve got to do my best, don’t you see?

Butch: Your best don’t include getting yourself killed.

News Carver: Dynamite’s ready, Butch.

Woodcock: Mr E.H. Harriman had the confidence in me…

Butch: Open the door or that’s it! You think E.H. Harriman would get himself for you, Woodcock?

Woodcock (as he ducks behind a crate): I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad, and he entrusted me…

Dynamite: Ka-BOOM!

Butch and Sundance and News scrambled up through the blasted doorway. News and Sundance head right for the safe. Butch stops to check on Woodcock who is lying by the door, bloodied and dazed. He props Woodcock up and decides he’ll be ok.

Butch: Whatever Harriman’s paying you ain’t enough.

---from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.

I’m in the middle of reading “Showdown”, Wil Haygood’s absorbing account of the Congressional fight over Thurgood Marshall’s nomination to the Supreme Court. You probably figured that out. (See here, and here.) I’m reading it along with twenty other books I have going. I always have twenty books going. A concerned reader once suggested it was a symptom of undiagnosed ADD. He may have been onto something. At any rate: Along with those twenty other books is “Empires of Iron: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America” by Michael Hiltzik. I was predisposed to like it before I started, because of the subject matter, because I’ve read Hiltzik’s previous book, “Big Science”, a biography of physicist Ernest Rutherford, and liked that a lot, because I’m a fan of Hiltzik’s columns in the L.A. Times, and because Michael and I follow each other on Twitter. (That was the requisite full disclosure, for those of you keeping score.) But I was taken with it from the opening paragraph which introduces as a character not a robber baron or even an employee of a railroad, but a young and not-yet-famous Scottish writer:

For two weeks in [the] deep summer [of 1879], westbound passengers on a Union Pacific train, encountered a tubercular Scot whose conversation, dripping with literary grandiloquence, had earned him the nickname “Shakespeare.” Pale, thin, and wracked by coughing fits, he seemed not long for this world. Generally, he could be found seated at one end of a car, propping open the door with his feet as though hoping the rush of air might soothe his unremitting fever.

That would be Robert Louis Stevenson, who was making the trip across the Great American Desert to San Francisco, taking notes that he’d turn into a travel book called “Across the Plains”.

Robber Barons follow Stevenson soon after. One of them is Ned Harriman. Edward Harriman. Edward H. Harriman. E. H. Harriman. Mister E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad. And whenever I come across Harriman’s name anywhere, I immediately begin to replay in my head that scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and hear the voice of the great and much missed character actor George Furth, who played poor but dedicated Woodcock, saying, “I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad....” Harriman is a major character in “Iron Empires”, its chief hero and villain, in fact, so I’m going to be hearing Furth/Woodcock a lot.

The movie is mentioned in the book. I checked the index and skipped ahead. Hiltzik doesn’t quote Woodcock, and he doesn’t spend many words on Butch and Sundance. In the passage that mentions them, his main focus is on what’s known to fans of the film as the “super-posse”:

One of Harriman’s pioneering initiatives would be turned into legend by Hollywood. This was his effort to end train robberies on the Union Pacific. The railroad’s route through Wyoming “had long been a Mecca for outlaws”...That stretch of track was especially vulnerable to [robberies] because the roadbed was hemmed in by mountains on both sides, affording robbers “opportunities for the ‘get-away’ which is essential to the highwayman’s profession.” Typically, the raiders would strike in early evening and safely on their way to the canyon-etched foothills known as the Hole-in-the-Wall country before a posse could be assembled.

The members of the protean community of outlaws, Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, AKA Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, have been credited with the longest string of successful...robberies of the period. They would be immortalized in a 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, as was Harriman’s solution to the repeated robberies [on his line]: the creation of a team of special agents to be shuttled along the Union Pacific tracks on their own train and supplied with horses that could a hundred miles in a day. The presence of a rapid-response brigade, superbly equipped and trained, discouraged raids on the Union Pacific and prompted robbers to concentrate their attentions on competing lines.

I couldn’t help read that passage without hearing Butch/Newman’s refrain as he and Sundance repeatedly failed to throw the superposse off their trail: “Who are those guys?”

The outfitting and the employment of the superposse didn’t cost Harriman much compared to what it saved him but in the movie---and maybe in real life---Butch can’t believe that. When he hears that Harriman has put the best lawman and tracker on his payroll, Butch is aghast, “That crazy Harriman,” he exclaims, “if he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him!”

Ok, time for me to get back to “Iron Empires”. Or “Showdown”. Or one of the nineteen other books on my stack. Meantime, I thought you’d enjoy having Woodcock’s voice stuck in your heads too...

The Mandalorian With No Name

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Friday night, June 5, 2020. Posted Saturday night, June 20.

The Mandalorian searching for the good, the bad, and the ugly: The imagery is an homage to the last scene of “The Searchers” but pose isn’t Wayne, it’s Eastwood, with the cape taking the place of a serape.  From the opening scene of the first episode of the new TV Western...I mean Star Wars TV series, "The Mandalorian".

[We finished “The Mandalorian” last night. Still sorting out my thoughts on the last two episodes and the series as a whole. In the meantime, here are my notes on the first three episodes...]

Friday night, June 5, 2020: Started "The Mandalorian" tonight. In the first 5 minutes of the first episode there's more pure storytelling, more visual artistry, more suspense, more drama, more real humor, and more attention to character than there is anywhere in the whole 2 hrs and 22 minutes of "The Rise of Skywalker". And then it keeps getting better.

Ok, so maybe it's truer in spirit to "The Wild Bunch" than to "Star Wars".

The original “Star Wars”, the movie now known as “Episode IV: A New Hope”, was a joyfully gee-whiz conglomeration of the kinds of movies George Lucas loved as a movie-addicted kid: Flash Gordon serials, swashbucklers, war movies, fantasy adventures like “The Thief of Baghdad” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”, “Jason and the Argonauts” and the Steve Reeve Hercules movies, 1950s science fiction, and, of course, Westerns. Han Solo was written as if he was going to be played by the John Wayne of “Angel and the Badman”.

"Solo" the movie failed on many levels and one of the reasons was that the filmmakers didn't understand what kind of movie Han came out of so they didn’t know what kind of movie to make. It’s hard to tell what they were thinking, considering its troubled production, but as far as I can make out, the only movies on anyone’s minds were the other Star Wars movies, and most of the creative effort went into making it match up visually, tonally, and narratively with those. They were intent on making a “Star War Story”, a sequel to the prequels that nobody needed. What they should have made was a good old-fashioned Western.

The question, then, would have been would the producers have known what kind of Western they needed to make?

Series creator Jon Favreau knows exactly what kind of western he wants to make---and make fun of.

“Solo” might have worked as an episodic TV series like “The Mandalorian”, although I think “The Mandalorian” is better than a Han Solo series would have been because it's freed from having to be tied to the original movies. It can go its own way...MAKE its own way.

And "The Mandalorian" can be darker and more revisionist than a “Solo” series because the Mandalorian is Eastwood and Han is Wayne so "Solo" the TV series would have had to be at base a comedy.

Favreau and his creative team of writers, directors, actors, and designers have managed something “Solo” didn’t and J.J. Abrams doesn’t seem to have even considered doing in “The Rise of Skywalker”: come up with original, personable, particular secondary characters, good guys, bad guys, and ugly guys. My favorites so far are the bounty hunter guild’s leader Greef Karga, played by Carl Weathers as the kind of deadly but good-humored and fair-minded (after his own fashion) villain whose eventual comeuppance you’re going to be sorry to see and hope the writers are able to put off until the final episode, and the solitary rancher, voiced by a grimly earnest Nick Nolte, who comes to the Madalorian’s moral and material aid

The rancher’s name, by the way, is Kuiil, pronounced Quill, as in Peter. I’m going to pretend Favreau isn’t winking at “Guardians of the Galaxy”. If he is, he’s earned the right to. It’s Favreau, as the director of the first “Iron Man”, who set the Avengers movies off on the right cinematic path

We watched the first three episodes tonight. I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say when we watch the next three next week. But for now, as Kuiil, who is nothing like Star-Lord, is wont to say when he’s decided a conversation has reached its conclusion....

I have spoken.

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Read the prequel: Chewie and Han together again for the first time.

"The Mandalorian" is available to stream at Disney+.

The Magnificent Seven...and the not as magnificent but still pretty darn good The Magnificent Seven

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, October 2, 2016. Posted Wednesday night, October 5.

Denzel Washington (center), magnificent as the kind of western movie hero he should have had a chance to play a long time ago, in Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the 1960 western classic The Magnificent Seven.

Saw the new version of The Magnificent Seven last weekend. Not as magnificent as the original, but how could it be? The original has had fifty-six years to burrow itself deep into the culture and our popular imagination. It’s practically not a movie anymore. It’s part of the collective unconscious. But the new one’s pretty darn good. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that while I was on my way out of the theater I was thinking it might be better than the original.

Took about two minutes of rewatching the original last night to disabuse me of that lunatic notion.

By the way, before we go any further, when I refer to the “original”, anyone who says, “Oh, you mean The Seven Samurai?” is just showing off.

