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Alan Ladd plays Shane, a calmly mysterious drifter and farmhand who seems extraordinarily handy with a Colt revolver. An antagonist soon appears in the form of a no-holds-barred cattle baron who wants to get rid of the homesteaders, once and for all. Filmed against the backdrop of the mighty Teton Range, this is one of the most beautiful Westerns of all times. The screenplay was written by none other than A.B. “Bud” Guthrie, author of the second greatest western novel, The Big Sky (my vote for number one goes to McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove) Bud Guthrie grew up in Montana, and knew exactly what a western movie should be. One of the finest quotes in all of movie history comes from Shane: “A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.”
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Proof that the old crooner Dean Martin is also an actor, Rio Bravo stars John Wayne as Presidio County Sheriff John T. Chance, and Martin as the drunken deputy who has lost control of the town of Rio Bravo. In control: the sadistic Burdette brothers, Joe and Nathan, who run afoul of Chance almost immediately. The cast is filled out with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Ricky Nelson as a Colorado gunfighter and Angie Dickinson as Feathers, a card sharp in black tights who distracts just about every gunman in the town–for at least a little while–from his battles. Rio Bravo has an interesting history- it was written as a kind of backlash to the film High Noon, which the very conservative John Wayne considered “un-American.” The writer of High Noon, Carl Foreman, had to leave the U.S. during the blacklist days of McCarthyism. Rio director Howard Hawks would say later that he tried to make a movie that was the opposite of High Noon. Whether he succeeded in that or not, modern mega-film director Quentin Tarantino, over half a century later, says that_ Rio Bravo_ is one of his favorite movies, and one of his major influences. “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” sung by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, from Rio Bravo:
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Lord Have Mercy, the Missouri Border Wars. There never was a crucible so hot or so merciless as the real-life tit-for-tat murder-fiesta of late 1850’s and early 1860’s Missouri and Kansas. The Kansas Redlegs and Jayhawkers raided the Missourians, the Missouri Border Ruffians raided the Kansans, Quantrill slaughtered, almost nobody came away unharmed, or often as not, un-hung, un-shot, or un-plundered. More than likely, there were indeed men like Josey Wales, good farmers and family men who just wanted to be left alone. But who were not. Clint Eastwood carried the role of Josey Wales into myth, and made probably the most quoted, most watched gunfighter movie in the history of film. In 1977, thousands of 12 year old American boys–especially Southerners like myself–took their .177 caliber pellet pistols and some contraband Red Man or Applejack chewing tobacco and spat and shot Mountain Dew cans named Fletcher. We used sign language to talk with Ten Bears, the Comanche chief, and said things like, ‘Dying’s not hard for men like us, it’s livin that’s hard…” It’s a great, enduring movie, and it gave us all a whole new vocabulary. Any movie that can have a grizzled and beaten old Missouri woman, saved by the deadly skill of Josey Wales from the nastiest bunch of Comancheros ever, step up and say to Wales with no fear at all, “Now you’ll kill us, I suppose,” is a keeper of the first order. The film was adapted from a novel called The Rebel Outlaw by the Alabamian, Asa Earl “Forrest” Carter, who was a former Klansman and an undercover speechwriter for Alabama’s Governor George Wallace. After an unsuccessful run for Alabama’s governor on the segregationist ticket in 1970, Carter left Alabama for Texas, reinvented himself by pretending to be a Cherokee Indian, and wrote the hugely successful novel The Education of Little Tree. He also wrote what I consider to be a masterpiece about Geronimo and the Apache Wars, a 1978 novel called Watch for Me on the Mountain. Carter died in 1979.
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It’s the Missouri Bushwhackers against the Kansas Jayhawkers again, but this time with a radical twist- this is a movie that holds tight to historical fact, while whipping up a concoction of fiction and real-seeming characters that make all the historical narratives (_Three Years with Quantrill, by John McCorkle, is the best) seem pale at best. Tobey McGuire is Jack Roedel, called “Dutchy” by the other Bushwhackers, who associate any German or Dutch parentage as sympathy for the abolition of slavery, and pro-Unionism, and thus worthy of death. But Roedel and his best friend Jack Bull have no choice, really, but to be Bushwhackers. Pro-Union Jayhawkers have invaded Missouri, murdered Bull’s father and burned his home, and are hunting Roedel and any other young man or woman in the region that might oppose them. The power of the movie is realism- how the Missourians survived the winters, who supported them, and at what terrible cost, how life, and love, or some version of it, is conducted in the midst of a black flag guerilla war. And the fighting here is what drew me to the film in the first place: the Missouri Border Wars were the historical highwater mark of handgun combat. Rifles were single shots, shotguns could be fired at most twice, but a Colt 1851 carried six rounds, and with six Colts, carried in special holsters and configurations on the body, a man on a fast and steady war horse could inflict fantastic levels of damage on an enemy that planned to fight a conventional battle. Ride with the Devil contains some of the best renditions of 1860’s era combat in any film. With Jewel as a beautiful and fickle young widow, in a land where blood, filth, and suffering is the order of the day. The movie is adapted from the book Woe to Live On, by Missourian Daniel Woodrell, who also wrote the great book (made into a recent award-winning film) Winter’s Bone.
