Besides my recent winter visit to Western Pennsylvania, which included a stay at the Fairmont in downtown Pittsburgh and a trip to the Heinz History Center to see the National Constitution Center’s exhibit on Prohibition before it closes, I’ve been attending screenings of Westerns at the Autry Museum of the American West. This was my first time seeing director John Ford’s Stagecoach starring John Wayne on the big screen.
I was as entranced by the thoughtful epic as ever. Read my Stagecoach review, which is posted at the New Romanticist. One of the advantages of seeing movies at the Autry is that they usually show the film in 35mm or 70mm prints in the Griffith Park museum’s Wells Fargo Theatre. Screenings include lectures by historians, scholars and other intellectuals and Stagecoach, which made John Wayne a movie star, was no exception. My review includes notes on the pre-film lecture.
The other Western I saw there is John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge, a groundbreaking 1960 movie about a wrongly accused man (such a thing is possible, though these days you might not know it) trying to overcome racism in the West. This unknown movie, which I had neither seen nor heard of before, was introduced at the Autry with an abundance of fascinating facts and information.
Apparently, the film’s story of a wronged Buffalo Soldier is rooted in the truth about the all-black U.S. cavalry unit which was active in the Indian Wars. Blacks had been brought as slaves to Texas for ranching, the audience learned, and, following the Civil War, after so many men died in combat, blacks were often the most experienced and knowledgeable about ranching. So, black cowboys were not uncommon. Sergeant Rutledge is essentially the tale of a black cowboy who leads the Buffalo Soldiers before he is charged with raping and murdering a white woman. The leading part is played by Woody Strode (Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Quick and the Dead), the first lead black actor in a major studio’s Western. The studio apparently wanted a known black actor, such as Sidney Poitier, cast in the role. John Ford insisted on casting newcomer Strode, the Autry speaker explained, for his striking good looks and superior physique.
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Besides the movie’s injustice theme, Ford was drawn to cavalry stories (as most John Ford fans know). He was fascinated by the American West, especially as depicted by artists Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, whose paintings he attempted to replicate or evoke in his motion pictures. Sergeant Rutledge is the favorite role for Woody Strode, who also appeared in the opening shot of director Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. The son of an interracial couple himself, Strode married outside his own race, too, to a Hawaiian princess, the Autry audience learned, and he became and remained close friends with John Ford. The former UCLA athlete appeared in several other Ford pictures and, years later, when Ford fell and broke his leg at his Southern California desert home, his only call for help went to Woody Strode, who moved in with the old movie director and assisted Ford’s recovery for four and a half months. The friendship was reciprocal, according to the Autry. When Strode’s mother died, and he couldn’t afford to pay for her funeral, Ford picked up the tab.
In an interesting twist, at least to me, I saw Sergeant Rutledge on the opening weekend of Marvel Studios’ hit Black Panther movie for Disney. What a contrast in depictions of heroic characters who are black. Other Westerns or cowboy-themed movies reviewed based on screenings with lectures at the Autry include Forty Guns (1957) starring Barbara Stanwyck, High Noon (1952) with Gary Cooper, The Big Country (1958) with Gregory Peck, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1955) and The Virginian (1946) starring Joel McCrea.
“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.” This line begins one of the greatest movies ever made, Oklahoma! (1955). Its original format was an ambitious and bold Broadway musical—itself an adaptation of a play by an Oklahoman playwright named Lynn Riggs—which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein adapted with Viennese-born director Fred Zinnemann (The Day of the Jackal, The Nun’s Story, A Man for All Seasons), who also directed High Noon (1952) and From Here to Eternity (1953).
This musical lyric unspools a simple and circular melody rejoicing in the promise of a new day sung by a character who’s an American cowboy. He rides alone on the prairie, so he sings as a hymn to himself. He goes by the name Curly (Gordon MacRae), wears a bright red shirt and rides on top of his horse with ease, rhythm and total control as he sings in a low, booming and soulful affirmation: “Oh, what a beautiful morning! Oh, what a beautiful day/I’ve got a beautiful feeling/Ev’rything’s going my way.”