The Seven Samurai is a whole higher level of art and it’s unfair to it and to The Magnificent Seven to think of the latter as a remake. Beside that, the changes, in time, place, language, and genre, along with the resulting differences in cultural references and resonances, set the two movies so far apart from each other in effect that to point out Kurosawa’s name in the credits of The Magnificent Seven is practically just to point out an interesting bit of movie trivia. Calling The Seven Samurai the original Magnificent Seven is like calling Macbeth the original Throne of Blood.

The original Magnificent Seven---director John Sturges’ 1960 shoot-em-up starring Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Brad Dexter, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, and Horst Bucholz, with Eli Wallach absolutely wonderful as the villain---is a re-telling of the old story re-told in The Seven Samurai. Almost all stories going back to Gilgamesh are re-tellings of old stories. The questions at work are how good a job did the new storyteller do re-telling the story and how good a job did they do in making the story their own in the re-telling? And, of course, if the story’s being told as a movie, how good a movie is it?

Time has proven that Sturges did an excellent job on all three scores, although no one would argue that on the third he made as great a film as Kurosawa made with the original original. Still, as westerns go, The Magnificent Seven is a classic piece of moviemaking.

Antoine Fuqua, director of the new version starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Byung-hun Lee, Martin Sensmeier, Manual Garcia-Rulfo, and Vincent D’Onforio as the Seven, with Peter Sarsgaard as the lip-curling, capitalist villain and Haley Bennett as the female lead the original conspicuously lacks, settling for a generic love interest instead, succeeds well on the first score. His version is a rousing tale of good old-fashioned western adventure and derring-do.

On the second, he hasn’t done as well. This Magnificent Seven never escapes the shadow of the original. But then Fuqua deliberately didn’t try too hard to do that. In fact, as he told New York Magazine, he saw it as an important part of his job not to.

From directing 2004’s King Arthur, Antoine Fuqua learned a key lesson about building new movies out of old material. “Make it your own, but be conscious of the things that mean a lot to people,” he says. “When you bend it too far, it gets hard for people to wrap their heads around.”

But while Fuqua didn’t feel free to depart too far from the original, he freed himself up in other ways. He gave himself room to pay homage not just to the original but to other classic westerns. Not just pay homage but in places to subvert and even mock the conventions of the entire genre. And Denzel Washington’s character owes more to Clint Eastwood than to Yul Brenner and pieces of the plot seem lifted from Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales---with the uniforms reversed---and Pale Rider.

This goes a long way towards Fuqua's making the movie if not the story his own and that brings me to the answer to the third question.

Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven is a rip-roaring, exciting, suspenseful, and at times moving western. It may take fifty years to decide if he’s made a classic on par with the original, but it’s good enough that, like I said, I almost had myself convinced it’s better than than the original.

And there are things about it that are better, starting with the leading man.

It’s a good bet people will be watching this Magnificent Seven fifty years from now as one of Denzel Washington’s best movies. Yul Brenner is better in the original than I remembered and more plausible. But mainly his job was to fill a space that should have been filled by the likes of Glenn Ford, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, or Jimmy Stewart---the angry, un-amiable, dangerous Stewart of the Anthony Mann westerns. Denzel is the more ferocious presence those stars would have been.

As Sam Chisolm, the leader of the Seven, he burns holes in the screen. Unlike Brenner’s Chris Adams, Chisolm is a lawman not a hired gun, though he's not opposed to doing a bit of freelancing on the side. That allows Washington to play Chisolm with an anger and air of menace that, while daunting, never threaten to define his personality for us. They’re professional qualities. Tools of the trade and part of what passes for a uniform. He puts them on like he puts on his gunbelt and his big, broad-brimmed black hat, to go to work.

First order of business, though, is to make plain an important change from the original to the new Magnificent Seven. In outline, the plots are the same. Bad guys threaten simple townsfolk. Simple townsfolk hire a band of gunslingers to drive away the bad guys. But the original is set mainly in Mexico and the simple townsfolk are simple peasants leading simple movie peasant lives. The remake is set somewhere in the United States---possibly California but that’s not made clear---and the simple townsfolk are farmers and not all that simple in their ways and their personalities. In fact, on the whole, they’re an angsty and emotionally conflicted lot and not all that likable. I think the change in location was made not just to make this a different movie or even to avoid the kind of well-meaning but unfortunate ethnic stereotyping the original fell into. I think it was done in order to give the designers permission to make things in the town more “realistic'---that is, gritty, dirty, ugly, and drab---and to give the actors parts to play more “realistically'---that is, they get to emote more.

Whatever the reasons, I think the change is one of the things that work to make it a lesser movie than the original, as I’ll explain in a bit.

The other obvious change is in the characters of the seven heroes.

There are no one-to-one correspondences between Fuqua’s leads and Sturges’. The closet, I think, after Washington in the role of leader played by Brenner in the original---They both wear black. But Brenner smiles a whole lot more.---is Chris Pratt as Josh Faraday, Chisolm’s sidekick and lieutenant, the role McQueen filled in the original.

But, good as he is, Pratt is no Steve McQueen and Faraday is no Vin Tanner.

Tanner is good-natured and easy-going. Faraday is good-natured and easy-going but careless. Tanner has a sense of mischief. Faraday has learned to enjoy being in trouble, a useful adaptation to circumstance since he gets himself into it so often. Tanner has avoided being tied down by responsibilities on a kind of principle. Faraday is just plain irresponsible. Tanner is drifting, going the way the wind blows just to see where it takes him. Faraday is adrift. He’s letting the wind take him because he has no idea what else to do with his life. Tanner is shrewd and observant. He picks his fights and takes no chances without first figuring out the odds. Faraday is impulsive and self-indulgent.  He’s been getting by on his wits and his luck and we get the sense that his luck has been running low and he’s afraid, with good reason, it’s about to run out.

That I can write that much about Faraday tells you something else Fuqua has done differently. His seven leads are played by stars or known up-and-comers and he’s given them characters to play.

McQueen, Bronson, Coburn, and even Robert Vaughn have achieved icon status, but in 1960 only McQueen could have been considered a star and he was a television star, the star of the TV western Wanted: Dead or Alive. Horst Bucholz was a star in Germany, but The Magnificent Seven was his first American film. The rest were known, as well as they were known, as regular guest stars on television. It’s hard but if you try, you can see them as what they were to the audiences at the time, talented, young---McQueen was thirty, Coburn thirty-two, Vaughn only twenty-eight. Bronson was an old man of thirty-nine.---journeymen actors getting a lucky break and making the most of it.

But there wasn’t much for any one of them to make of their parts. When you get down to it, they were each playing an attitude more than a character. The leader, the cheerful one, the greedy one, the arrogant one, the sentimental one, the coward, and the kid. Their characters barely even have names.

The new Seven have all been given extensive backstories and come with enough to be the leads in their own movies or, at any rate, regulars on Deadwood, if David Milch ever gets around to resurrecting it. In some ways, the movie is about them as characters rather than about them as heroes of an adventure story we’re meant to be paying the closer attention to.

In the original, the villagers, even with the stereotyping, are individualized. We feel we know them. What’s more, we like them. We’re rooting for them, which is why we root for the Seven. And they save the Seven as much as they are saved by them. Sturges never lets us forget that these are not good men. They’re not altogether bad but they’re killers for hire. They’re in the business for the money and the thrill.  What happens is they draw strength and learn virtue from the villagers.

(This is especially true of Bronson’s character, Bernardo O’Reilly, who is adopted by a group of boys from the village. As they cheerfully and proudly tell him, it’ll be their job to mourn him when he’s killed and make sure there are always flowers on his grave. O’Reilly sardonically asks if that means they’ll be happy if he’s killed.

Oh no, they assure him. They’ll be just as happy if he survives.

“Maybe happier,” says one.

“Maybe,” adds another.)

This new group of heroes come across more as a collection of loveable rogues and scoundrels. Their violent pasts and deadly occupations are taken as givens of the time period and more or less forgiven or excused or explained away.  And while they’re not in it for the money---because there’s hardly any money in it---they’re not in it for any principle either. They’re mostly just along for the fun of the adventure and, it looks like, the fun of playing off each other, and I mean the characters as well as the actors.

They get interested in saving the town when the plot requires them to but for the most part their minds are on other things and their hearts are elsewhere. So are Fuqua’s. He doesn’t seem to care that much for the townsfolk except in that they’re victims menaced by his villain. And for all the realism of the make-up and costuming and the actors' acting, it’s often hard to tell them apart. This is particularly true of the men whose faces are lost behind too much “realistic” facial hair.

We don’t even get to see these farmers’ farms. So we don't get to know except as an abstraction what they keep telling us they're willing to die fighting for.

So in this, it has less human feeling than the original.

But I have to admit, I got caught up in the acting of the leading men. Denzel first and foremost, but the others are all charming and charismatic and make their characters compelling. My favorites were Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio.

D’Onofrio plays an old bible-quoting mountain man and renowned Indian fighter named Jack Horne (No doubt in honor of Tom Horn, played in the movie by that name by Steve McQueen.) who says his prayers, recites scripture, and threatens bloody vengeance in a high-pitched hoarse voice that is either the result of his having had his throat cut and his vocal cords severed in a fight some time back or spending too much time alone singing hymns to the trees and hills at the top of his lungs.

