The Stalking Moon

The Stalking Moon (1968)

For a film which at first seems akin to the traditional captivity narrative, there is a surprising lack of shunning in The Stalking Moon (1968). Sarah Carver, a white woman who was held captive by Apache Indians for ten years, conceiving, giving birth to, and raising a son during that time, is not shunned by the soldiers who find her, nor by the scout who offers to escort her to safety. She is not shunned by the Apache women of her tribe, who stand by as mere set dressing as Sarah chooses to rejoin white society and ask the Army's help in fleeing from her Apache husband, who's on a murderous rampage to reclaim his son. She's given some contemptuous looks at a stagecoach station, where one man makes some hostile comments about Indians, but ultimately this is not a movie concerned with the more complex ramifications of the captivity scenario.

"You can't escape
The Stalking Moon"

The Stalking Moon instead presents itself as a horror thriller, the type where a deadly and inexorable hunter kills everything on its way to a final showdown with the film's protagonist. When this threat is in the form of a giant shark or a masked psychopath, its relentlessness is not questioned — it's a one-dimensional killing machine with no profound motives. But from the viewpoint of the early 21st century (post-Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse, Dances With Wolves, post-Elián González), when that threat is an American Indian who will stop at nothing to reclaim his son, he's not so much a horrific threat, just a dedicated dad. Granted, this father, an Apache named Salvaje, kills every white person along the way, even those not directly connected to his quest. But after decades of films that have changed the portrayal of American Indians in Westerns, this murderous rampage is more understandable, arguably excusable, to today's audience.

I would almost say that this is the main reason the film fails as a thriller, and that it does so only in a modern context, if it weren't for other, more fundamental problems it has in setting up its thrills. The suspense leading up to the eventual confrontation with the film's protagonist, the scout, Sam Varner (played by Gregory Peck), is diminished by one of the techniques presumably intended to build it, namely that Salvaje is not seen, even briefly, until he reaches Varner's homestead for the climactic fight. Successful horror movies often withhold from view the face of the killer but give you increasing glimpses — the silhouette of Norman Bates on the shower curtain in Psycho, for example, or the first flashes of fin and teeth in Jaws — or force the audience to see through the killer's eyes in POV shots. The Stalking Moon does neither, and while we await the arrival of Salvaje, we don't necessarily fear it. (The evident trappings of classic Westerns also dull the tension: in the final showdown, the good guy almost always wins.)

"Aim the gun, dammit!"

The deliberate teasing of the audience also works against the film. The first time Varner leaves his home — and therefore Sarah and her son — only to find that the Apache has taken advantage of Varner's absence to attack, was an acceptable (albeit predictable) contrivance. But when Varner does this again, and nearly a third time, suspense is replaced by amazement at how this man ever found work as a scout. Furthermore, as Salvaje — who arrives in a less silent manner than Sarah (and the movie's poster!) indicates he will — comes through the door of Varner's homestead, Varner is waiting for him, rifle at the ready. But Varner hesitates and waits until the Apache can see him before even lifting his gun to aim. Sure, this delay creates tension, but strains credibility to the point of annoyance. (In his 1969 review, Roger Ebert recalled "mentally urging" Varner to "Aim the gun, dammit! Shoot him!" My reaction was the same, only audible.)

Peck's portrayal of Varner is a bit stiff (more so than the usual Peck), and I'm not convinced that his character really thinks through his offer to bring Sarah and her son home, nor that he is genuinely moved to do so. For me, the emotional high point is when the boy, realizing his father has come for him, runs from Varner's house and tries to reach his father's hiding place. The bond between father and son that this scene implies is stronger than any other interpersonal relationship in the film: that between Sarah and her son, who seems indifferent towards his mother, between Varner and petulant junior scout Nick, who barely conceals his hurt at being left by Varner when the elder scout retires, or between Varner and Sarah, who are paired only out of sympathy and necessity.

Varner's homestead

The Stalking Moon is a nice-looking movie, though, with some fine location shooting. My favorite is Varner's homestead, an idyllic frontier Eden, one of the nicest locations I've seen in a Western. It would have been nice if the scenery had been backed up by some depth to the characters, particularly the Apache pursuer — insight to his thoughts about retrieving his son, about his original abduction of the boy's mother, about his vendetta against the white settlers — and perhaps an ending that reunited him with his son. That would have been interesting.

Happy Birthday, Robert Ryan

Robert Ryan

I first became aware of Robert Ryan in my early twenties when I saw him in On Dangerous Ground, which rocked my naive assumption that the cop-on-the-edge had been invented by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. The scene where Ryan's Jim Wilson beats information from a belligerent perp showed a man frazzled from a life patrolling the underbelly of society, worn out as much by his own violent tendencies as by the criminals he unleashed them on. Jim Wilson was the type of part I would later discover Ryan excelled at: the tough guy with a bit more going on inside.

As I watched more of Ryan's films (there are many), I found this to hold true. His character in The Wild Bunch has an outlaw past, but the man we see is a forlorn turncoat hunting down his former gang and silently wrestling with what that means. His Cotton Ryan from Lawman is a sellout sheriff who eventually has to confront his own complacency. In The Professionals, he's one of four men assembled to rescue a woman kidnapped by a Mexican bandit. Each of these men has a specialty — weapons, explosives, tracking. Ryan's Hans Ehrengard's skill is horse wrangling, and Ryan plays him with a sensitivity that could mislead one into thinking he's soft — until he KO's a man over the mistreatment of a horse.

