And I was Rich Indeed

Mostly Concerning Food

If something is essential, then I believe that it should be made special. The wow should be in the ordinary. Sleeping, eating and breathing should all be elevated and celebrated. Beds should be frighteningly comfortable. Sleep nothing short of a nightly treat. As a trumpeter, I’ve always valued the joy of a good lungful of air. As a reformed smoker I enjoy it still more. If Joseph Priestley is going to spend his life discovering oxygen and its qualities then I am going to savour it and live a little richer. Food is simply one of the true gateways between this world and a much better one.

I’m not a gourmet. I do like to try things out and I have come to like things I would once have regarded as being “a bit posh” but I feel uncomfortable among truly refined diners or when the  food is over-fussy. I do like an oyster or a lobster but am equally content with a plate of sausage and potatoes or a good pie. I was brought up near Scrabster where lobsters were ten a shilling and crabs were given away. Oysters, even in London, were the food of the poor and added to meat pies as bulk to save on the meat bill. I’ve remained classless for most of my life. My qualifications and mode of income preclude me from being able to claim true brotherhood with my agrarian and proletarian roots (though that is where my heart lies). I’ve never been comfortable with middle class smugness or aspiration. These days I work for myself and spend as many hours with chisel or saw as I do with pen or computer. I have as much as I want to have and can thereby call myself rich indeed. I can be any class I want to be or none at all and I reflect this in my diet. One thing I insist upon is honesty whether it be in friendship, faith or food. Good ingredients well prepared and well cooked. Taste, texture and colour. And I’d prefer it if it did me good. If it doesn’t and its tasty, I’ll eat it anyway and compensate with an apple or an orange.

We keep the wow in the ordinary and spend the Johnson pound on a more comfortable mattress, a nicer garden and more exciting bag of groceries rather than on the cruise or the fancy car. It wouldn’t be to everyone’s tastes but it makes me happy. Very happy.

How to make a sausage sandwich. Take a third of a baguette. Open it up and load with meaty sausages. Smear with English mustard and squirt with ketchup. Ideal drink: a mug of tea.

Couscous with peppers and duck. Ridiculously easy to make delicious meals with. If you gave a good chef some couscous and a few other ingredients on Ready Steady Cook they’d wonder what to do with the other 15 minutes.

In the foreground cauliflower cheese. In the background a really tasty, malty, seedy loaf from Lidl. Another way of reaching the culinary heights via the primrose path of dalliance.

The good, the bad and the Tall T. Untypical of my snacking food while watching westerns but nonetheless enjoyable …well, for the first five minutes… then the flavours seemed to change from those you’d expect to create in the kitchen to those you’d expect to create in the science lab. If you haven’t seen the film I recommend it.

This is more like it. Slices of baguette lightly toasted in the oven and served with Orkney crab paté. A squeeze of lemon juice does make quite a difference.

A bowl of porridge with Demerara sugar melting on top. (Not the same but very similar to a photo I put up a few weeks ago). I may well print this photograph and frame it and make it my entry for the Turner Prize. Entitled “Simple Happiness”.

Supermarket of current choice, Lidl, has much tastier and a better range of cured meats than any of its competitors. OK I didn’t try Fortnum and Mason’s or the Harrods’ food hall but they aren’t often seen as direct competition to Lidl in Darnall. It might be a loyalty thing but very few people seem to use both.

Savoury snacks from their bakery. That’s goats cheese on the left. Can’t remember what flavoured the twist but I can remember looking to see if I’d bought another. Very moreish.

(British modern adjective:so pleasant to eat that one wants more.
“a moreish aubergine dip”) Cambridge English Dictionary and an example of oxymoron.
I’m not sure but I think the chilli came out of a can. Not great on its own but not bad with rocket, grated Red Leicester cheese and soured cream in a tortilla. Eaten while watching The Good the Bad and the Ugly. A film worth making good food for.

They sell yoghurt by the pailful in Lidl and almost every customer (it serves a truly multi-ethnic customer base and is the happiest shop I know) buys a bucket of it. I’ve taken to doing the same. Next to porridge, yoghurt and fruit (in this case sour black cherries from a jar) is my favourite breakfast.

Croissants used to be my favourite breakfast but I found that one croissant was something of a gateway drug and soon I was gorging on three or four and finding (unusually for me) my stomach ballooning. I even used to load them with butter and jam. My hat! These bad boys are full of butter as it is. How on earth do the French remain so slim and elegant? If I was French I’d resemble Alec Baldwin.

So here is a photograph of some typical English health food. A venison pie with chips.