Hawke plays Goodnight Robicheaux. a crack rifleman and Confederate Civil War hero whose guilt and PSTD have, fifteen years after the war, finally caught up with him. Robicheaux’s days as a killer are secretly over, but he needs people to be afraid of him in order to make his living. He’s been getting by on his reputation and by a pretense of bravado and cavalier charm that we can see is a parody of his once brave and noble self.

Lee and Sensmeier are fine in lesser roles, but I was particularly taken with Manuel Garcia-Rulfo who really doesn’t have much to do as the gentleman bandit Vasquez except adopt an attitude of raffish charm. Oddly---or maybe not---he reminded me more of McQueen in the original than Pratt did.

And then there’s the villain.

Peter Sarsgaard looks like he’s having a high old time playing the grasping, monomaniacal Bartholomew Bogue as practically a mustache-twirler out of an old-time melodrama. He doesn’t actually twirl his mustache, but he makes it clear that if the mood struck him, he would, and he'd get away with it.

But that brings me to another significant difference between Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven and Sturges’, and it’s epitomized in the differences between the two movies’ villains.

Eli Wallach is great of course and is obviously having his own great good fun as Calvera, the leader of the gang of bandits terrorizing the village the Seven have been hired to protect. But the key point is that Calvera’s gang is just that, a gang. It’s a big gang but still just a collection of thugs, drifters, ne’er-do-wells, bums, and other types of life’s losers and minor villains. In short, they’re just outlaws. Bank robbers, horse thieves, and cattle rustlers. They’re formidable only because there are forty of them and they’re led by Calvera. Which is why they stay loyal to him. They know they’re nothing without him. He in turn is loyal to them for pretty much the same reason. And that’s pretty much the whole of his motivation. His evil plan is to keep his gang together for as long as he can. That means keeping them fed through the coming winter. So the only thing he wants out of the villagers is food. Right now that’s all he’s interested in.

Not land. Not money. Not power. Not wine, women, or song. Not that he’s averse to any of these. But they’re not his immediate concern.

Bogue, on the other hand, is obsessed with money and power. He’s a robber baron intent on increasing his empire, which is based on land grabbing where the land being grabbed is rich in minerals and shiny metal. He doesn’t want anything out of the town his private army is terrorizing. He wants the town. There’s gold in them thar hills and he’s going to have it.  All of it. And he doesn’t have a gang to help him with this. He has an army. He’s rich enough to hire mercenaries by the hundreds.

I think the conception of Bogue owes something to Deadwood’s version of George Hearst who is meant to embody the evils of capitalism and serve the theme that money corrupts everyone and everything. But in execution Bogue is essentially a Wild West Bond villain. Come to think of it, he could be a character out of The Wild Wild West, which was a Bond movie re-imagined as a TV western. Dr Miguelito Loveless didn’t have anything on Bogue in his lust for power and world domination or in melodramatic over-the-topness. It’s just that Bogue, if he was in the need, would hire his own mad scientist rather than having to bother with being one himself.

One of the beauties of Sturges’ Magnificent Seven is that in its plot and characterizations it has the simplicity of a fable. It is a fable. But like all good fables it’s about something real. It’s a fable about the closing of the western frontier.

That is, it’s about the end of the Wild West.

Calvera and his gang have to resort to robbing the villagers of their food because they can’t earn their keep the usual way, robbing banks and rustling cattle, anymore. Civilization, and with it law and order, is closing in on them. There is an army in the movie, although it’s offscreen, and it belongs to the United States’ government. At one point, Calvera expresses his dismay and his surprise that the last time he and his gang crossed the border into Texas to rob a bank, the United States sent the army after them.

“A whole army!”

That narrow escape taught him a lesson. His days as an outlaw are numbered.

Now, here’s the critical point.

The days of the Seven are numbered too, if they’re not already over and done with it. At least in the United States, their services are no longer required.  No more hired gunslingers need apply. 

Oh, here and there, patches of the Old West where questions of right and wrong have to be settled with guns in the hands of men quick on the draw still exist. But the incident that introduces us to Chris and Vin and that catches the attention of the trio of villagers who have come looking for men like them to hire to come save their village---Chris and Vin driving the hearse carrying the coffin of an Indian up to Boot Hill where it’s met by a small band of bigots with their guns drawn, looking to keep the Indian from being buried in the same ground as whites, and isn’t that a metaphor for the settling of the West?---is instigated by a pair of traveling salesmen who have simply taken it for granted that common decency, fair-mindedness, a degree of tolerance, and the rule of law are the order of the day. This is how the country now works. The reason Chris and Vin have to take over is that the salesmen have to catch the next stage and don’t have time to go looking for the legal authorities.

In other words, although I don’t believe any exact date is given, the movie starts in the 20th Century or at least with the 20th Century well on its way.

Fuqua’s movie is set in 1879. But that’s just a date to explain the fashions and the guns. It’s not a true historical marker. And, as far as it matters, the United States doesn’t exist. Bogue operates as free of legal and political constraint as if there are no laws and no politics because there is no government. In reality, the settling of the west was almost entirely a political enterprise, sponsored by, encouraged, defended, and to a great degree financed by the federal government. Violence was rife but it was mostly a matter of the United States Army killing Indians as they drove them from their land and duly-sworn lawmen taking guns away from drunken cowboys.

Bowe wants to take their land away from a bunch of farmers. But to give you an idea of what life was like for real farmers in the West, at around the time the movie is set, the Ingalls family had already left their little house on the Kansas prairie, and they’d left it not because they were driven out by evil capitalist warlords with their own private armies. They had to leave because their homestead turned out to be on the Osage Indian reservation and for once the government was honoring a treaty with the Indians.

What I’m getting at is that the original Magnificent Seven is a fable with resonances with actual history and the remake is basically a fantasy whose main resonances are with other Western movie fantasies.

Still, it’s a lot of fun. Fuqua did what he says he wanted to do, make his own movie while remaining true to the spirit of the original. It isn’t as magnificent as the original but while you’re watching it you won’t care. Like I said, it’s a rip-roaring adventure with some terrific old-fashioned western action scenes and stunts and some excellent acting. And...it’s a great Denzel Washington movie.

He is, as usual, magnificent and, man, does he wear that big black hat well.

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The Magnificent Seven, directed by Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by Richard Wenk and Nick Pizzolatto. Based on The Magnificent Seven directed by John Sturges and The Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa. Starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, and Haley Bennett. Rated PG-13. (I know. I’m surprised too. It’s pretty violent.) Now in theaters.

Hell or High Water: "I never met nobody who ever got away with anything."

Sunday morning, September 11, 2016.

Toby Howard: “How have you managed to stay out of prison for a year?” Tanner Howard: “It’s been difficult.”

The Howard brothers, Tanner (Ben Foster, left) and Toby (Chris Pine, right) rest up and reflect after their most recent bank robbery in director David Mackenzie’s sad, ironic, and political contemporary western Hell or High Water.

Hell or High Water’s one of the best westerns I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s also one of the saddest.

And one of the most overtly political.

If I had world enough and time I might make the case that it does a better job of examining the causes of the economic collapse of 2008 and its subsequent devastations than The Big Short. In The Big Short the victims are mostly invisible and the few villains we see are mainly clowns. The evil being perpetrated’s an abstraction that needs constant cinematic tricks and stunts to keep it in focus.

There’s nothing abstract in Hell or High Water and the victims and their sufferings are almost never off screen.

To be clear right way, Hell or High Water is a contemporary western. Like the TV series Justified, it transplants themes, tropes, conventions, and stock characters established in classic westerns to the 21st Century United States. Hell or High Water is even set in the west. West Texas, to be exact. But unlike Justified, Hell or High Water’s western-ness isn’t a matter of the filmmakers’ taking poetic license.

Justified turns Kentucky coal country into a modern day Tombstone in order to give Marshal Raylan Givens an excuse to act like Wyatt Earp and get away with racking up a body count that would fill several movie Boot Hills to capacity. It really isn’t much of a stretch but it’s a stretch to have Boyd Crowder and the rest of the criminal Crowders and Bennetts behaving like the Clanton Gang and the Cowboys who ran Tombstone before the Earps came to town. But it takes a good deal of our willingness to suspend disbelief to accept every other episode including a version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

I wouldn’t call Hell or High Water a model of cinematic realism. But the picture it presents of economically blasted West Texas as the the Wild West or, rather, not as far removed from the days when it was the Wild West, has an essential realism.

The historical fact is that once upon a time the Wild West began just a short walk up from the beach at Plymouth, Massachusetts. A better name for the Wild West would be the western frontier and the story of the Taming of the West is the story of white settlement pushing the boundaries of the frontier farther and farther west.