At other times, Ryan was just fun to watch. I forget where I read this, but someone said that the trick to his Ben Vandergroat in The Naked Spur was that Ryan just laughed when delivering each line, making his character not only sinister, but unexpectedly likable.

This is why, in his Western roles especially, Ryan stands out among other leading men of the genre. While I certainly consider John Wayne one of the great Western stars, Ryan displayed in his supporting parts a much greater range. (So much has been said about Wayne's inability to act that this may not be the most effective comparison, though I've always felt such criticisms of John Wayne were overdone.)

And I would be lying by denying that the little I know of Ryan's personal life contributes to my affection for his work. His tough guy credentials included being a former Marine and boxing champ, but he was also a civil rights advocate and Democrat who supposedly clashed with John Wayne over HUAC on the set of Flying Leathernecks, living for real the complexity he played on screen.

Wyatts Earp

Today is the birthday of Wyatt Earp, legendary lawman of the American West. To commemorate the occasion, here's a look at some of the actors who have portrayed him on film.

Randolph Scott in Frontier Marshal (1939)

Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine (1946)

Will Geer in Winchester '73 (1950)

Joel McCrea in Wichita (1955)

Burt Lancaster in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

James Stewart in Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

James Garner in Hour of the Gun (1967)

Randy Lowell in National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)

Kurt Russell in Tombstone (1993)

Kevin Costner in Wyatt Earp (1994)

Cowboys and . . .

Cowboys and Aliens

To coincide with this weekend's release of Cowboys and Aliens, in which extraterrestrial beings invade the Old West, here's a look at a few movies that pit cowboys against other fantastic creatures and strange environments.

Mighty Joe Young

Mighty Joe Young - Cowboys vs. Gorilla
Showman Max O'Hara wants a special attraction for his new safari-themed nightclub, so he hires a band of cowpokes to accompany him to Africa in order to capture lions — by lassoing them(!). By chance, they encounter a giant gorilla and attempt to lasso it instead, much to the annoyance of the gorilla and the young woman who raised it. O'Hara convinces the woman to headline at his club, but it soon becomes apparent that neither she nor her gorilla are cut out for the rigors of show biz.

The Valley of Gwangi

The Valley of Gwangi - Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs
In turn-of-the-century Mexico, the owners of a Wild West Show discover a unique attraction — a living Eohippus, the pint-sized prehistoric predecessor to the modern horse. When the animal is stolen and returned to the hidden valley from which it was taken, the show's wranglers give chase — and end up face-to-face with a living dinosaur bent on destruction.

Blazing Saddles

Blazing Saddles - Cowboys vs. Hollywood
The now-famous ending to Mel Brooks' send-up of the Western has a mob of brawling "rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves" and various other black hats breaking through their backlot set onto the Warner Brothers lot and wreaking havoc in the studio commissary before spilling onto Hollywood Boulevard, where Sheriff Bart finally confronts the snidely Hedy — sorry, that's Hedley — Lamarr.

Hang 'Em High: the Clint Eastwood primer

Hang 'Em High (1968), Clint Eastwood's first American western after the Sergio Leone trilogy, contains many of the motifs recurrent in Eastwood movies of the following decades, particularly his action movies and Westerns.

The lawman who clashes with the law
Eastwood's Marshal Jed Cooper repeatedly disagrees with his boss' idea of justice, at times seeing it as too lenient, at others too severe. This conflict is further played out in the Dirty Harry movies.

Delivering prisoners against great odds
Jed's cross-desert trek with three murderous cattle rustlers and no backup sets precedent for elements of Coogan's Bluff, Joe Kidd, The Gauntlet, and In the Line of Fire.

Back from the dead — for vengeance
Jed Cooper is left for dead twice‚ at the lynching that opens the film and the saloon shootout later on. Both times Cooper surprises his would-be assassins by reappearing and taking revenge, either with badge or gun. Other Eastwood characters make similar death-defying comebacks, symbolic or otherwise, in High Plains Drifter, Sudden Impact, Pale Rider, and Unforgiven.

Sex crime
Rachel Warren, Jed's love interest, is on constant watch for the men who raped her years ago. She looks at every prisoner brought before the judge, hoping one day she will see her assailants hang. Similarly victimized characters — several of them prostitutes — appear in The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Sudden Impact, Tightrope, and Unforgiven.

The Clint Eastwood Repertory Company
Several actors appear frequently in Eastwood's movies. Hang 'Em High features regulars Pat Hingle (The Gauntlet, Sudden Impact) and Jack Ging (Play Misty for Me, High Plains Drifter).

What's in a name: Liberty Valance and Ransom Stoddard

James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard,
Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance

Liberty Valance - An outlaw for hire who terrorizes the small frontier town of Shinbone, Liberty attempts to intimidate settlers into voting against statehood in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Ransom Stoddard - An educated man from back East, Ransom hopes to bring law and order to the West. He favors statehood as a way to protect settlers from unscrupulous ranchers.

Bad guy Liberty's name sounds positive, but the "liberty" he represents is unrestrained and unmediated freedom. Valance acts on his every whim and impulse, however violent, provided it doesn't interfere with his own liberty, regardless of how it affects others.