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Setting out to make an epic film must be a terrifying vision. The field of battle is littered with failed attempts: ever tried to watch Heaven’s Gate at one sitting? What is takes is determination and self-confidence, and above all, a hell-raising story. Kevin Costner had all of these in place before he began this phenomenal $22 million dollar effort. The result is a wild roller-coaster of a movie- and again- even for all the suffering, all the pain- wouldn’t any adventurer or outdoorsman change places with Lt. John J. Dunbar? To see the plains when the Lakota still ruled them, hunt buffalo, dodge raiders, make your soul’s home, and your own stand, beneath no roof but the ever stretching skies of the West? Because, beyond all the morality tales told, the psychology illuminated, the power struggles and genocidal impulses revealed, what Dances with Wolves is, at its essence is a magnificent adventure story, richer than Shackleton’s Endurance, of much more historical power than any of the narratives or dramatizations of, say the journals of Lewis and Clark. It’s a grand tale of the individual transcending the collective culture. The overall nations- the Lakota and the European-Americans, are hopelessly, mortally, at odds. But within that death struggle, individuals can become friends and hunting partners. We all know how the story ends, both the movie, and the real history of the Plains Indians. That knowledge makes the movie, with all its exuberance and adventure, also unbearably sad. Yes, for the critic, there’s plenty to attack here. Buffalo were not slain by lances that are thrown- the lance is thrust, from horseback. Dunbar’s woman, Stands-with a Fist, must be the only white woman for a thousand miles, and yet he stumbles upon her, and love ensues. Everybody’s hair is bit too clean, and too fly-away late 80’s style. But the critic of this movie, missing the whole song because the guitar player is wearing a distracting frilly shirt, is just cheating him- or- herself of a grand experience.
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The gunfight at the OK Corral on October 6th, 1881, has fascinated western history buffs for decades, even though, in reality, it was a relatively minor, or at least small scale (no battle is minor if you are in it), event. But since it was brought to the national attention in 1931, in a sensationalized biography of Wyatt Earp, the OK Corral has taken on mythical dimensions as the iconic gunfight of an iconic time and place. In my opinion, it deserves the hype, and so does Tombstone, the definitive movie-myth about it. The Earp brothers were authentic western heroes, all myth-making aside. They had worked together to quell bad men and gang violence in mining and cattle towns across the West, always on the lookout for opportunity, be it in the form of a gambling house, a house of prostitution, or any of dozen more mainstream investments and businesses. By the time the brothers arrived in Tombstone, hired as U.S. Marshals in a wild and wooly mining boom town, they were in their 30s, men of the world who knew their place in it. The role of peace officer and boom town opportunists seems never to be at odds– Wyatt’s long-term friendship with gambler and killer Doc Holliday, for instance, seems not to have been questioned. And the gang called the Cowboys, led in the movie by Powers Booth as Curly Bill Brocius, was real, too, allied with Sheriff Johnny Behan. The story is ancient: strong newcomers run up against entrenched economic interests that are a part of the legal and extra-legal power structure of the new place. The enforcers of the entrenched order resist the newcomers. Violence results. The arc of the story in Tombstone follows that model almost perfectly. But any American watching tis movie brings to it a wealth of assumptions, and knowledge about mythical figures like the Earps, Holliday, or to a lesser extent, the adversaries like, Ike Clanton and Curly Bill. The power of Tombstone is that it does not challenge, ever, what we think we know. The Earps are hard, fair men. Holliday (and Val Kilmer will be forever associated with the role) is the hard drinking tubercular card sharp of myth, played huge on the stage. By the time the fight actually comes, we know everybody so well that we are utterly invested in the outcome–every shot, every misstep, is of grave concern. Tombstone is actually not too far from accurate in a historical sense. But if it were not, the movie is so powerful that we wouldn’t care one whit what the real history was.