The stuff of the legends, myths, and tall tales and the characters and exploits of the pioneers, immigrants, frontiersmen and women, heroes, folk heroes, and villains that have become in our collective imagination the story of the Taming of the West as we know it mainly from movies and TV began with the settlement of the wildnernesses of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

It’s not unrealistic or at all ahistorical to see George Washington as one of our first frontiersmen heroes. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which are set in what are now some of the more touristy spots of upstate New York, are literature’s first Westerns. The second part of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, which focuses on the second generation of Puritan settlers in New England and their part in King Philip’s War, reads like a prequel to Cooper---written by a smart writer who took to heart Mark Twain’s furious contempt for Cooper’s writing---and includes a heroic Indian fighter who rivals Hawkeye in derring-do, fighting and tracking skill, and luck in surviving dangerous and bloody adventures and it’s all true. Mayflower is non-fiction. And what I’m saying is that much of what we think of as legend, tall tale, and myth is part of the true history of the of the often bloody “civilizing” of the frontier.

At one point, the West Texas of Hell or High Water was one of the farthest reaches of the frontier and it remained on the frontier for a longer time than other places on the continent where civilization took hold faster and more deeply. Basically, West Texas was what we think of as the Wild West long after the rest of the west was won and in defining economic ways it stayed the Wild West right up until the beginning of the 21st Century.

And what we see in the movie is that for many people West Texas as they’ve always known it is reverting back to the frontier it was when their ancestors arrived.

It’s important to keep in mind that a key part of the history of the taming of the West is white, English-speaking people stealing land from other people who were there ahead of them, people who in most places were Native Americans. But the English and their descendants also stole land from the French, Dutch, and Spanish while they were at it.

That the land we’re all living on today is mostly stolen land is a theme of Hell or High Water.

A Texas Ranger, who’s part Mexican and part-Comanche while without question being all Texan and all American, observes that the land the economically hard-pressed white people of West Texas feel being stolen out from under them by the banks and oil companies was stolen by their ancestors from his Mexican ancestors who in turn had stolen it from his Comanche ancestors who in their turn had stolen it from other Native American tribes.

This makes Hell or High Water an ironic tragedy. There’s a poetic justice in the people we’re rooting for, represented by the failed rancher turned bank robber, having their land stolen from them.

There’s another irony at work too, and that’s our recognizing that while we’re aware that their ancestors stole the land, in other movies we’re meant to root for those ancestors to get away with the theft.

This makes it hard to know who and what to root for in Hell or High Water.

Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is a divorced father of two sons he very much doesn’t want following in his footsteps. He’s been a sometime roughneck in the oil fields, a sometime ranch hand on his mother’s small and far from prospering ranch, and pretty much a full-time failure. Up until recently, he took a life full of hardship, money woes, and disappointment for granted. But his mother has died, leaving behind nothing but a pile of medical bills and the ranch and the ranch is facing foreclosure. His mother had fallen behind paying off the loan she been talked into taking predatory terms by unscrupulous bankers. The ranch itself isn’t worth much as a ranch. Toby’d only worked it to help out his mother and he’s not attached to it. He’d just as soon let it go except...oil’s been discovered on the property.

This is Toby’s big chance, but he sees as not a chance for himself but for his sons. Problem is the oil company won’t start drilling and paying out unless he owns the place free and clear. He has to pay off the bank---forty-three thousand dollars in a matter of a couple of weeks.

He comes up with a plan to raise the money by robbing the very chain of banks looking to foreclose. Looking forward to foreclosing. The banks want that oil money too.

Toby, who has always been an honest man if not a successful one, enlists his ex-convict brother in the scheme. Tanner Howard (Ben Foster) has just finished doing a stretch in prison for killing a man in a bar fight. This was his second murder. He was never charged for the first one he’d committed. He’d shot his the brothers’ abusive father. That one got passed off as a hunting accident. Point is, Tanner is a man of uncertain temper, violent impulses, a live for the moment and to hell with the consequences philosophy, and a guilty conscience.  He’s the type who tends to maximize trouble by way of solving a problem.

But he’s brave as all get-out---mainly because he doesn’t care if he lives or dies---and he’s fiercely loyal to Toby. He’s the older brother and he killed their father to protect his little brother.

Toby’s plan is to rob a string of the bank’s branches, taking only relatively small scores in small bills so they can’t be traced, until they’ve raised the required forty-three grand which he’s figured out how to launder. It’s a clever plan but it gives the Texas Rangers who are soon on their trail time to figure out more or less what they’re up to and start anticipating their next moves.

The two Rangers after the Howards are Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), a cynical and worn-down days away from retirement but still almost as brilliant and fearless an investigator as he was in his prime, and his longtime---and longsuffering. Hamilton is deliberately difficult to get along with.---partner, Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham), the Ranger I mentioned above who voices and embodies the movie’s central irony. He’s a man of two worlds. In his Mexican and Indian heritages, he represents both West Texas’ frontier past and its diverse, post-agricultural, knowledge-based white-collar future.

Hamilton, too, is a man of two worlds. In temperament and by virtue of his own history as a Ranger, he’s a throwback to the old-fashioned lawman of classic Westerns. But on principle and through dint of intelligence, education, professional training, and common sense, he’s very much a modern police officer and detective. He knows what the future’s bringing and he’d be looking forward to it, if only he could be part of it. Forced retirement’s getting in the way of that. But it still makes him someone whose heart is divided between two worlds he can’t be part of, the lingering Wild West of his glory days and the bright civilized future he fatalistically figures he won’t live long enough to enjoy witnessing let alone be an active part of. Retirement, as a consequence, is looking to him like a state of death in life.

No surprise then that he’s clinging hard to the present moment and enjoying maybe a little too much the chase they’re on after the bank robbers. It’s his last hurrah. Alberto, though, worries that Hamilton’s looking to go out in a blaze of glory.

Hell or High Water, then, is the story of three desperately unhappy men, Hamilton and the two Howards, at the ends of their ropes, with only one of them, Toby, feeling he has anything left to lose.

Hamilton and Tanner seem to be having a high old time playing out a real life western, Tanner seeing it as a game of cowboy and Indian, with himself as the Indian. But at bottom both are as sad and sick at heart as Toby, and the three men’s different sadnesses are part of what makes Hell or High Water that saddest of westerns I described it as up top.

But that sadness doesn’t stop it from being an exciting western or a fun one.

Finally cutting to the chase, which is the opposite of what director David Mackenzie has done. Mackenzie smartly opens with the chase and takes some time to let the action settle down before laying out his themes and giving us the backstory.

We meet the Tanners in the middle of their pulling off their first robbery. And we’re told anything about them except that they’re not particularly experienced bank robbers. Terror, exuberance, affectionate squabbling puts us on the Howards’ side before we know who they are or what their longterm plans are. All we know is that they are in more trouble and immediate danger than the people in the banks they rob.

The teller at the first bank (Dale Dickey), although scared, is annoyed at them as much as frightened. She recognizes at once that they’re amateurs who haven’t come to work prepared. Her practical, no-nonsense reaction is indicative of most of the characters we’re going to meet along the way.

The regular folks of West Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle---a casino there figures at the center of Toby’s scheme to beat the banks with their own money---are like her, practical-minded, common-sensical, stoical, and even good-humored in their determination to make the best of bad situations. But that’s one of their problems. They’re resigned to hard times.

The teller is different in that we can see at once she’s someone who will survive and thrive whatever comes her way and not just because she works for a bank, one of the few prospering businesses around. She’s the type who thinks and plans ahead, who can think and plan ahead because she can imagine a different and better future for herself. (At the exact present moment that means coming out of this robbery alive.) But others can only see more hardship and sorrow ahead of them and their only solace is a kind of retreat into memories of a glorified past or dreams of improbably rosy future brought about not by hard work or careful planning but sheer good luck.

In counterpoint to the bank teller is a waitress at a diner where Toby and Tanner happen to stop in for breakfast on their way to their next hold-up. She’s a single mother who sees her only hope for a better life for herself as attracting the romantic interest of a customer with a good job. She is consequently overtly and too obviously and desperately flirtatious. We can easily guess that far more often than she’s come close to landing a husband and father for her child, she’s essentially prostituted herself for very little money, most likely usually not much more than a too generous tip.

What’s more important, though, is that we see through Kelly Mixon’s heartbreaking performance the waitress’ self-awareness and self-disgust and at the same time her resolve to keep her pride despite her sense that she’s humiliating herself and that her belief that her situation is hopeless.

This mix of courage and shame makes her more typical than the teller of the characters who populate the movie’s West Texas, and that includes Toby.

Toby is forward thinking and he’s a careful planner, but both are new to him and they’re reactions to the sheer dumb luck of oil being found on his mother’s ranch and his mother’s dying when she did---had she lasted a few more days, he might not have had time to put his plan into action before the bank took possession of the ranch. And his careful plan requires him to debase himself. An honest, considerate, and gentle man, he has to turn himself into a thief and point guns at innocent people’s heads. Already ashamed of himself for a lifetime of failure, he’s now disgusted with himself for having become a criminal and a threat and danger to people who’ve never done him any harm.