One of the definitions for "ransom" given by Merriam-Webster is "to deliver especially from sin or its penalty." Ransom Stoddard certainly provides (at least by appearances) a deliverance from evil (evil in the form of Valance), but also represents the "captivity" (to use words suggested by "ransom" or "holding ransom") of the freedoms we yield to the law in order to sustain a peaceful society. The killing of Liberty by Ransom (albeit in perception only) is symbolic of this giving up of unrestrained personal freedom for the common good.

See also: Great Showdowns: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The impossible POV

Yellow Sky: Not in the sights, exactly

There's a shot in Yellow Sky (1948) that immediately distinguishes itself from all others in the film, when we see the male lead (an outlaw named Stretch, played by Gregory Peck) through the barrel of a rifle being aimed by a woman (Mike, played by Anne Baxter) who hasn't yet made up her mind about pulling the trigger. The shot's thick rifle barrel border fills all but the very center of the screen with darkness, a strong contrast to the brightly lit exterior shots of sun-baked desert which dominate the rest of the film. But the most striking thing about this shot is that, for all purposes, it proclaims itself as a point-of-view shot when in fact it is not. The framing of Stretch at the end of a long tube implies an owned specularity, like a shot of the moon as seen through a telescope. We are tricked for a moment into believing that the owner of this view is the shooter, when in fact it belongs to an unseen and unseeing object: the bullet.

The peril of such a trick is that it threatens to expose the camera as the autonomous presenter of the film. While not every shot in a feature film is a point-of-view shot (most are not), when a shot is first disguised as a point-of-view shot, then revealed to be otherwise, there is a noticeable disruption, a perceptual double-take, that hints at the film's construction. This of course works to varying degrees, depending upon the shot and the audience, and by pointing this out I am not suggesting that all shots should conceal the camera's presence as much as possible or that stylized camera work should never be used (if it never were, there would be no Expressionism or film noir, to say the least). Depending upon the type of shot and its context, though, the artifice of such shots can become more noticeable than for others, for better or worse.

Great Expectations: Pip comes to

Another such deception is the simulated "coming to" shot, which shows a blurry figure coming into focus as a character regains consciousness. A perfect example of this can be seen in the David Lean-directed Great Expectations (1946). After visiting Abel Magwitch's death bed, Pip staggers home through London streets and passes out on his bed. The next shot begins in hazy darkness, then slowly brightens and focuses on the shape of Joe Gargery. This appears in every way to be the point-of-view of the recovering Pip, a trick set up by the previous shot, which showed Pip's authentic point-of-view as he pushed through his door and fell into bed. Once Joe is in complete focus, however, we see that he is not looking into Pip's eyes — that is, directly into the camera lens — but rather offscreen. The shot is thus revealed not as Pip's actual point-of-view, but as an ornate fade.

First Men in the Moon: Images captured by a nonexistent camera

I mentioned another example in an earlier post, from the 1964 film First Men in the Moon. At the end there is a scene in which people on Earth watch a television broadcast from the moon, which shows a trio of astronauts escaping from a collapsing underground lunar city. The television broadcast shows three shots from three different camera angles, though no character is present on the moon to operate a camera, let alone three.

Of the three listed here, the rifle barrel shot is probably the most disruptive, due to its obvious gimmickry. I don't know how this shot was achieved, but it screams "special effect." The effect of the simulated "coming to" shot is perhaps a wash if one considers the alternative — it may have been more jarring if Bernard Miles (the actor playing Joe) had looked directly into the lens. (Lean could have presented the awakening with the camera trained on Pip, however, or in a medium two-shot, e.g., to keep the camera more concealed; obviously he and cinematographer Guy Green found value in the simulated POV.) However, like the lunar TV broadcast, this method of suggesting character point-of-view has become common enough that perhaps it is not as noticeable to all viewers.

See also:
Shoot the moon...somehow
Scorsese's Enunciative Presence

Great showdowns: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Two of my favorite showdowns are from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The first is a confrontation over a fallen steak in a restaurant in Shinbone, a small western frontier town, and it is unusual for a showdown because no guns are ever drawn and no shots are ever fired. It emphasizes, though, one of the film's main themes — the way of the gun vs. the coming of law to the Old West. The former is highlighted not only in the movie's title (it is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, after all, not The Man Who Prosecuted Liberty Valance), but also in the characters Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a vicious outlaw and hired gun for cattle barons looking to intimidate voters into defeating a proposal for statehood, and Tom Doniphon, a tough but respectable rancher who provides the only real challenge to Valance's skill with a gun. The Law is represented by Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), a lawyer from the East eager to bring a more civilized order to the frontier.

On his way to Shinbone, Stoddard's coach is robbed — and Stoddard himself is severely beaten — by Valance and his gang. Ransom is found and rescued by Doniphon, who leaves him in the care of Hallie (Vera Miles), a waitress at Pete's Place and, ostensibly, Tom's future wife. To pay for his room and board, Ransom washes dishes at the restaurant, and on one night he volunteers to help Hallie serve food, much to the consternation of the women in the kitchen, who feel wearing an apron and waiting tables are not duties befitting a man. Ransom insists, however, and carries Tom's dinner into the dining room just as Liberty Valance — who had entered the room just moments before and forced a party of cowhands out of their chairs — is making himself comfortable. Ransom, seeing Liberty at the nearby table, stops short. Valance jeers, but Ranse carries the plate towards Tom's table, only to be tripped by Valance as he walks past the outlaw. Both Ranse and the plate hit the floor hard, and as Tom's food scatters, Valance and his men laugh derisively.