It’s a stunning moment in cinema, letting the audience see man in an undaunted musical expression of supreme self-confidence.
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Curly’s accent is as flat as the Midwest’s, as clipped as the mountain states’ and as relaxed as the South’s with the vocabulary of the West and Oklahoma! is centrally about Curly making life go his way. But Oklahoma! is also about a period of time when it felt like the world could go America’s way; the way of individualism, capitalism and a robust, greedy and selfish pursuit of happiness here on earth.
I’ve previously seen Oklahoma!—which screened before Thanksgiving in 35mm at the Wells Fargo Theater at the Autry Museum of the American West and introduced by the Autry’s assistant curator of Western history Josh Garrett-Davis—on television, DVD and the silver screen and I always find new aspects in its artistry. This time, I noticed that the film, written by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein, is consciously liberal and decidedly anti-traditionalist. Oklahoma! is liberated about sex and filled with optimism for the future, not nostalgia for the past.
Curly looks eagerly, greedily, toward his future. The handsome cowboy takes no liberties and treats the pretty young lady he desires (Shirley Jones as Laurey in her movie debut) as an equal. Like Gregory Peck in The Big Country, he’s playful with Laurey, not domineering, and he respects her decisions when she makes up her mind, even when he knows she’s wrong. Curly’s accustomed not entitled to attention; when wise and frisky old Aunt Eller (Charlotte Greenwood in an outstanding performance) flirts, he takes it in stride.
But then Curly is an enlightened man. At mid-point in Oklahoma!, Curly notices a picture of a naked woman. He gets closer to inspect it. He gives the picture a good look. He thinks about it, then comments on it. He’s neither put off nor overly interested. He notices but he doesn’t drool or put on airs to impress others and he certainly doesn’t dismiss it. The picture’s another fact to assimilate in modern life and Curly’s curious. He’s neither hyper-masculine nor emasculated. Indeed, Curly doesn’t mind if Laurey sees him express emotion—whether anger or joy—as he knows his own worth.
Knowing himself figures into Curly’s conflict with the story’s villain, Aunt Eller’s hired hand, Jud Fry (Rod Steiger, Doctor Zhivago), competing for Laurey’s attention. MacRae’s performance is underappreciated, especially in their smokehouse scenes as Curly mocks Jud’s misanthropy, displaying subtle humor, bravery and intelligence as he measures Jud’s character in one of Oklahoma!‘s most disturbing scenes as unwashed Jud, who lives in a moist underbelly of primitivism, essentially chooses to come out for the death premise (this turns out to be a flaw in Curly’s character as he lets Laurey ride with Jud knowing that Jud’s a threat).
Laurey, too, is an enlightened woman. Though the character is incessantly critiqued for being sweet and virginal—and Oklahoma! is undeservedly criticized for being too sentimental (it is serious and dark, not all sugary and light, though it is emphatically romantic)—her solo starts as an ode to the “healthy and strong woman”, in contrast to a shallow, hyper-feminine second-hander. Laurey sings her complicated profession and lament to a gathering of women in whom she finds support and discovers in herself the skill for leadership. It’s a bright, frilly, high-pitched scene and song immersed in femininity and femaleness but it is not frivolous. For example, a short-haired brunette who stands out for being too rambunctious as the ladies dress for the auction is also pointedly the first female to console Laurey when she’s hurt and it’s the brunette that steps up to remind Laurey of her inner strength.
Shared values aside, Laurey is no less liberated when she is alone, bathing naked in the outdoors with neither shame nor exhibitionism.
Even steady, salty old Aunt Eller is a modern, rational woman who both scorns tradition and speaks plainly about men, passion and sexuality. Freethinking in Oklahoma! leads to sensual, romantic love, territorial unity and free trade; a more perfect union. When Laurey and Curly go side by side, their chemistry is electric. A butterfly encircles the couple. Set during the Industrial Revolution, Zinnemann captures Americanism in their fresh faces: the innocence, confidence and intransigence. With birds, horses and cattle in almost every frame, and drifting clouds and rippling waves representing widening effects of what’s yet to come—amidst incisive and exceptional songs—Oklahoma! implies that sex and love are best aligned and in any case are a vital, natural part of forging a dynamic, new land.