Jeff Bridges as Ranger Marcus Hamilton is unsurprisingly terrific, and I could go on and on about him and his performance; however, I think it’s best to leave things to Bilge Elbiri who writes about Bridges' remarkable career as one of Hollywood's best leading men of the past two generations in a article at the Village Voice. Chris Pine, though, does a to me gratifyingly excellent job as Toby. I’ve been rooting for him to become a major star since the first movie in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

It was fun to see Hell or High Water not too long after Star Trek: Beyond. Abrams reconceived Jim Kirk as the popular jock who makes the class nerds feel good about themselves and inspires them to be heroes. But Pine never lets us lose track of the fact that Kirk is the son of a pair of brilliant scientists and takes after them in important ways. The driving quality of his life is an intelligent curiosity---what he wants most in life is to know. He’s every bit as smart as the nerds who look up to him and is, at heart, a nerd himself. In Star Trek: Beyond, Pine takes his Kirk a step closer to that Kirk, which is to say the Kirk we know and love from the original series. And that Kirk, besides being very smart, is a comic character. Although he has a melancholy streak, he’s essentially a happy man who takes great joy in life and in being himself.

Toby Howard is not a happy man nor does he take much joy in anything, especially not in being himself. He’s not stupid, by any measure, he is in fact quite smart. But he doesn’t really know how to be smart. He’s never had to be. He’s gotten by up until now by going along. He knows objectively that his plan is a smart one but he lacks faith in it because he lacks faith in himself. And more than he’s impressed by his own plan’s brilliance, he’s oppressed and depressed by its necessary criminality. That he has to break the law in order to save his sons' lives is proof to him that as smart as the plan is, it mean he's smart. A smart man wouldn’t have to resort to robbing banks, even if those banks deserve to be robbed.

Pine lets us see Toby’s heartbroken shame and self-doubt as clearly as Kirk’s exuberant and inspiring and good-humored self-confidence.

But as good as Bridges and Pine are, I think it’s Ben Foster who steals the show. While never letting us forget that Tanner has an awful mean streak, that he’s dangerously lacking in self-control, and that as much as he’s driven by loyalty to Toby, he’s driven by a desire to break things, he also never lets us forget that Tanner is large-hearted, brave, and in his way noble. He’s also very smart, in his own way. He doesn’t think before he leaps, but once in the air his mind sharpens and his thinking becomes focused and practical. In other circumstances---in another kind of movie---he’d be a hero. He’s practically the hero of this movie. A tragic hero, however and of course, because unlike all the other characters in Hell or High Water, including Toby and Hamilton, he’s not simply a victim of circumstance. He’s a victim of his own nature. It wouldn’t matter, when and where he found himself, he would eventually find himself on a path to self-destruction.

Hard times are what they are, is one of the messages of Hell or High Water, and to a great degree we’re all at the mercy of economic forces beyond our control, and that’s not just a tragedy it’s a crime, because there are people who can control those forces and who choose to use their control to serve their own narrow interests and destroy other people’s lives in the process.

But along with not having enough of a say in what happens to us, unless like Toby we strike oil in one way or another, that is, we get very lucky, we don’t have a lot of say in who we are either.

Mackenzie doesn’t push it, but it’s key to our understanding what’s going on that we keep in mind that Tanner and Toby are the sons of an abusive father and a cold and withdrawn mother who enabled the abuse.

The problem for other characters in the movie is that they too readily accept what’s happening to them.

Tanner’s heroism may lie in his too readily accepting who he is.

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As if you don't have enough to read, here's my review of Star Trek: Beyond: Kirk's Odyssey Begins.

And over at the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri's article The Searcher: On the Enduring Appeal of Jeff Bridges, All-American Loser.

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Hell or High Water, directed by David Mackenzie. Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan. Starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham, Kelly Mixon, Dale Dickey, Buck Howard, and Kevin Rankin. Rated R. Still in theaters.

What if The Searchers wasn’t a Western? What if John Wayne Wasn’t John Wayne?

April 9, 2015. Eleven p.m. On the road home from Syracuse.

Matt Zoller Seitz visited our Wired Critics class this afternoon and as you can guess he had a lot to say. But before I let him say anything I had something I wanted to say to the class, along with something to show them: a scene from the original Star Wars.

It was the scene of Luke rushing home to the moisture farm to find that stormtroopers have killed his aunt and uncle and left their burned bodies on the doorstep. The scene's modeled on a scene from The Searchers, John Ford's great Western starring John Wayne as the vengeance obsessed Confederate Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards:  Ethan and his adoptive nephew Martin return to the family's burning ranch and find that a Comanche raiding party has slaughtered Ethan's  brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, and carried off his nieces.

Here are the clips.

From The Searchers:

And Star Wars:

Reason I showed it was that last week we watched The Searchers. My students knew from their reading of Glenn Frankel's book The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend that the movie has had a considerable influence on succeeding generations of filmmakers and I wanted them to see that influence at work in a movie they all knew well.

The students were all revved up to hear Matt talk about Wes Anderson. For the course, they've read his book The Wes Anderson Collection and watched---re-watched most of them, some for the third and fourth time---The Grand Budapest Hotel. But of course Matt had some things to say himself about The Searchers and its influence and he rattled off a long list of films that referenced, quoted, paid homage to, and out stole from The Searchers, including one I hadn't thought of in that light before, Taxi Driver.

Matt pointed out that Travis Bickle's self-appointed mission to rescue the twelve year old prostitute Iris from a life of sexual degradation mirrors Ethan Edwards' quest to rescue his niece Debbie from what he sees as her defilement by the Comanches, the difference being that Travis believes Iris can be restored to a life of purity and Ethan believes Debbie is ruined forever and better off dead.

You want to get picky about it, that scene is not from the original Star Wars. It's from the DVD version of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the one put out in 2007 that George Lucas monkeyed around with and had Han shooting first. One of the scenes beside the shootout with Greedo he monkeyed around with was this one. He made the skeletons more vivid and gruesome.

I pointed out that in The Searchers we're not shown the bodies. Ford leaves the horror for our imaginations to conjure up. The look on John Wayne's face when he approaches the shed is enough to tell us we don't want to see what he knows he's going to find in there. Now, there are two things to consider when thinking about how much better and affecting the scene in The Searchers is.

One is that Lucas probably didn't feel he had the time to devote to his scene. He had to get across what happened and Luke's grief and horror in a hurry in order to get on with telling his action-adventure story, while Ford's story is about Ethan's grief and horror and the hate and desire for revenge that follow.

The other is that Ford couldn't show the bodies. Not in a realistic way. The times wouldn’t allow it. But the point is that there's a lesson for aspiring filmmakers and student critics in that. It's wonderful how much Ford and other directors of his era managed to do because of what they couldn't do. Reticence and restraint are artistic virtues. Indirection and suggestion can often accomplish more than the most detailed and lifelike cgi.

I quoted W.C. Fields on a key to comedy that can be applied to most any art: Whenever you feel the need to do more, do less.

Matt had something to say about that too.

The reason filmmakers of Lucas' generation, particularly in their early movies, did more was that they could do it.  The times didn’t just allow it. They reveled in it. More and more graphic violence, more swearing, nudity, explicit sex.  The filmmakers were testing limits and finding that there weren't many.  In the process, though, they overdid. That's why there's a messiness, sense of self-indulgence, superfluity, and an apparent lack of discipline in their movies that I said I think dates their movies.

I don't mean dates as in marks them as having been made at a certain time. I mean makes them look dated.

Matt is more forgiving and tolerant of that aspect of 1970s filmmaking than I am, but he did bring up a movie that exemplifies the giving in to the temptation to excess---just for starters, the bad guys shove the hero's hand down a garbage disposal--- Rolling Thunder, which had a screenplay by Paul Schrader who also wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver. Rolling Thunder features more obvious and extended borrowings from The Searchers. That doesn't help make it a great movie. In fact, I was surprised Matt remembered it or had even seen it. I only remember it because it played at the movie theater where I was working.

But Matt sees everything and remembers everything and he can talk about it all in depth, with wit, with energy and enthusiasm in a way that can carry away a seminar room full of curious honors students with great, gaping holes in their knowledge of movies and cinematic and cultural history. Which is what happened in class today. It was Matt's show and I turned things over to him and right away he and the students moved on to talking about all sorts of things and not only or even mainly things concerning Wes Anderson.

I knew that would be how it would go. It's why I invited Matt in. So I was pleased. A good time was had by all. But a part of me kept hoping the discussion would circle back to The Searchers and was hard at work concocting ways that would do that. There were some questions  I wanted to ask my students, questions I didn't have a chance to ask them last week because the movie took up most of our class time and won't get to ask them next week because we're not meeting as a class. They've got individual appointments with me to discuss their upcoming final essays. Week after that is our last class meeting and the whole time will be devoted to their filling out course evaluations and our watching Bringing Up Baby and having pizza.

What I'd like to ask them is: What did they make of John Wayne? Not just in the role of Ethan Edwards but as an actor? And what did they make of The Searchers? Did they see it as a movie or did they see it as a Western?
Did they know what a Western looked like?

I know from the discussions we have had that they know who John Wayne was and are at least conversant with what's behind his status as a movie and cultural icon. But none of them could remember ever having seen even one of his films. And while all of them were pretty sure they'd seen some classic Westerns on TV when they were kids, the only Westerns any of them were sure they'd seen and could not just name but discuss in any detail were True Grit---the Coen Brothers' version---Django Unchained---I didn't dare get into it---The Lone Ranger, and Rango.