Tom walks slowly into frame and stands behind of Ransom, who is still on the floor recovering from his fall. "That's my steak, Valance," says Tom, as Liberty jumps to his feet. After a pause, Valance, chuckling, tells Ransom, "Well you heard him, Dude. Pick it up." Ranse starts to get to his feet, defiantly refusing to do as told. But Tom cuts him off, leaving Ranse on his knees, and sidesteps him to face Liberty. "I said you, Valance. You pick it up." A tense standoff begins, as Liberty silently considers his chances against Tom in a close-range gunfight. As Valance and Doniphon remain locked in a stare-down, Ransom, with a look of adrenaline-fueled rage, loses his patience. He stands up, angrily shouting at the two. "What's the matter? Everybody in this country kill crazy?" He picks up the steak, slaps it onto the plate, then slams the plate onto Tom's table. "There! Now! It's picked up!" Valance and Doniphon don't flinch — their eyes are still locked, gun hands at the ready. After a moment, Liberty backs down, though still taunting Tom by dropping some coins on the floor. "Why don't you get yourself a fresh steak, on me?" he says, his eyes still locked on Tom's. He then turns, slowly walks toward the door, then suddenly spins on his heels while going for his guns. Tom quickly checks Liberty's draw — "Try it, Liberty! Just try it!" he says, and Valance freezes. Liberty's face changes bitterly, and instead of drawing, he takes out his anger by beating one of his henchmen as he pushes his way out the door.

This scene further emphasizes the courage Ranse demonstrates during the coach robbery, when he steps in front of Liberty Valance when the latter threatens a woman. It shows that Ranse, despite his preference for reason over violence and his apparent blindness to prevailing gender roles, is in his own way as brave as Tom. But it also serves as the moment when Ranse realizes how complicated a task it will be to bring lawfulness to the west — he is fully aware that it was Tom and his gun that scared Valance away, not fear of the law. It's a quintessential James Stewart moment, too, showcasing the actor's talent for playing men pushed to the edge, whose anger explodes into defiance in the face of possible ruin or death. (The following scene, where Ranse recovers from the incident, is another well-executed move from the George Bailey playbook.)

The second — and most significant — showdown from Liberty Valance is shown twice: once when it happens, and again in flashback (technically both instances are in flashback, as the events are told by Ransom decades after they occur). After the confrontation at Pete's Place, Ranse knows it's just a matter of time before Liberty comes back for revenge. In secret, he begins practicing with a gun, and gets one memorable lesson from Tom, who angers Ranse by shooting paint cans while Ranse is still near them, covering the lawyer in white paint.

The showdown happens at night, on Shinbone's darkened main street. Ranse discovers that Valance and his men have badly beaten the editor of the town newspaper and destroyed the newspaper office where Ranse was establishing his law practice. While he knows that he is no match for Liberty in a gun fight, he resolves to face him anyway and sends word to Liberty to meet him in the street. Ranse, still wearing his apron, retrieves his gun, pulls down what is left of the sign he had hung outside his office, then starts down the street toward Liberty.

Valance controls the situation from the start, telling a determined but obviously frightened Ranse to come forward out of the shadow. Ranse obeys, only to be toyed with as Liberty shoots a jug hanging close to Ransom's head, splashing him with water (echoing Tom's humiliating paint can trick). Ranse gathers himself, then steps forward, only to be shot in his gun arm and watch his gun fly into the street. Liberty leans against a post laughing as Ranse, blood pouring from his arm, moves slowly toward his gun. "You got two hands, Hash Slinger. Pick it up," taunts Liberty. As Ranse slowly reaches for the gun, Liberty shoots the ground nearby and continues to laugh. Ranse takes the gun in his left hand, then slowly steps up onto the sidewalk to face Valance. Liberty stops laughing and changes his expression so that we know he is done with games. He steps away from the post, points his gun at Ranse, and pulls back the hammer. "All right, dude. This time, right between the eyes," he says, taking aim. Ranse quickly raises his gun and fires. Liberty is thrown back against the post, then staggers onto the street and falls over, dead.

As a crowd bursts from the saloon and surrounds Valance's body, Ranse, holding his bleeding arm, walks slowly back to the restaurant, where Hallie follows him to the kitchen to tend his wound. As she does so, she tearfully confesses her fear that Ranse would have been killed and kisses him on the forehead, just as Tom walks in. It becomes apparent to Tom that Hallie will marry Ranse and not him, and his bitterness over this realization manifests as anger in the following scenes when he roughs up Valance's men in the saloon, gets drunk, then returns to his home to burn down the addition he had built in anticipation of living with Hallie.

The significance of Tom's anger is not fully revealed until the territorial convention, where Ranse — bolstered by his reputation as the man who shot Liberty Valance — is nominated to represent the territory in Congress. Uneasy with the controversy surrounding his new fame, Ranse leaves the convention hall. Outside he is confronted by a grizzled and bitter Tom, and explains to him that he wishes to go back east instead of build a career based upon his killing of Valance. "You talk too much," Tom tells him. "Besides," he continues, "you didn't kill Liberty Valance." In flashback, Tom explains to the astonished Ranse how he had hidden in the shadows across the street, and shot Liberty Valance just as Ranse fired his own gun. When Ranse asks Tom why he did it, Tom replies, "Hallie's happy. She wanted you alive." Ranse then re-enters the convention hall to accept his nomination.