MacRae’s strong and solitary Curly, from romancing Laurey on that first beautiful morning to bidding on her picnic basket against Jud Fry, symbolizes the West’s new, freethinking man. Curly is the first one to initiate a handshake after a plea for peace, trade and understanding between cowboys and farmers.
I noticed more realism mixed with romanticism this time, too. Oklahoma! could easily have ended after a happily ever after scene. Zinnemann, aided in tone by an extended foreshadowing dream sequence in a dance choreographed by Agnes De Mille, goes deeper, letting Aunt Eller deliver a stern if tender cautionary warning to Laurey that life means taking the good with the bad, rising above adversity and accentuating the best in life.
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No analysis of Oklahoma! would be whole without addressing its deft and delightful comic relief, Will (the perfectly cast and talented Gene Nelson) and Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame, acing the role) who bundle and bind the story’s themes into one immensely rewarding subplot involving Eddie Albert (Roman Holiday) as a foreigner. This pair cashes in on the Rodgers and Hammerstein humor after Will returns to Oklahoma from Kansas City to eventually corral Ado Annie, who keeps melting with men because she “cain’t” say no (except when Will goes to kiss her). Annie, daughter of a strict, dismissive farmer (James Whitmore), protests and explains, especially as her Will discovers pornography, ragtime and the “tellyphone” in a remarkable dance at the depot.
As with corn husker closeups, Zinnemann frames that scene and enhances it, symbolizing the Oklahoma territory’s change from old to new, as Aunt Eller’s horse-drawn carriage pulls up on the right of the screen as the camera pans to the left and a steam engine-powered train pulls into the station with a tail-wagging dog scampering to welcome the pioneer to the industrial revolution. The section finishes as Will casually hops onto his horse from the departing locomotive, retaining the cowboy’s way as the carousel of progress revolves.
This is Oklahoma! which brilliantly and musically, dramatically—with action-packed scenes, fabulous songs and great performances—renders the tale of a heroic individualist and the young, modern woman he loves, their chosen friends and fellow pioneers and the ties that bind in a rousing, and distinctly American, title song which could have gone on and on and on as far as I am concerned.
If you haven’t seen Oklahoma!, or if you haven’t seen it lately, this musical exists not to recall America’s past greatness as much as it does to showcase the boundless optimism that Americans once held as an ideal vision for the new country’s future.
With an all-star cast, magnificent score and a powerful exposition underlying its theme, The Big Country, directed by William Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday, The Letter, Funny Girl, Ben-Hur, The Collector), packs a punch.
This sprawling, violent and thought-provoking Western, which I watched with my Writing Boot Camp students at a screening at the Autry Museum of the American West’s Wells Fargo Theater, lingers and stays with an audience.
“I’ll be back,” says a character played by Chuck Connors, long before he played the rapist/slavemaster Tom Moore in Roots and a year before he played a man of honor in The Rifleman. That he says this to an innocent but strong schoolteacher (Jean Simmons) early in the picture signals the final conflict to come.
The main character is Jim McKay, played by Gregory Peck in one of his better roles and performances. Peck’s McKay is a civilized man; a newcomer to the American West. He represents a new wave of frontiersmen and women who populate the West. McKay drinks hard liquor in daylight, knows how to fire a gun and he eats steak and eggs. But he dresses well, thinks and knows how to sail a ship, too. McKay doesn’t swagger when he walks. He doesn’t drawl, either. His confidence is held down deep and he’s refined, not hard-charging like the Connors character or dogmatic like the duty-bound cowhand played by Charlton Heston. Indeed, Peck’s McKay is the quintessentially modern Westerner: he is the individualist who thinks.