Rango is a good Western, in case you haven't seen it, in the way Galaxy Quest is a good Star Trek movie and Young Frankenstein's a great Frankenstein movie.

And of course you have to wonder how they would have seen any other Westerns. Most of their "old" movie watching is what streams on Netflix and Netflix is woefully lacking in pre-1980s classics of any kind. And the only good Westerns I can think of from the last 30 years are Silverado, Tombstone, Unforgiven, Wild Bill, 3:10 to Yuma, the Coens' True Grit, and a little-known, little-seen unpolished gem starring Pierce Bronson and Liam Neeson called Seraphim Falls.

And Rango.

What can I tell you. I really like that one.

I also liked The Lone Ranger, so you can't always go by me.

The best Westerns of the last thirty-odd years were all on television: Lonesome Dove, The Streets of Laredo, Deadwood, and Justified, which doesn't bother to hide the fact it's a Western with cars and cell phones. My students haven't seen any of them.

They're familiar with the tropes and clichés and recognize them when they see them in non-Western movies and TV shows, but I wonder if they truly know what they're seeing.

What imagery and memories are conjured up?

Any?

What would that be like?

Seeing The Searchers for the first time without that stuff cluttering up your imagination?

Did they even see it as a Western? Did it strike them as a any period piece might? And how about John Wayne? What was it like to see him for the first time as the great movie actor and star he was without having to look past all the prejudice, biases, politics, gossip, and jokes that got in the way when I was their age?

Is it even possible to see The Searchers and Wayne as Ethan Edwards this way?

Ford knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn't making an anti-Western or a revisionist one. He was making what he considered an essential one.  The Searchers is a crash course in the Western both as a genre and as the story of the America's idea of itself at the middle of the 20th Century. He had to do that in order to question both the genre and the idea. And he knew what he was doing casting Wayne as Ethan instead of his other favorite leading man, Henry Fonda.
Fonda might have been too good in the part. He might have made Ethan too much himself---that is Ethan's self---and given us too few traces of Fonda the good guy's good guy. In short, Fonda's Ethan might have been too straight-forwardly and obviously an anti-hero, like his Colonel Owen Thursday in Ford's Fort Apache.

But with Wayne Ford could do something more daring and subversive. He could use Wayne himself to suggest that there was always something dark at the heart of Wayne's type of Western hero, which is to say at the heart of all Western heroes and so at the heart of America's sense of itself as a heroic nation. With Wayne in the part, Ford could make Ethan a hero while suggesting that a hero could also be a villain at the same time.

Anyway, the only way I can get my students' to answer my questions is to make them write about it, and they've already got enough to write about over the three and a half weeks that remain in the semester, starting with what single, specific thing Matt's visit got them really thinking. I'm looking forward to reading their answers to that. Be interesting to see what they each focused on. Lots to chose from. I filled up a dozen pages of my own notebook.

But I guess I just gave you my answer if I was a student in my own class.

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Lots of assigned reading to go with this post. You have to work hard to get an A in this blog.

My reviews of the Coens’ True Grit, which is called True Grit and True Grit and…True Grit; The Lone Ranger, “There’s Something Very Right With That Horse”; and Seraphim Falls, Seraphim Falls and the better, and baser, angels of our nature.

Roger Ebert’s Great Movie essays on The Searchers and Taxi Driver.

Matt Zoller Seitz’s books The Wes Anderson Collection and The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel along with Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend are available from Amazon.

The Lone Ranger: “There is something very right with that horse.”

Playing the Lone Ranger before he knows how to be the Lone Ranger, Armie Hammer channels Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent while Johnny Depp as an exasperated Tonto looks on in dismay and Helena Bonham Carter as a ballerina turned madam looks decidedly unimpressed by our hero to be in The Lone Ranger, Gore Verbinski’s noisy and messy but exuberant and likeable and, at heart, true to the spirit retelling of the story of the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains and his faithful Indian companion as they begin their fight for law and order in the early West.

They were both great horses, but the difference between Roy Rogers' Trigger and the Lone Ranger's Silver was that Trigger was well-trained. Silver just knew.

The Ranger never had to call him or ask him or hardly even explain. Silver had it figured out on his own and was often a step ahead.

Trigger was born to be a cowboy's horse, the King of the Cowboys' horse, but still, basically, a work horse which means a tamed horse.

Silver was wild. The Ranger did not raise him, capture him, or tame him. They found each other or, possibly, Silver was always there waiting. Horse chose his rider and that was the sign.

Silver is just one of the things the movie The Lone Ranger gets right about the Lone Ranger, and he nearly steals the show. He does things we devoted fans of the old TV series always knew he could do if budget and time had allowed, chief among them thinking for himself. But his best and most important trick in this movie is helping us keep in mind that The Lone Ranger is a Lone Ranger movie. In fact, there are times when he appears to be the only one involved in making the film who remembers that.

Whenever director Gore Verbinski seems to be losing track of his story and his characters in the noise and cgi-ed confusion of this exuberant, violent, wild, convoluted, cheerful, likeable, enjoyable mess of a movie, Silver arrives on the scene to save the day.

“There is something very wrong with that horse,” Tonto observes at one point.

No, we think, there is something very right about him.

That horse, we know, can only be ridden by one man.

Sure enough. One of the movie's central conceits is that the young lawyer John Reid who we know is going to become the Ranger is emphatically determined not to become the Lone Ranger. But throughout the movie, no matter how much he's insisting it’s not going to happen, he keeps unconsciously reaching out to Silver, and every time he does he becomes a little bit more the Ranger until...

You can guess until what and I reckon you're already hearing those first bugle blasts from the William Tell overture in your head.

Durn tootin' you are.

With The Lone Ranger Verbinski, who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the cartoon western Rango, which also starred his Tonto, Johnny Depp, hasn't made as good a Western as he made a pirate movie with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl or even as good a Western as he made with Rango. But he hasn't made as bad a movie as he made with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, either.

That’s not saying it’s a good movie.

It’s all over the place in tone and style. There’s too much to the plot and too little. The very real humor is offset by the very real and gruesome violence.  Except for the Ranger and Tonto, and Silver, all the characters are a mile wide and an inch deep.  The shootouts, the fights, the stunts, the train wrecks, and daring escapes are noisy and messy, although at least they have structure---they scan. You can follow the action, tell who's where at the moment and where they're headed--- and they fit each stage of John Reid's development into the Lone Ranger and the Ranger and Tonto's development into true partners.

But for me, questions of good and bad got lost in the fun and excitement.

I liked it. I had a good time. But I'm easy.

I loved the Lone Ranger and Tonto when I was a kid. A very little kid. They were the highlight of my Saturday morning cartoon and serial watching. But, while I never stopped loving them (and I love them still), I outgrew them. The ideal "cowboys" of my older kidhood, the two who stayed with me, were a gambler and a secret agent, and Bret Maverick and Jim West lived by very different codes than the Ranger's, codes that allowed me a peek into the grown-up world.

It was a kids western. Simple plots. Simple dialog. No complicated questions about right and wrong or conflicted emotions. No angst. No sex. Minimal violence.  Even as kids' fare it was tame. Disney's Zorro and Davy Crockett offered more sophisticated story arcs and showed a deeper understanding of the complexity of life and the vagaries of human nature.

And that's a problem.

How do you turn the  hero of a radio show created for children in the 1930s into the hero of a big budget summer blockbuster attractive to the 21st Century adults you need to draw into theaters to make back all the money you poured into making the film?

How do you even make him make sense to that audience?

Verbinski clearly loves and understands the Ranger and Tonto much more than Zack Snyder showed he loved or understood Superman in Man of Steel but he doesn't have nearly as much material to work with.

There's not a lot to the Lone Ranger myth. The mask, the silver bullets, the faithful Indian companion, a fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty Hi-yo, Silver! Away! Cue the bugles and that's it, your work here is done. There are no iconic adventures after the origin story, no supporting players after Tonto as important or familiar as Lois and Jimmy and Perry White. No Lex Luthor or General Zod. No recurring villains of any note, at all.

What Verbinski has done is filled in with images, tropes, and direct steals from other TV and movie Westerns. High Noon. True Grit. 3:10 to Yuma. Little Big Man. Lonesome Dove. Deadwood. The Good,the Bad, and the Ugly. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Searchers. Probably many more I didn't catch. (Verbinski did the same thing but to more comic effect in Rango.) Some of these are in there deliberately and explicitly. Others are there indirectly because the movies Verbinski references referenced them.  This isn't storytelling by evocation. Verbinski isn't cheating like Snyder did in Man of Steel. The Lone Ranger tells its own story. The allusions and quotes don't stand in for a narrative. They're in there to give scope and context and to place this story within a larger story and a larger mythology.

Take what had to be the most deliberate and to me the most striking references.

Since he was filming in Monument Valley, John Ford's favorite location for his Westerns, Verbinski couldn't avoid allusions to The Searchers. But he doesn't allude. There are at least two blatant and brazen visual quotes. And Verbinski means for us to use the reference for insight into the Reid family. John Reid is a reversed Ethan Edwards, coming home to Texas not on the run from the law and civilization but to help bring both to his home state. But he also comes home to take his place in a corner of the same sort of love triangle as Ethan's in with his brother and his brother's wife and he winds up riding the same trail to vengeance.

