With the arrival of Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, possibly the best Western film since Shane, one begins to speculate all over again on the future of this thankfully inexhaustible genre. And perhaps the most important and impressive feature of Brando’s piece is that it brings back to the Western a sense of period, a sense of community, decidedly lacking during the last few years.
From the start the cowboy picture has been split into two distinct types, as may be seen by comparing the viewpoints of, say, John Ford and John Sturges. Ford’s approach to the great nineteenth-century pioneering epoch is charged with nostalgic affection and respect. Where he observes his people with love, a love which also embraces the territories they inhabit, Sturges remains less preoccupied with the human and geographical forces which went towards shaping the modern America than with essentially private conflicts which could arise in any country in any age.
Ford presents us in Wagon Master with a band of emigrating Mormons, or in Stagecoach with the dangers of primitive transport; these are religious and social issues rooted in his nation’s past. Sturges, by contrast, gives us in Bad Day at Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill two plots whose immaculate fulfilment of the unities would not disgrace Aristotle. Furthermore, the plots have the timelessness of classical literature. Significantly, Bad Day at Black Rock, in spite of its Western milieu, is a post-World War Two story; while Sturges’s only attempt to create period detail was in The Magnificent Seven, a remake of a film by Kurosawa, whose temperamental resemblances to Ford have been widely noted.
Of course, which type you favour is a question of taste. I personally find, all else being roughly equal, the “historic” Western preferable to the “domestic.” Sturges’s films are splendidly taut of their kind, but beside Ford’s, his is a cold brilliance. Too often the settings of his pictures echo in stark, sparse, dry austerity the dramas he plays out upon them. Even Escape From Fort Bravo – probably the least bitter – seems deficient in warmth when confronted with the evocation of United States Cavalry life in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, and Fort Apache (or for that matter in The Alamo, which Ford supervised). Similarly, there is nothing in the Sturges Gunfight at O.K. Corral as poetic and moving as the Sunday morning churchgoing episode in Ford’s version of this legendary incident, My Darling Clementine.
Yet I deliberately use the words “poetic and moving” rather than “realistic and thoughtful,” just as I call the O.K. Corral affair “legendary” rather than “historical.” The Western was never meant to be primarily a vehicle of historical, social, religious, political, economic or psychiatric comment (however valuable such comment has on occasion proved). Admittedly, Carl Foreman has tended to describe High Noon as an allegory of McCarthyism; but authors are notoriously bad judges of their own work. What one remembers about High Noon are Zinnemann’s skin-tight direction, Floyd Crosby’s graphically sharp high-key lighting, Tiomkin’s ominously rumbling score with its repeated snatches of haunting theme song, and the superb climatic montage recapitulating the chief characters in a long unerringly edited succession of perfectly composed shots, as to the mounting thud of the background music the clock ticks its closing minutes towards midday.
In the same way one recalls Bad Day at Black Rock not for its condemnation of race hatred but for its dead colony of scattered buildings, lying suspiciously in baking sunlight around the passing, unending railroad track; or the scene where Spencer Tracey knocks Ernest Borgnine for six through the swinging doors of the old saloon. Last Train from Gun Hill stays in the memory not by its plea in favour of capital punishment but by its bleak, tangle-brown patches of forest and sandy, scrub-dotted plain. Wyler’s The Big Country lives for us because of its exhilarating credit-title sequence (coach-horses galloping full-tilt in sepia close-shot to Jerome Moross’s majestic melodies, until the camera draws back to reveal the carriage against a huge expanse of land), rather than its arguments for pacifism. And Dmytryk’s Warlock endures less through its Freudian relationships than through the simple emotional tension of the scenes where the Marshal’s deputy faces the outlaw gang.
But if this is true of the school of Westerns which endeavours to deal with “contemporary” or “universal” subjects, it is also wholly true of the “historic” school. Years after the dreary later episodes of oil drilling, politics, and war in Anthony Mann’s Cimarron have been forgotten, one will treasure the early passage depicting the mass rush of pioneers in their wagons to stake claims upon the newly opened territory of Oklahoma. This sequence, in its breakneck speed and movement, its images of a woman seeing her husband dying by his overturned buggy, kneeling by the cross that marks his grave, and then departing alone with a brave salute of the hand to her friends, conveys an idea of the excitement, sadness, and communal humanity which distinguishes Ford’s finest films, The Alamo, Wyler’s The Westerner, Hawks’ Red River,”Stevens’s Shane, and the family and fiesta scenes in One-Eyed Jacks.
And in each instance the historical background is vital not in itself but as an atmospheric enrichment of the picture’s aesthetic quality. For now I return to the word “legendary.” The Western is as clearly a work of epic myth as Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Brando’s phrase, it expresses “the folk-lore of the outdoor era”; and one hopes that his film will provoke in other directors a firmer realisation of this fact than has recently been the case.
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