In secretly killing Liberty Valance, Tom knowingly sacrifices his future happiness with Hallie for Hallie's future happiness with Ranse. But his sacrifice is for more than just Hallie — by shooting Liberty Valance, Tom not only saves Ranse's life, but gives Ranse the reputation needed to get him elected to Congress, which in turn gains statehood for the land "south of the Picketwire" and ushers in the secure law, order, and prosperity Ranse had hoped for all along. More significantly, Tom's action establishes the film's main thematic paradox, that law prevails only by exploiting the violence it intends to replace.

See also: What's in a name: Liberty Valance and Ransom Stoddard

Double feature: Red River and There Will Be Blood

There's a scene in Red River (1948) where John Wayne, as frontier settler Tom Dunson, arrives at a seemingly arbitrarily chosen tract of land and claims it as his own. When agents for a man named Don Diego, who lives 400 miles away, south of the Rio Grande, arrive to dispute this claim, Dunson shoots and kills one of them and sends the other back to Mexico with the news. After burying the dead man, Dunson surveys the land that is, by his thinking, rightfully his:

My land. We're here, and we're gonna stay here. Give me ten years and I'll have that brand on the gates of the greatest ranch in Texas. The big house will be down by the river, and the corrals and the barns behind it. It'll be a good place to live in. Ten years and I'll have the Red River D on more cattle than you've looked at anywhere. I'll have that brand on enough beef to feed the whole country. Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make them strong, make 'em grow. It takes work, and it takes sweat, and it takes time. Lots of time. It takes years.*

That scene, and the one immediately following, which jumps 15 years into the future to show that Dunson does indeed succeed in raising that many cattle, establishes Dunson as a driven man who has a plan and the will to see it through, regardless of — in fact, aided by — legal and moral uncertainties. He is a man with the requisite ego to act on Manifest Destiny.

The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood (2007) show Daniel Plainview to be equally driven. We see him working a claim on a silver mine, alone, enduring an accident which leaves him with an apparently broken leg and possible internal injuries, before he arrives in the nearest town (presumably after crawling through the dessert to get there) to cash in. While Dunson associates (genuinely or not) his claim with the future success of the country, Plainview's goals appear to be more solitary. The work of both men, however, advances the infrastructure and, mostly, the economy of the developing nation.

Both of these films are Westerns — Red River more obviously so, set amid the trappings of traditional Westerns like cattle drives, American Indians, and quick-draw shoot-outs, but There Will Be Blood also, for much of it is set in the last period of the Old West amid not the territorial but the economic expansion of the country. Both lead characters are bold, brave, determined to stake a claim on the frontier and defend it above all else, bullying, not always likable, at times detestable, at times amoral, at times immoral. In short, most likely the kind of people who really did settle the American West. Both films show these men attempting to realize a difficult plan in pursuit of wealth, and becoming increasingly isolated as their bludgeoning personalities make it increasingly difficult for them to work with others.

The men are also similar in that they each adopt (officially or not) boys who have been orphaned by the same enterprise the men pursue. These boys act as the men's sons, and serve as counterweights to their adopted fathers' unscrupulous wills. Dunson takes in Matt, a boy orphaned when his wagon train is attacked by Comanche Indians. Plainview adopts H.W. after the infant's father is killed while working on Plainview's oil rig. Each boy is an aid to their new father: Matt by using his easy rapport with the cowhands to smooth over tensions caused by Tom's increasingly belligerent behavior, H.W. by giving Daniel the appearance of a man with family values, which helps during negotiations with families and small towns for land and drilling rights. Tensions develop between father and son when the sons eventually act on their own initiatives. Matt alienates Tom when he wrests control of the cattle drive from a near-homicidal Dunson, and Daniel viciously disowns H.W. when H.W. reveals plans to start his own oil company in Mexico. Without the support of their sons, both men fall into greater anger and bitterness.

The two men also have a conflicted relationship with religion. Tom appears to be a Christian, with "I'll read over him" (in reference to reading scripture at a funeral service) becoming his refrain. His devoutness is called into question, however, by the fact that some of the men he reads over are men he has himself killed. Daniel is more obviously at odds with religion. After paying lip service to landowners concerned about his religious beliefs, and after being humiliated by Eli, an ambitious preacher on whose father's land Plainview builds his fortune-making rig, Daniel's "victory" over Eli (and, symbolically, the Church) at film's end seems to cap not only his freedom and career, but his unspoken life's ambition.

I'm finished.