How far down that trail will he ride? Not very, of course. He's going to become the Lone Ranger, after all. But he's going to ride farther with more complicated feelings about it than you might expect, unless you caught the allusions to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that accompanied Reid's entrance into the movie. Reid has some Ethan Edwards in him, but he's got more Rance Stoddard, the naive, idealistic, and bookish lawyer played by Jimmy Stewart in the movie that famously includes the line "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend", which has implications I better not get into or we'll be here all day. The big difference is that in Reid's first encounter with his Liberty Valance, he's capable of fighting back, fairly effectively.

Well, like I said, he's going to become the Lone Ranger, after all.

The other thing Verbinski has done to give the movie heart and depth and humor is draw out the process of John Reid's becoming the Lone Ranger.

It's not just the audience who might have trouble accepting the notion of a daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains fighting for law and order. Reid himself rejects it as flat out ridiculous and refuses to wear the mask.

And this isn't the case of a conflicted hero-king turning down the crown thereby proving that he is the right one to wear it. Reid simply doesn't see the point.

For one thing, Tonto, whose idea this is, is trying to dragoon him into a life he's already turned away from. His murdered brother Dan, the Texas Ranger, was leading the life of the quintessential movie Western lawman, solving all problems with his guns and his fists and feats of violent derring-do.  John, who was raised by his brother's side and, we discover, learned everything Dan did about riding and shooting and fighting, and maybe learned it all better, has long since decided that he can do more good with his brains than with a six-shooter.

Also, he has a very strong sense of who he is and what he wants to do with his life and becoming the Ranger means literally giving up his identity. Once he puts on the mask, there will be no taking it off again. There'll be no more John Reid. Only the Ranger. But Reid has only a vague sense of that as his fate.

What really causes him to resist is that this is Tonto's idea and Tonto might very well be crazy.

Hard to say.

Tonto has a plan of his own, that's certain, but he refuses to explain that plan to Reid or, as it happens, to us.

So, this is how the movie unfolds, with Tonto trying to impress upon Reid the need of his becoming the Lone Ranger and teaching him how to go about it and a very skeptical Reid slowly, very slowly, coming around but on his own terms, while the two of them ride, fight, shoot, connive, finagle, and talk their way into and out of scenes and plots from all those other Westerns.

Worked for me.

This approach raises the question, How do you fit Lone Ranger into the universe of those Western? Note that all the ones on my list are revisionist Westerns.  They were made as repudiations of the simple good guy vs bad guy formulas of the Saturday morning serials the Lone Ranger grew out of. If John Reid arrives as a reversed Ethan Edwards, Ethan arrives, not as a reversed Lone Ranger, specifically, but as a sardonic commentary on the Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and their fellow do-gooders. John Wayne enters The Searchers wearing a black hat.  How does the Ranger fit into a world where John Wayne plays a good guy who's a bad man?

The answer is he doesn't. He can't. Unless..

Things undergo a fundamental change.

Which they do. The Ranger in himself is the change.

And that's half the fun, watching Reid start to believe, despite himself, that he is the Lone Ranger and through pure and pure-hearted conviction forcing the people around him to believe it too and then seeing them react accordingly.  This includes the bad guys.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are comic heroes. Comic as in the opposite of tragic. They are bestowers of happy endings. They bring order by re-ordering the towns and communities they visit.  Under this new order the civilizing and humanizing influences of law, virtue, and common decency are more powerful than lawlessness, selfishness, and vice, and villains are reduced to what they really are, losers, thugs, louts, and posturing buffoons.

In The Lone Ranger, the villains who are introduced as frightening grotesques and monsters of pure evil are turned one by one into clowns and cartoons as they confront the Lone Ranger and it dawns on them exactly what they're up against.  It's amusing to watch William Fichtner's slimy and literally bloodthirsty Butch Cavendish, who appears to have been rejected by Larry McMurtry from one of his Western novels for being too creepy and ghoulish, get slowly erased from the movie's final act and replaced by a cleaned-up, gussied-up, dumbed-down double of himself in the form of Barry Pepper's parody of Richard Mulligan's parody of Custer in Little Big Man.

Something similar happens to Tom Wilkinson's corrupt and calculating railroad man who starts off smooth, suave, intelligent, and persuasive in his evil but by the last act is almost visibly resisting the urge to twirl his mustache. And in the end he's replaced by a goofily grinning, goggle-eyed Stephen Root as his obviously conniving and oafish mini-me.

Evil doesn't disappear from the land. But it can be seen for what it is and stood up to and faced down.

The trick Verbinski pulls off is to place us in a world where we soon wish there was someone as boringly decent and dully noble and straight-forwardly heroic and competent as the Ranger and then make us believe, at least for the little while it takes for him and Tonto to arrive to save the day, that our wish has come true.

This only works because he has cast a near perfect Ranger.

Armie Hammer isn't called upon to play the Lone Ranger, exactly. At a certain point he has to start looking convincingly like the Ranger, which isn't simply a matter of putting on the mask and the white hat and mounting Silver.  The Ranger has to carry himself, in the saddle and on foot, with an ease and sense of calm that both commands immediate respect and at the same time comforts and reassures.  The Lone Ranger is in certain respects a prototype for Batman---the origin in a quest for vengeance, the mask that frightens criminals and baffles lawmen, the secret cave, the habit of assuming disguises---but in spirit he's more a brother to Superman. Hammer conveys all that, when he puts on the mask for real and for good.

But his real job is to create a character who would make a convincing Lone Ranger once he comes around to the idea that he needs to be the Lone Ranger, someone boringly decent, dully noble, heroically competent, yet somehow still immensely likeable and above all persuasive in his goodness.  Hammer spends most of the movie as John Reid, playing him as a combination of a young Jimmy Stewart and a live-action Dudley Do-right. His Reid is a born hero and all-around good guy but also a bit of a dope.  He's often stupid in the way very smart people can be when they refuse to acknowledge that the world doesn't behave in what they believe is an intelligent fashion.  Hammer earns his laughs this way, but he allows himself to come across as a goof in the early going because he knows where things are headed and he trusts us to notice that he has Reid growing into the Ranger the whole time.

And Hammer visibly physically grows on screen. He's studied Christopher Reeve's dual portrayals of Clark Kent and Superman and what Reeve did in seconds whenever Clark took off his glasses, Armie does over the course of the film.  His carriage and demeanor change. His back straightens, his shoulders broaden, his chin lifts, his voice deepens, and his gaze focuses and his eyes light up.

But this isn't to say he's growing up like Tony Stark does in Iron Man 3 and Jim Kirk and Clark Kent are supposed to in Star Trek Into Darkness and Man of Steel but don't. Reid enters the movie as a real grown-up, just a naive and inexperienced one who isn't prepared for what's about to happen to him.

Growing here means learning. And here's something else the movie gets right about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Reid learns from Tonto how to be the Ranger.

Conventions of the time made it hard for the TV series to get this across explicitly, but fans who recognized that the models for the Lone Ranger and Tonto were Hawkeye and Chingachgook understood it implicitly. The relationship between Cooper's heroes was more than a friendship. Chingachgook was a father to Natty Bumpo.

Tell me you haven't read Deerslayer.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are more like brothers and in this movie Tonto is definitely the big brother.

Johnny Depp as Tonto is a problematic concern, starting with the problem of casting a white guy as an Indian. But there'd have been no Tonto to cast anyone as because there'd have been no movie without Depp in a starring role and he's too old and too short and too Johnny Depp to play the Ranger.

But even when you get past that there is the weirdness of his conception of Tonto.

Some of this is just Depp being Depp. There is, however, method in his madness, beginning with the possibility that Tonto is mad. Reid certainly thinks he is. And if you know Tonto’s history, you know he has reason to have become unhinged through grief, anger, and guilt. On the other hand, Tonto is on a mission, secret and private, and what we’re seeing is---possibly---a disguise he’s adopted to help him go about his mission. It allows him to pass, not unnoticed, but not taken seriously. To most white people he’s just that crazy Injun. To other Indians, he’s just that crazy Tonto.

Whichever’s the case, and it may be that he’s both mad and calculating, what he has done is set himself apart. He is without a tribe, without a people. His rituals and religion are all his own, invented when he was ten years old as both penance and consolation. What Depp is playing then is a man alone and feeling it. It may be that he needs Reid to become the Ranger to help him on his mission. But it's certainly the case that he needs the Ranger to exist because he needs him for a friend.

How’s it go in the Lone Ranger’s code? “If you want a friend, be a friend”?

Among the other things that dawn slowly on Reid is that Tonto is asking to be his friend.

And that’s the big thing the movie gets right about the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Tonto is not the Ranger’s sidekick. They are partners. They are brothers. They are friends.

Depp and Hammer’s portrayal of the development of that friendship gives The Lone Ranger its heart. And much of its comedy. They’re very funny together. The friendship doesn’t come easy and Depp and Hammer find the humor in their characters’ irritations, exasperations, misunderstandings, infuriations, and frustrations but while still showing the growing affection and respect that keep them together despite Reid’s wanting out of the nonsense and Tonto’s dismay at Reid’s continual failure to learn his lessons and start living up to his expectations.