But he is engaged to the daughter (Carroll Baker) of a landowner (Charles Bickford) who lacks the far-sighted brand of individualism that settling and inhabiting the West will demand. Herein lies a seed for moral conflict that spreads out far and wide. As everyone keeps telling the newcomer, this is big country.
In compelling scenes that run long and hard and entice the audience to pay attention, not drift off into sight gags, gimmicks and thrills, the locals’ small-mindedness in this big land comes out, is tested and gets roped. McKay’s fiancee’s daddy sets the smallness down at the dining table, as McKay reels back and sees the puny as it is for the first time.
At issue is an ongoing battle between two families over water rights owned by the schoolteacher.
“You can’t be friends with both,” someone tells a doubter. Jim McKay sees possibilities, however, looking out at the vast, open valley. Slowly, very slowly, at his own pace, this town’s people come to know the newcomer as a man of balance—even his future father-in-law sees that fact in McKay’s legacy guns, used in a duel McKay’s father lost—and the more they know him, the less they like him and his newfangled ideals. Among the radical notions he brings are treating a man with benevolence, not scorn, whether he’s drunk like Connors’ roughneck cowboy or foreign like Ramon, who runs the horses at the daughter’s ranch.
Treating a woman as an equal is another ideal, which not even his own would-be wife comes to want when she’s faced with what it really means. Baker and Simmons are a pair in contrast as much as the other two duos in this trilogy of contrasting couples. Their two Western women characters pit the self-reliant against the self-centered in a thoroughly engaging subplot. Simmons’ woman works with her hands and her mind while Baker’s acts more like a pre-Industrial typical female, working her ways and means, throwing hissy fits and pushing her man to fight for the sake of exhibition, not for the sake of a goal or a principle. When someone refers to him as a sailor, she points out that he’s a captain. Titles, not deeds, matter to her.
But deed matters most in The Big Country and it’s a deed to property owned by Simmons’ estate—the Big Muddy, as it’s known—which the rational man knows how to get and what to do with it. The plot twists and turns with great screenwriting from several credited and uncredited writers. Pivotal lines include: “Do what you’re told and don’t ask any questions”. The Big Country‘s best line, when climax nears and someone finally smears McKay, who dares to name the smear: “Coward? Are you afraid of the word? I’m not.”
This character contrast on an epic scale has everything it needs in abundance, from a technological tool used to outsmart the warring tribes, playfulness of a romance between equals and the sight of a man facing the big country alone, braced only with the use of his reasoning mind. With great writing, characters and performances, especially by Peck, Simmons and Heston dramatizing the virtue of loyalty, and fistfights, dancing, horseback riding, cattle, a stagecoach and stunning vistas in Technicolor—set to a musical score by Jerome Moross capturing what was once the insatiably American sense of life—The Big Country delivers its best feature late but not too late.
Burl Ives (So Dear to My Heart) gives a career best performance as the gruff patriarch who might have been a man of principle.
Ives dominates every scene with his body, voice and intensity. His nuanced turn as the leader of the ambush at Blanco Canyon (the name of Donald Hamilton’s story on which this movie’s based) adds depth to an already exceptional movie. The Big Country improbably has all of that and manages to depict with complexity the type of man—and woman—who idealized, conquered and won the West.
The raw, lusty, raging Forty Guns, written, produced and directed by Samuel Fuller, cuts across genres and landscapes to forge its own way. Like a strong cowboy, tough pioneer or good Western, Forty Guns, screened at LA’s Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park with an introduction by Western movie scholar Andrew Patrick Nelson, comes out fast and hard and never lets up except where it ought to go easy.
Beginning with a great open range shot, finding a lone wagon in the foreground and letting loose a stampeding roar of hooves that envelops the wagon and its driver (Barry Sullivan), the audience sooner than later learns a lot about the wagonmaster, the land and the stampede.