* Though I am not suggesting 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of a potential triple feature, this speech of Dunson's nonetheless reminds me of the prehistoric segment of that film. After being visited by the monolith, the primates discover that bones can be used as weapons. There is dramatic emphasis on how one group uses bones to kill members of another group, allowing the former to expand and dominate. Prior to this, however, emphasis is placed on the killing of an animal for food; shortly after the kill the group is shown eating meat, presumably for the first time, and eating lots of meat — a piece of raw flesh dangling from practically every primate hand. The infusion of that much protein into their diet — and this is something I picked up elsewhere, not directly from 2001 — allowed carnivorous primate brains to grow larger, giving them an evolutionary advantage and allowing them to expand and eventually evolve into the dominant species. Dunson's mention of beef, hungry people (by which he doubtless means White settlers), and time — "lots of time" — brings to mind this evolutionary process. While it doesn't qualify as an evolutionary advantage, certainly their great numbers, and not their weapons alone, enabled White settlers to overwhelm the native civilization (at least according to "Hollywood history" — see mentions of the relentlessness of the white onslaught in Dances With Wolves and Little Big Man, e.g.). Such numbers needed infrastructural support, and the raising of cattle contributed not only to that infrastructure, but to the need to annex more and more land on which to raise more and more cattle.

Do not forsake me, Io my darling

Outland (1981), while not an "official" remake of High Noon (1952), obviously borrows from it — a lot. If it had been made in the last decade (don't look now), it would probably be called a "reimagining" of High Noon (thanks to Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes), for it uses many of the same plot elements and essentially transports it to outer space in what is, at least superficially, a science fiction movie.

I say "superficially" because Outland is really more of a "man vs. the establishment" film. It looks like science fiction due to its location in a mining facility on Jupiter's moon Io, and because it has spacesuits, talk of zero atmosphere, and the analysis of a mysterious chemical compound — a recreational and often deadly narcotic being pushed by the mining facility's administrator, Sheppard — but its central conflict arises from Marshal O'Niel's decision to stand up to corruption, a conflict which could exist among the trappings of any genre and which is not necessarily best served by a specific one. I also hesitate to call it a "space western," for though it takes place along the lawless "frontier" of deep space, the mining facility is a corporate outpost, not necessarily a future Earth colony. Based upon O'Niel's wife's desire to return to Earth, we can assume that Earth is still a desirable and livable home. But these are debatable quibbles...

Outland seemingly duplicates much of the plot of High Noon: O'Niel's decision to interfere in the drug trafficking soon puts him on the defensive against a pair of hired killers, his wife leaves him prior to the showdown, his deputies are reluctant to help, and no one else wants to take his side against the criminals. These similarities, however, are also superficial, and altered enough to make their effects significantly different than those of their counterparts in High Noon. The hired guns, for example, have no personal grudge with O'Niel, no history with him at all, in fact. Their motive is strictly professional, and while the workers on Io do not want to interfere, it is not out of friendship with the killers or with Sheppard. O'Niel's wife leaves not because of any danger a potential showdown presents — indeed, she leaves before any such showdown is foreseen — but because her husband's work has meant tour after tour at remote space facilities, which she feels are not healthy for their son. (There are subtle hints that she understands what Sheppard reveals later — that O'Niel's reputation as a whistle blower has won him a string of unpleasant assignments, but she does not explicitly give this as a reason for leaving.) O'Niel's deputy, unlike High Noon's Harvey Pell, does not covet the marshal's job — he is a knowing bystander who has been silenced by Sheppard through bribery and a desire to live.

What is most interesting in the comparison of Outland to High Noon — and what makes the former ultimately less complex and challenging — is that the factors that made Kane's decision in High Noon so difficult have been altered so much that they are virtually irrelevant to O'Niel's decision. There is no longer a citizenry whose conflicting desires make the marshal's decision questionable. In High Noon, where it is explained that life in Hadleyville was dangerous and lawless before the Miller gang was stopped, some citizens want to help Kane, but are too afraid to do so, while others look forward to Frank Miller's return. In Outland, we never hear from the workers about the quality of life before or after Sheppard became manager, nor do we know their opinions about O'Niel's actions. Furthermore, the danger in Outland is not as generally applicable — while we can assume that anyone taking the dangerous drug could be at risk of death, we are not shown that everyone on Io is taking the drug. While both marshals decide rather quickly and instinctively what their decisions should be, O'Niel's decision seems far less complicated and his course of action seems much clearer: he is an officer of the law, therefore it is his job to stop the illegal and dangerous drug-running.

There is also in Outland a moment (my favorite in the film, as well as one of my favorite bits of Sean Connery acting) that is absent from High Noon, when O'Niel admits that his motives are personal. On the racquetball court, Dr. Lazarus asks him why he is standing up to Sheppard. "You know," she tells him, "if you're the kind of guy you're supposed to be, you wouldn't stick around. That's why they sent you here."

O'Niel replies:

They send me here to this pile of shit because they think I belong here. I want to find out if...well, if they're right. There's a whole machine that works because everybody does what they're supposed to. I found out I was supposed to be something I didn't like. That's what's in the program. That's my rotten little part in the rotten machine. I don't like it. So I'm going to find out if they're right.

In High Noon, there is never as direct an admission from Kane that part of his motivation is personal. We can assume that Kane is not facing Miller entirely for the town's benefit, but we must decide the ratio of personal motivation to professional.

Comparing Outland to High Noon is easy enough to do — Outland borrows so much that it begs comparison. However, the comparison is ultimately unsatisfying and unfair, as it may lead one to feel that Outland is a failure at reproducing the complexities of the "original," instead of a success at becoming a different film entirely.