Wilkinson, Fichtner, and Pepper make a fine team of villains. Helena Bonham Carter as the one-legged ex-ballerina turned madam Red Harrington---her name’s a joke I suspect Verbinksi had left over from Rango---makes the most of her one big scene in a set piece reminiscent of but not quite as neatly composed or funny as the Tortuga scenes in The Curse of the Black Pearl. As John Reid’s heroic but gruff and taciturn brother Dan, James Badge Dale does a good job of making us understand why he’d have been Tonto’s first choice to be the Lone Ranger and why Tonto would have been making the wrong choice. Ruth Wilson as the nominal love interest is mostly there to show off her pout and her freckles, both of which are lovely.

Like I said, Silver---well, the horses playing Silver---come close to stealing the movie.

There aren’t any other characters to speak of, a real weakness. The background characters are mostly just that, background. I keep coming back to Rango, but it wasn’t the case there and I wonder why Verbinski didn’t follow his own example. The people the Lone Ranger and Tonto help ought to be seen as persons in their own rights and they were in the TV show.

But Hammer and Depp carry the day. This is their movie and their story, the Lone Ranger and Tonto’s, although when you get down to it, more Tonto’s story than the Ranger’s.

Which brings me to the framing device.

The movie opens with a hundred year old Tonto telling his story to a young fan of The Lone Ranger radio show in 1933.

I feel dumb for being put off by this at the start because it shouldn't have taken me even a short while to get the allusion.

Little Big Man.

It’s Tonto telling his story the way Jack Crabb told his story.

His story. Tonto’s story. The survivor’s story.

It’s the story of how he invented a hero and then came to believe in his own invention and to love him and to rely on him.

And it’s a grand and glorious story but also a sad one in its way because it’s being told from so great a distance in time and we see that the storyteller has long outlived his friend and how much he misses him and wants him back. How much he’s counting on the boy to remember the story and keep it and the Ranger alive.

And that’s where Verbinksi leaves us, missing the Ranger and wanting him back, wanting them both back. We want to return with them now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. We want to hear it begin again…

"A fiery horse with the speed of light, a hearty Hi-yo, Silver! The Lone Ranger and Tonto ride again…"

_____________________________

Oliver Mannion’s one sentence review: “A better Superman movie than this summer’s actual Superman movie.”

_____________________________

Here's something that made me happy. Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels, who played the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the TV show, were good friends in real life. By way of Leonard Maltin, a tribute to Silverheels by Moore's daughter Dawn.

And from the Smithsonian: How the Ranger's mask found its way into the national Museum of American History.

_____________________________

Since I brought it up, my review of Man of Steel.

The Lone Ranger, directed by Gore Verbinksi, screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio. Starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Ruth Wilson, Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Wilkinson, William Fichtner, and Barry Pepper. Rated PG-13. Two hours and twenty-nine minutes. Now in theaters.

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.

Please help keep this blog running strong by making a donation.

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.

Who owns the night? The cops and robbers or the cowboys and Indians?

Tell you what kind of movie We Own the Night is.

It’s the kind of movie that opens with scenes of rowdy, drunken, loutish young men and leering, drunken, slutty-looking young women in a nightclub, snorting lines of coke, popping pills, and tossing back drinks and laughing too loud and too hard and then switches to a scene of middle-aged cops and their families gathered in the basement of a church for a party celebrating one of their own’s promotion to captain.  The men drink beer but they’re clearly sober.  Their wives are plain and practical-looking and have one eye on the kids at all times.  Everybody dines on macaroni and cheese served out of aluminum foil chafing dishes, and before the party really gets underway a chaplain says a prayer and the guest of honor requests a moment of silence to honor a brother officer killed in the line of duty the night before and why they’re all here instead of at the wake is never explained.

And then, as if not satisfied that you got the point of that little exercise in compare and contrast, it switches back to a scene of a group we recognize from the nightclub snorting more coke and downing more booze.  The men are more loutish, but the women are acting a little less slutty, mainly because they’re too stoned to muster the energy.  And then it switches back again to a scene of cops we recognize from the church basement hard at work at the station the next morning, planning their strategy for taking down some drug dealing kingpin, and all this switching back and forth is shot and played entirely without irony.

If you stick with it after that, what you’re in for is the kind of movie that features many intense, high-volume conversations in which one character tells another things like, “We can’t do this, it’s too dangerous!” and “We better not try that, it goes against procedure!” and “We’d better not even try that because it would be just too unbelievably stupid if we did!” and then those characters go right out and do it.

It’s the kind of movie in which one character says to a second, “You want me to take care of it?” and the second character says no, he’ll do it himself, and in the next scene the first character is doing what the second character just said he’d take care of and you find yourself shouting at the screen, What’s the matter with you people?  Aren’t you in this movie?  Aren’t you paying attention to your own scripts?

It’s the kind of movie in which a deputy chief of police gets to make up all the rules, write and rewrite the law on the spot, give conflicting and dangerous orders, and make the kind of ridiculous decisions that if he’d been in the habit of making his whole career he’d never have risen above patrolman, just so that he and the other cop characters will be where they need to be when the plot requires them to be there.

It’s the kind of movie in which a main character who has no business being there, whose job would in fact preclude him from the task, takes part in a routine witness transfer, driving the lead car himself, and riding in that car all by himself, no one riding shotgun, just so he can get himself killed at a point in the film where it’s about time for a main character like him to die so that the hero can sober up and learn his lesson and set out to inflict righteous vengeance upon the bad guys.

It’s the kind of movie in which the hero, who until he sobers up and learns his lesson, has been a coke-snorting hedonist who consorts with Russian mobsters and takes every chance he gets to insult and pick fights with his cop father and his cop brother, can within days of sobering up and learning his lesson, walk into the police station, get himself made a probationary cop on the spot, pin on his badge, strap on a gun, and walk right out to take over command of the task force that’s been chasing the mobsters who until he sobered up and learned his lesson had been his friends.

It’s the kind of movie that casts Robert Duvall and Mark Wahlberg in important roles and then gives them not much to do except look grim and growl a lot.

It’s the kind of movie that casts Joaquin Phoenix as the hero who sobers up and learns his lesson, just as he did in Walk the Line, but unlike Walk the Line makes you like him better when he was a coke-snorting hedonist refusing to sober up and learn any lessons.  Think of the movies James Cagney and Pat O’Brien did together, in which Cagney was the devil-may-care gangster with the wild smile and the look of crazy menace in his eye and O’Brien was the sober, clear-thinking, honest model of decency and reason, the cop or the priest trying to save Cagney’s soul.  Think of the movies Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy did in which they put their own stamps on the Cagney-O’Brien dynamic, with Gable as the devil-may-care good bad guy with just the right, attractive amount of lust in his heart of gold, and Tracy was the model of sexless, regular guy rectitude.  Well, in We Own the Night, Phoenix plays both parts of the dynamic—he’s a Cagney who turns into an O’Brien, a Gable who becomes a Tracy, only without O’Brien’s wit and charm and without Tracy’s strength and good humor.

We Own the Night is set in 1988, but I can’t figure out why.  There’s nothing about the story that’s peculiar to the end of the Reagan era.  There are no stylistic flourishes that identify it as an 80s period piece.  If James Gray, the director, watched any television in the 80s, it wasn’t Miami Vice.  If he saw any movies, one of them wasn’t American Gigolo.  Blondie’s on the soundtrack, but as background music, not as commentary or a signature tune.  If you miss the fact that none of the good guys have sideburns, beards, or mustaches, it could be the 70s.  If you don’t wonder why no one uses a cell phone or a lap top, it could be now.  And if you go by the plot and the way the characters act as if bound by no laws or rules or logic, it could be the 1880s.

Not the real 1880s, the movie 1880s.

Move We Own the Night back in time, take it out of New York City in the late 20th Century and set in the Dakota Territories of the 19th, and a lot of what happens will be familiar enough to seem to make sense.  Make the deputy police chief a US Marshall, the only peace officer with any authority for a hundred miles around, make his “good” son his top deputy, his “wild” son, the one who needs to learn a lesson, a saloon keeper instead of nightclub manager and take the rolled dollar bill out of his nose and put a shot glass in his hand—add in the fact that he was once a marshall or a Texas Ranger or a calvary officer or a gunslinger so that it makes sense that when he pins on his badge and straps on his revolvers the rest of the posse accepts him and turns to him for leadership---have the bad guys selling rifles and whiskey to the Indians instead of cocaine to the yuppies, and you’ve got the basics for a pretty standard western.  Call it We Own the Range and cast John Wayne as the Marshall, Montgomery Clift as the good son, Jeffrey Hunter as the wild son, give it to Howard Hawks to direct, and who’d care that none of it makes a lick of sense?

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Related reading from Turner Classic Movies:

Cagney and O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces.

Gable and Tracy in Boom Town and San Francisco.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River.

Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers.

And be sure to read our favorite film blogger, the Siren, on The Manliness of Montgomery Clift.

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?