The land is weathered and dusty and unforgiving—so is the rampage, which is also long and purposeful—and the wagon man is undaunted. In an outstanding single shot which foretells the showdown to come, the long line of galloping horsemen splits into two lines encircling the chipped, rickety wagon. As they do, the man holds on to the reins while his horses go into a wild rage as the stampede descends and he doesn’t let go. Sure and steady of hand and manner, he is the man to watch.
As the dust settles and the riders go off, fading the heart-racing opening sequence into a slow, distant thunder, and the opening credits roll with Harry Sukman’s thrilling musical score, the camera pans past forty gun-toting cowboys toward a lone figure in the lead—why, it’s a woman!—and there goes indomitable Barbara Stanwyck.
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Then comes the town setup, with every detail factoring into the intricately mythical plot, from a child jumping rope and a stagecoach arrival to a lonely, beautiful woman making eyes at a new stranger in town. Part of the appeal of this raunchy 1957 movie is its cross-generational, cross-cultural contrasts and it’s nothing if it’s not about women’s liberated sexuality, the West and the man-woman relationship. Fuller introduces and embeds themes of aging, too, and other interesting subtexts.
But he leaves exposition to a balladeer (Jidge Carroll) who sings of a “High Ridin’ Woman” with a whip, one of several cheeky moments, and how she’s full of life and full of fire. This would be Stanwyck’s pre-Big Valley rancher and property owner, a matriarch lording over the area with her 40 dragoons. The woman’s name is Jessica Drummond—the balladeer calls her “the boss of Cochise County”—and when she’s not ordering men around and inspiring songwriters to croon at the bathhouse, she’s looking after her possessions and rationalizing the bullying actions of her much-younger brother Brockie (John Ericson). That brings Jessica Drummond into conflict with the wagonmaster she nearly ran down but didn’t.
His name is Griff Bonnell (Sullivan). He’s an avenger who’s come to town to exact justice with a criminal that works for Drummond, which he does, and he has his own score to settle. In scene after scene, the tension builds as Griff and Jessica stake their claims. Griff walks slowly by the town courthouse before coming up on Brockie and putting him in his place, underscoring that he aims to restore order and assert the role of a lawman in a wild country ruled by a hard, lonely woman. Brockie and his bunch are like hippies, Beatniks and hooligans, though, shooting up the town, destroying property and snuffing out lives. Griff has his helpers, two strong sons named Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix), but he has long-range plans, too, including guiding his youngest son to a more civilized, businesslike life.
That won’t be easy with a wild woman on the loose, her unruly younger brother and a roost of half-men who let themselves be run into submission by Jessica Drummond. The sex kitten daughter of the gunsmith stirs, making moves toward Griff’s son Wes, the townfolk come to terms, noticing that Griff’s getting on in years and striding “a little slower” than usual and the Old traditionalist West comes into conflict with the New modern West with California as the ultimate ideal. With drunken, irrational Brockie uprooting the town while people decide who they are and what future they want, and Dean Jagger’s exasperated, cowardly sheriff—the quintessential moderate in the middle of the road—struggling to keep up with Griff, Forty Guns cooks up a mighty grand finale.
“Hyaaahhh!!” yells Stanwyck’s Jessica Drummond, riding across her range and finding herself drawn to Griff Bonnell because he openly mocks her and doesn’t back down and if these two sound like Roark and Dominique rustling up romance near the stone quarry in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that sounds about right. After he rejects her, she serves him whiskey, he downs it and she handles his gun like a pro. But Griff lets her know who’ll come out on top after she tells him she’s sure of herself.
“I’m sure you’re sure,” he says, and with that he’s done with her—for now. By the time the famous twister scene plays, with Jessica riding alone in the storm and being dragged by her horse and Griff riding alone in his wagon, the chords of “High Ridin’ Woman” come up and it’s not hard to see where these two ought to be.