A second way of making a sausage sandwich. Toast pitta breads and open them up. Bung in a couple of sausages and garnish with Gruyere cheese. Eaten while watching 3:10 to Yuma.

Home baked wholemeal bread.

With cock’a’leekie soup with cream stirred in. Very nice.

And with cream drizzled. Much nicer.

A Monday roast dinner. One free range chicken spatchcocked and served Tudor style. It was never intended to all be eaten in one sitting. The birds actually made two other main meals. It was a very easy way to serve and added a little element of feasting. No bones were thrown over shoulder amid Brian Blessed impressions while eating this meal. (Even though a dog waited patiently just in case).

One of the other meals was this chicken risotto. Risotto is my current favourite meal. If heaven exists they will serve risotto.

Another of those special treat meals I make for myself when I’ve been working on the house or garden. Lamb chops with new potatoes, mange tout and mint sauce.

Seafood pasta. Tagliatelle with mussels, cockles, prawns and baby squid and creme fraiche.

I got the recipe for these off a fellow blogger who has an amazing site full of fabulous recipes for vegans. These are kale crisps. Lightly oiled kale leaves are roasted in a oven for 10 minutes each side  and then sprinkled with sea salt. Very moreish!

Hope she doesn’t mind me adding a link.

 

http://alittlesage.com

Bon appétit!

 

 

The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Part Two

Tags

Akira Kurosawa, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, goya, gustave doré, Lee Van Cleef, Sergio Leone, the pardoner's tale, Till Eulenspiegel

Radix malorum est cupidités (Greed is the Root of All Evil)

(May contain spoilers)

We get two perspectives on the characters in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. We get what seems like  distant, two-dimensional, long shots of each. And we get extreme close-ups. On the one hand we find out very little about the background (Tuco is the only character provided with any sort of a back story) of the trio and on the other we get so close to them that we can feel the heartbeat and motivation of the moment. We don’t only see the beads of sweat forming on brows and cheeks, we see the pores from whence they emerge.

This duel viewpoint is mirrored in the cinematography of the film. Leone loved alternating extreme wide angle shots of forbidding landscape with extraordinarily penetrating close ups of people (particularly faces) who are as weathered and worn as the land they exist in. Like many directors, Leone was an art lover and it shows in his work. For George Stevens’ Shane, the template were the western paintings of Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington. For Leone it is unsurprisingly, more European, older, odder. These films are painted with the colour palette of Goya and informed by the truth seeking absurdities of the Surrealists with more than a touch of the famished world of Gustave Doré.

Many westerns inhabit the world of the epic, few take it to such operatic extremes as The Good the Bad and the Ugly. It’s a forbidding genre not least because of the literary giants who have used it. A writer must have extraordinary ability or extreme self-confidence to enter a world populated by Homer and Milton. Some do. James Joyce transformed our approach to literature by finding epic qualities in Dublin on a June day in 1904. The western lends itself more readily than the urban novel to the epic. The greatness of the finest works of Cormac McCarthy is due to his ability to combine the immensity of landscape with an inner immensity of character that has something fundamental to say about the human condition. Of the recent film versions of his works, No Country For Old Men and The Road work better than All the Pretty Horses (which is in my opinion a superior novel) because the film makers have sought to embrace this epic nature.

The two biggest influences on Leone both came from the world of films. John Ford’s discovery of Monument Valley and his decision to use it as location for many of his westerns was perhaps the single most important decision made in the history of the western. At the same time Akira Kurosawa’s (an admirer of Ford’s work) incorporation of the medieval, in his deconstruction of calendar time in his films, gave film-makers a way of echoing the story-tellers of past civilisations. Historic time gives way to story-teller’s time. You can put a date on The Odyssey but it would be meaningless. Devoted, pre-Darwinian students of the Bible may even be able to put a date to the events of Paradise Lost. You can certainly put a date to The Good the Bad and the Ugly (it is set during the campaign of General Henry Hopkins Sibley into New Mexico in 1862) but it defies historical time as much as it embraces it. Homer based his work on real events but he isn’t a reliable historian. The same can be said for Leone.

The action may be set in the Santa Fe and Albuquerque regions in the 1860s but the protagonists are from the storytelling tradition. Clint Eastwood’s character originated in medieval Japan, Lee Van Cleef’s (having undergone a greater transformation than Eastwood’s from For a Few Dollars More) is out of the darkest pages of villainy. Eli Wallach is playing a native Mexican in the film but the roots of his character are European. You can find him in popular German folk tales of the 14th and 15th century as Till Eulenspiegel (the original merry prankster), in England as Till Owlyglass. You can find variations of the storyline from the film in legends from many countries. Three men set out on a quest that requires them to work together. If they do then they will all be enriched. But each has a chance of increasing their riches by disposing of one or both of the others. I find a delightful parallel in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.