See also: The Dilemma of High Noon

The dilemma of High Noon

The story seems to mean different things to different people . . . [Producer Stanley] Kramer, who had worked closely with [Carl] Foreman on the script, said it was about a town that died because no one there had the guts to defend it. Somehow this seemed to be an incomplete explanation . . . I vaguely sensed deeper meanings in it; but only later did it dawn on me that this was not a regular Western myth.¹

- Fred Zinnemann, Director

I first watched High Noon in my early twenties. I had just received my degree in Film Studies and was accustomed to looking for "against the grain" readings of popular movies, or, at the very least, to looking at westerns like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence as essays on the diminishing relevance of the traditional Western hero. So I was well prepared to do the following: First, to assume that High Noon had one established popular reading, and Second, to find one counter to it.

It was my preconceived supposition (based upon the bits and pieces I had heard about it already) that High Noon was probably a conservative film, one which advocated confrontation and machismo over reason and an intellectual society. What I saw instead was a refutation of that; I saw the townspeople — many of whom did not seem to object to convict Frank Miller's pending return — letting their marshal know that his outdated code of honor must not interfere with the continuing development of the town. In marshal Will Kane I saw a man who refused to put the safety of the town in front of his own personal grudge with Miller. I agreed, essentially, with the plea made by Hadleyville's mayor (played by Thomas Mitchell), that gunfighting would damage the growing town's reputation, and that Kane should leave at once and take his problems with him. To me, the treatment of Kane was in line with the door shutting on Ethan Edwards or the coffin lid being closed on Tom Doniphon.

Cut to twenty years later.

I recently watched High Noon for the second (then third, fourth, and fifth) time, and my thoughts were very different. This time I felt more sympathy for Kane. He became the target of Miller's revenge while in the service of the town, after all, so why shouldn't the town stand up for him later (much in the same way our government offers secret service protection to former presidents)? And despite the fact that Miller and his gang had been arrested or run out of town, the handful of years since then did not seem sufficient for the people to be able to consider their nascent town free of the troubles of the lawless West. Surely they needed to contribute more than taxes to establishing and preserving a peaceful society.

I also learned, thanks to DVD special features that were not available on the VHS copy I had originally watched, that screenwriter Carl Foreman had meant for High Noon to reflect the oppression of blacklisting in the era of McCarthyism, something he was experiencing at the time. In my subsequent viewings, I could easily see how Kane could represent a blacklisted professional whose friends and colleagues no longer want to have anything to do with him for fear of the consequences (the death of one's Hollywood career being represented by the possibility of physical death in a gunfight). I was pleased to know that such a liberal message could exist in a Western — indeed, be one of its stronger readings.

At the same time, I could very easily see how the movie could be appropriated by the Right. The townspeople could certainly represent stereotypical liberals — intellectuals who would rather debate the issue than take real action (as they do in the church scene), and who feel their problems should be solved by government (one of the citizens feels the politicians "up north" are responsible for Miller's parole, so they should somehow take care of things; another says that Kane is paid to take care of such matters himself).

I was therefore not surprised to learn that the movie has been revered and condemned by conservatives and liberals alike (see High Noon's Wikipedia entry for some interesting examples), nor that among its fans are political leaders of opposing parties, for many of the questions asked by the film concern the relationship between government and citizens:

1. Who is directly responsible for the welfare of society — the people or its appointed officials?
   
2. Do people need to take direct action in society, or is it enough to vote and pay taxes?
   
3. How much responsibility does the citizenry have toward its appointed officials?
   
4. Where is the line between an appointed official's professional and personal duties?
   

High Noon endures in part because these questions endure, and because it does not offer definitive answers to any of them.

¹Zinnemann, Fred: A Life in the Movies: An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), 96.

Great showdowns: The Tin Star

Early in The Tin Star (1957), bounty hunter Morg Hickman gives some advice to inexperienced sheriff Ben Owens after Owens' near-disastrous attempt to arrest town tough Bart Bogardus: "You walk right up to a man, chances are he won't gun fight. 'Cause at three feet he knows he'll get hurt, maybe killed, even if he draws first." Hickman becomes a reluctant mentor to Owens, teaching him some of the things he learned in his own time as a sheriff and preparing Owens for the inevitable showdown with Bogardus at film's end. "It's that time you wait," he tells Owens, "that split second, that means the difference between missing a man and killing him."

The showdown comes at night, when Bogardus leads a mob to Owens' office to demand the release of two outlaws so they can be hung without trial. Wielding a shotgun, Owens refuses to give up his prisoners and challenges Bogardus. "You're a brave man when you've got 100 better men to back you up," he says. "Why don't you come on and get them by yourself?"

"Put down that gun," replies Bogardus. "I'll tear you apart."

But the dismantling is done instead by Owens, who calls Bogardus on his bluster: "You fight with your mouth and hat." The mob parts, leaving Bogardus standing alone. Owens approaches him, first handing the shotgun to Hickman. "All right, I put down the shotgun, Bogardus. Now tear me apart." Bogardus stares, dumbfounded. Owens slaps him twice in the face. A stunned Bogardus turns, looking for help among the retreating mob but finding none. As Bogardus walks away, ostensibly in humiliation, we know that he is really removing himself to safe gunfighting distance. But we also see that Owens knows this as well — he stands still, hands at the ready, watching Bogardus' every move. As Bogardus turns and fires, Owens waits the split second and shoots — Bogardus falls dead.