Later, she tells him, “I need a strong man to carry out my orders.” His reply—”…and a weak man to take them”—once again foretells the outcome in a way, though not before tragedy strikes and the whole town, including rotten Brockie and his counterpart, boyish Chico, cashes in on their choices and calls the final contest between anarchy and civilization. With the Greek chorus-style balladeer chiming in on forgiveness, death and what it cost to settle the West—with California standing in for the American Dream—the high ridin’ woman, softly in reprise on piano, gets what she’s got coming with humor, pathos and a lot to say about family, legacy, sex and love, womanhood and manhood and, yes, how the West was won.
“I never knew how to like anybody until I learned how to love,” someone says when it matters. For all its lust, raunch and fun, Forty Guns fires up and shows everybody how it’s done.
Almost any movie starring Joel McCrea (1905-1990), who’s known for his Westerns as well as leading roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific, George Stevens’ The More the Merrier, Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story and Sullivan’s Travels, is worth seeing just for him.
As host Robert Nott explained before a recent screening of The Virginian (1946) at The Autry Museum of the American West in LA’s Griffith Park, Southern Californian McCrea carried an easygoing way about him; he was a true gentleman and horseman—a rancher, not merely a movie star, as he informed the IRS when they came after him (and lost, by the way)—and he was a proud Western rancher. Nott says his family still runs one of the original ranches in New Mexico. McCrea, Nott asserted, captures “Americanism, realism and romanticism.”
Yes, indeed, he does, in all of those movies and especially in The Virginian, not to be confused with other fine versions and the later TV adaptation. It’s a fine story, based on the Western novel by Owen Wister, about an individualist in the West. McCrea plays the title character, which is what he goes by in a Wyoming town that’s on the cusp of civilization but still in the Wild West. In from the East comes a feisty schoolteacher (fetching Barbara Britton) to bring the growing town into the modern age and, predictably, her presence puts the whole town off on opposing sides of law and order. In this way, The Virginian is deft and raucous at once, letting the joy of courting the pretty new woman in town test each man’s character and bring his true nature to the fore.
Three men represent the good, the bad and the mixed and this is what powers the movie. Sinister Trampas (Brian Donlevy) is the standard Black Bart type, a scoundrel from the outset who’s as intent on stealing cattle as he is in first trying to steal the teacher at the saloon. He’s a rat, to be sure, and a coward when it comes to backing up what he’s done. Donlevy nails the type with the right amount of slime. The man in the middle of the road, Steve (well played by Sonny Tufts) provides the moral of the film. Steve’s the jolly fellow who goes along with the Virginian without much thought, a true ‘pardner’ to a point and a cheerful rival for the pretty teacher’s affections.
Steve’s all smiles throughout the boiling of the coming conflict between Trampas and the Virginian, who expertly rides a horse, thinks in advance and sweeps the lady off her feet, which upsets her uppity Eastern sensibilities. But Steve’s good time cattle rustling with the Virginian ends when Trampas raises the stakes and, in a line about the West that applies today as much as ever, “times are changin’ and a man’s got to figure out who he’s lined up with.” What happens next is heartbreaking, particularly for the benign but uncompromising Virginian, whom someone says “takes life too serious.”
This the Virginian does, which is why he is the movie’s hero, taking account of the townspeople, the conflict and the lady and factoring what’s likely and what’s right by reason and setting the town on the right track by his best effort. Strong and handsome Joel McCrea shines in the role and this picture displays why he is one of the screen’s greatest stars. His Virginian rides fast and endures the results of his mistakes with grit. He winces when there’s pain and strives to understand the new West but he is supremely self-confident when he acts, including when he takes Britton’s fresh-faced sophisticate, who is too much the conformist to deserve him, into a dazzling dance.
Look for I Love Lucy‘s William Frawley as a crusty cowhand. Fay Bainter steals every scene with crisp, true lines as the teacher’s hostess and would-be mentor; some of the film’s best moments come when she instructs the dainty Easterner in what being a Western woman means in practice and principle and puts Britton’s silly objections in perspective. The Virginian was adapted by Howard Estabrook from Wister’s novel and stage play by Kirk La Shelle and Wister and written by writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, directed by Stuart Gilmore and produced by Paul Jones for Paramount.
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