Summary of The Good The Bad and The Ugly

Three men, who are comfortable with breaking both legal and moral laws for personal gain, each discover that a huge horde of gold has been stashed away by a man called Carson. Two of the men (Blondie and Tuco…the Good and the Ugly) had previously worked together on a long-running scam where one handed the other into the law in return for Bounty money and then freed his partner, often at the point where he was going to be hung. They have fallen out and take it in turns (power and status alternates in stories even more than in real life) to try to kill each other by the unusual tactic of making them walk an unendurable distance across a burning desert without water. By fortune they meet the dying Carson and each receives a vital but incomplete piece of information as to where the gold is buried. Suddenly they need each other again. Without the information that the other possesses, they have no chance of finding the gold. (One is told of the cemetery where the gold is buried and the other the name of the grave). The third man (Angel Eyes … The Bad) is independently on the same trail when he finds himself in a position of power over the other two. He tortures one and extracts that person’s information and makes a contract with the other. It leads them all to the cemetery and the possibility of them all becoming rich. Or it leads to the possibility of betrayal, double dealing and the best Mexican stand-off in the history of film. For more than a moment it seems quite likely that, in search of riches they are all about to kill each other.

Summary of The Pardoner’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

Three dissolute friends spend their days leading a life of perceived pleasure which involves breaking a good number of the deadly sins of the church. They drink, they swear, gamble, flirt, feast and generally enjoy an existence of uncaring debauchery. They hear a funeral bell and discover that the man being buried is a friend of theirs. They want to know how he came to die and are told that the killer is someone called Death. They vow to avenge their friend and to kill Death. First they must discover where death is and are told by an old man they will find him under the tallest oak tree in the forest. When they reach this there is no sign of Death but as they dig into the roots (a valuable metaphor for all storytellers) they discover a huge horde of gold: enough to make them all rich for the rest of their lives. True to character they decide that before transporting the gold they must celebrate and draw lots for who is to go into town to get the wine, food and provisions necessary for a suitable feast. The youngest is chosen and reluctantly leaves his erstwhile partners. He buys all the provisions required and returns loaded with all the necessaries for a party. Meanwhile the other two have had a conversation along the lines of why split the horde between three when they will get much more by dividing it two ways. They decide to kill the other when he returns from town. And indeed they do so. Unknown to them their partner had had the same idea and has laced the wine with rat poison. After killing the young man they drink the wine and die most horribly. And thus enact the old man’s prophesy that they will find Death under the oak tree.

Death is never far away in The Good the Bad and the Ugly and neither is the entire storytelling tradition of a dozen cultures. The great storytellers give us something new or re-tell something marvellous from the past. The greatest storytellers do both and Sergio Leone was one of the greatest storytellers of our time and The Good the Bad and the Ugly is his greatest work. Mind you his other films are pretty good.

 

 

If It’s Good Enough For The Birds…

Tags

Cake-a-Doodle-Doo, chicken soup, crayfish, Exeter, lardy cake, lidl, venison, Waitrose

Mostly Concerning Food

I’ve noticed the birds in the cherry tree, where I hang my feeders, have taken a strong interest in the fat balls this month. They get largely ignored (except by the squirrels) in the warmer seasons but at the moment they need replacing every few days. They know instinctively when they need to change their diet. Soon it will be nesting time and all the feeders will empty daily as they build themselves up for the eternal circle. For the moment, keeping warm is their top priority and they are eating a lot of fat and a lot of fruit. I’m doing the same and for pretty much the same reasons. One, it keeps out the cold and two, I’m programmed to do it. My parents, grandparents and great grand parents did the same. It’s in the blood.

Chicken and vegetable soup to fight off the January colds. I’m touching wood while I type but feel bold enough to say that I haven’t had a bad cold since I gave up smoking over six years ago.. They used to hang around from October to March. I can’t say that it is any more than coincidence. I’ve made a lot of other changes in my life during that time. One thing that doesn’t change is my love of a home-made soup. It’s like bread in that it is simple, wholesome, and as much fun to make as it is to eat. I prefer to keep it brothy rather than blend it. Sometimes it improves it to blend it, mostly, it seems to me, to be making it into baby food. I like to be able to enjoy the different elements. Not that there are too many here; onions, leeks, carrots and chicken stock with any meat that had been left on the carcass after it had already served as main course for two meals.