Avatar, white redemption, and social critique

Avatar is the latest Hollywood movie to carry out the ritual of what could be called the "white man's Native American guilt redemption fantasy," a narrative convention seen previously in Dances With Wolves, A Man Called Horse, and Little Big Man. There are other movies that use elements of this ritual — Broken Arrow, Cheyenne Autumn, even Disney's animated Pocahontas, though Avatar adheres to a more strict formula set down by movies in the former group.

This fantasy is typically set in the Old West, and requires a white man to be captured or adopted by American Indians, to go through a trial of assimilation and acceptance, and finally to emerge as a respected member of the tribe, one who in many cases uses the sk/ills of white society to defend his adopted people against attack by outsiders, even against his own white civilization. This fantasy serves as a form of confession, and allows the white audience to confront the injustices perpetrated against American Indians during westward expansion, to refute those injustices with a modern sensibility, and to return to its own culture appeased that a long-standing debt has been paid, if only on film.

To accomplish this purging of guilt it is important that the ills of white society be vividly demonstrated, most often by showing white violence toward Indians or the white bureaucracy's unquestioning commitment to what is depicted as an outdated and senseless doctrine of expansion at all costs. Further, the American Indians need to be inversely mythologized as the opposite of whites: they must be shown not only as victims justified in their resistance, but often as embodying a way of life that is steeped in tradition, balance, and spirituality — namely, all that ostensibly has been lost by white society. Finally, the white emissary must then undergo a transformation, whereby he comes to realize that his adopted culture is more worth fighting for than the white one he leaves behind. There are variations, but that is the basic structure.

While Avatar is applicable to the historic relationship between whites and American Indians, and while the story of Jake Sully fits neatly alongside the stories of John Dunbar (Dances With Wolves) and John Morgan (A Man Called Horse), its use of a fictional alien race instead of American Indians gives it distance enough to use the fantasy not primarily to comment on historic white/American Indian relations, but to protest what its makers view as the evils of modern society in general. To that end, the film glorifies the fictional Na'vi culture as the extreme opposite of an exaggeratedly corrupt human society. By doing so, the audience is able to side against those elements of white society which the film instructs are most abhorrent and to side with the Na'vi, who in turn represent our fantasized ideal, or rather a fantasized opposite of what the film suggests are our most ruinous attributes.

Avatar sets its sights primarily on:

1. Divorce from Nature
While the Na'vi believe in the interconnectedness of all living things and thrive in the lush forest of Pandora, the humans' only contact with the ecosystem occurs when they are out to destroy it. Scenes of huge mining vehicles razing the Pandoran forest, as well as the assault on and destruction of Home Tree, are very clear references to the real-life problem of deforestation. The fact that the Pandoran atmosphere is toxic to humans symbolically underscores how far humans have separated themselves from the natural world, and also echoes the concerns many have about the effects of rising CO2 levels in Earth's atmosphere.

2. Corporate Greed
The humans' interest in Pandora is due to its deposits of the mineral "unobtanium", and the force behind this pillaging is the the RDA, Avatar's evil corporate entity. RDA stops at nothing to attain greater wealth through unobtanium (valued, according to company stooge Parker Selfridge, at "20 million a kilo"). Avatar capitalizes on the idea of corporate greed in a timely manner, amid the financial crisis of the past few years. The Na'vi, by contrast, seem not to know of greed or even of commerce. While their Home Tree sits atop a massive deposit of unobtainium, the Na'vi appear not to value it at all. The economic workings of their society are not shown, though it appears that even benign capitalism does not factor in at all.

3. Dubious Use of Military Force
RDA brings its own mercenary force to Pandora to deal with Na'vi resistance, yet given the motives of the corporation and the relative naiveté of the Na'vi, the use of force is, at best, highly questionable. This reflects a skepticism toward military action that is firmly rooted in the Viet Nam era and immediately topical with US involvement in Iraq.

Jake's decision to fight with the Na'vi, then, is as expected as the similar choices made by Dunbar, Morgan, and Jack Crabb (Little Big Man), and his decision allows the audience to agree with — and be validated by — Jake's position against our world's problems.

Where Avatar veers from the strict ritual is in its ending — by letting Jake remain with the Na'vi. This is antithetical not only to the structure of the "strict ritual", in which the white emissary ultimately chooses to leave the tribe, but to many other Westerns as well in which the hero abandons society after briefly re-entering it — Shane and The Searchers come immediately to mind — and which adhere to the archetypical "walk into the sunset". (In a general way I am calling Avatar a Western, in so much as it fits the formula of the other films discussed here, and in that it deals with territorial confrontation along a frontier.)

The heroes of the strict ritual leave at the end because we know they have to — we know that the fantasy needs to come to an end because we know the reality of the American Indian and of westward expansion. These white heroes are our time-travelling ambassadors, armed with modern ideals and sent back to a West of our imagining to act the way we imagine white society should have acted in order to create a more peaceful coexistence and to spare us the guilt we now feel, but their remaining can only create a paradox — we know that any such "happy ending" is in conflict with what really happens.

Jake, however, is free to remain because Avatar is set in a fictional future, not on Earth but on a moon millions of light years away that is populated not by American Indians with a known past, but by an alien race specific to this one movie. It is therefore more immediately discernible as fantasy. Though we may have our doubts about how long the Na'vi victory will last, about how long the RDA will stay away from its valuable installation on Pandora, we have no corresponding historical record that forces deeper consideration of the moment.

Avatar photo used with the permission described here.