These are my secret treats. (Not so secret now as T reads these blogs). Bacon, fried eggs and fried potatoes with a mug of black coffee. This is a Hemingway style writer’s breakfast. I face it without Papa’s hangover and talent. The tray cloth suggests that I had minor aspirations to grandeur that morning. The plastic sauce bottles help to keep me grounded.

This used to be a real treat as a boy and a starter in restaurants that had heard of three course meals but didn’t really want to offer the customer too much in the way of clever cooking. Inexplicably people chose to have it. Some restaurants still try to get away with it, cutting it thin and fanning it out. Now that melons are available for under a pound all the year round it is the equivalent of being offered an apple. Very nice but not at £25 a head.

I try to finish whatever work I am doing by 4 o’clock and have a meal ready on the table for when T gets home. I’m currently going through bit of a chop phase. All of this plateful is nice. The Bramley apple sauce is but five minutes effort and adds so much. Freshness is all. The best part of the meal isn’t actually the chops but the baked potatoes with real butter.

The last of the chops pan fried with a couple of sausages (hence the black flecks on the chop) re-heated baked tatties and a greedy helping of grated cheddar cheese. My lunch the following day.

As you can see giving up cigarettes has not left me vice-free. I like my food tasty and I tend to enjoy a generous portion. In my defence (does pleasure need a defence?) my working day does consist of plenty of strenuous labour at the moment. And I don’t eat much for the rest of the day.

This is one of a dozen (at least) meals that I would call my favourite. Some crackers, some good Stilton cheese and some pears. Heaven on a plate.

Hotel room. Not sure why the shaving brush and bowl are there but there is limited space in a hotel room. We share a Danish pastry and an almond croissant. On their own they are nice. With a decent apple, they are even better.

One of my great regrets on leaving Exeter 20 years ago was that we were leaving behind a wonderful parade of shops on Magdalen Road. Some of the best have gone and been replaced by cafes run by people who are about as qualified to run cafes as I am to exhibit at the Tate. The best greengrocer in the West of England has closed since I was last there and that is a nail in the coffin as regards it being a world class shopping street. Happily the bakery is not only still there but hasn’t followed the trends into sourdough and wholesome or fancy. (I like sourdough and fancy, my gripe is against a particular type of cafe and bakery). They bake good bread and sell the same choice of cakes and puddings that they did in the eighties (and probably the fifties). Here we have a plum and almond cake and a lardy cake. Lardy cake was a fantastic treat as a boy and now has almost disappeared. This bakery has stuck by its guns and will outlast all of the fashion following rivals. I like my poetry written by poets, my food grown by farmers and my bread (when I don’t bake it myself) baked by a baker.

Not a traditional way of eating lardy cake. Ayrshire cheese, pears and figs. I don’t care, this was delicious.

These Buxton fish and chips were just about as good as they appear: more filling and thrilling. No complaints but no rush to go back for more.

But here is a fish meal that would tempt me back. Made by David and Melissa and the highlight of our visit to the South West. Baked smoked salmon with potatoes and a really delicious combination of vegetables flavoured with honey, balsamic and other ingredients. Very special indeed.

I’m not against well-meaning middle class people with the ability to bake from opening their own cafe. Amongst the many dreary efforts in Exeter are one or two that are superb. One goes under the cheerful but corny name of Cake-a-Doodle-Doo! It is on the Palace Gate end of Cathedral Green and is everything you want in a cafe. A limited choice of first class cakes and simple but tasty meals. (Too much choice is a great mistake in small cafes). All freshly made and served in a cheerful and tasteful atmosphere by the people who baked them. I was halfway through my coffee and walnut cake before I remembered that T had a camera on her phone. Also on view are the remains of a rich chocolate (gluten free) cake and the bottom third of a slice of Victoria sponge. Imagine you are able to sample the wares on the final day of the Great British Bake Off and you won’t be far out. Oh, and they served proper tea as well not a bag seeping in an aluminium pot.

Another meal that is a contender for my very favourite. Good bread, butter, cheese, ham, tomatoes and nothing else. Scientists have recently concluded that vanilla yoghurt is the food of happiness. I can only presume they forgot to test this plateful.

A bought Christmas pudding. One of many I’ve eaten this year. This one is made to look fancy by being topped with lots of glacé cherries and whole almonds. The almonds are ok but glacé cherries are no longer anyone’s idea of a treat. Just give me more plum pudding and don’t stint.

I’m not the biggest fan of supermarkets. I can’t see the little bits of good they may have done, in widening tastes and making foods available, has even come close to cancelling out the huge harm that they are responsible for. But they are here now and they aren’t going to go away. (Though I’m proud of the efforts of British people, in protesting about the market leaders showing that all they really care about is profit and dividends, and giving them a bloody nose). Tesco and Sainsbury’s have pretty much lost my trade until they show that service (to both supplier and customer) comes before the balance sheet. Waitrose bribes me (successfully) with free tea and coffee to go with a decent range of treats in their cafe as well as a free newspaper, but if their shelves didn’t hold better food than their bigger rivals I don’t think I’d bother. I’m still with the new guys. Not simply because they are cheap but because they have more exciting products. My current favourite is Lidl. The one I go to is in a run down part of Sheffield and my fellow shoppers are the displaced from the UK and all over Europe and beyond. It is the friendliest shop I know. It never fails to give me something I’d be prepared to travel a long way for if it wasn’t on my doorstep. Here are some delicious crayfish tails. I’m the only one in our house who likes shell fish. It allows for feastly portions. I made up a little creamy dressing to complete these sandwiches. I must have been a good person in a previous life.

Lidl also provided a tray of venison for the price of a pint of Guinness in a London pub. I know which I’d prefer. They were packaged as if they were steaks but on cooking they fell into these lumps. It said haunch of venison on the box but was more like hunks of venison inside. Still very tasty but not quite the Robin of Sherwood feast I had in mind.

Everything goes well with new potatoes and peas. No fruit and very little fat (venison is an extremely lean meat) to finish the post.

Bon appétit!

The Good The Bad and The Ugly 1966 (Part One)

Tags

Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, ennio morricone, Lee Van Cleef, Sergio Leone, spaghetti westerns

Blondie, Angel Eyes and Tuco

Some people blame Spaghetti Westerns for the death of the genre and others for keeping it alive. I’m very much in the second camp. There is a continuum from John Ford through to Quentin Tarantino and Spaghetti Westerns fit in nicely. They are deeply influenced by what came before and they, in turn, deeply influenced what came after. There were hundreds of them but only four made it big in the county of the western and only four have survived the vicissitudes of history. All four are by the same director and all four are very good indeed.

My first problem was in choosing which one to focus on. My dilemma reduced by the fact that this is an open-ended blog purely devoted to films of my own choosing: I can always include the others later on. I could have chosen A Fistful of Dollars. In some ways a film more typical of the spaghetti tradition. Very low budget, brilliant soundtrack, quite short, single strand narrative, one hero played by one (at the time) mid range American star and based on a Kurosawa movie. Tempted!

I was even more tempted by For a Few Dollars More. Again we have Clint Eastwood in more or less the same role (the more or less is important) but now we have a second protagonist in Lee Van Cleef. We have a double threaded storyline that comes together in a way that is more consistent with the American tradition, another hauntingly appropriate soundtrack from Ennio Morricone; an almost perfectly directed film. The budget is twice that of the first film and it is put to good use.

I’ve chosen the third of the trilogy because it includes everything I’ve got to say about the other two; it absorbs them both and supersedes them. It is magnificent. My memory told me it was and my memory was nearly forty years old. Watching it again told me it was one of the most magnificent films I’ve ever seen, and watching it again for the second time (in two days) leaves me in the same ball park as Quentin Tarantino who described it as “my absolute favourite movie and the greatest achievement in the history of cinema.” I have a few diamonds that I would put above The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but nothing I would say was very far ahead of it. It is very special.

The first two films had found a way of sneaking into American cinemas. And they did well at the box-office. So well that they elevated Eastwood to the first rank of Western actors and encouraged United Artists to pump fat wads of cash into film number three. The first, and most important, thing the extra money allowed was a third great actor in Eli Wallach. This led to a huge increase in scope. The narrative moved from threads to a full tapestry, the quality and range of the acting got a massive boost, Leone was able to paint on an epic canvas, combining his take on the role of The American Civil War in the birth of the nation as well as reflecting on more recent conflagrations in Europe. In Blondie (Eastwood was never known as the Man with No name until PR people entered the fray), Angel Eyes and Tuco, Leone had three characters with which he could evoke storytelling from a dozen cultures and a dozen periods of history. If you are looking for the literary forebears of this film you will take in John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher but you will also take in Kurosawa, the Brothers Grimm, Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Aesop, Ovid, and medieval popular culture.

To combine all of that seamlessly would be close to impossible and Leone gets very close to the impossible with this movie. There are clunks and judders and the entire journey is a bumpy ride but what a ride. I wanted to watch it in sections to make notes. I’ve watched it three times in the last fortnight and I haven’t pressed the pause button yet. My note taking may have suffered but my cinematic enjoyment didn’t. It is a wonderful film when you don’t know what is going to happen and an even better film when you do.

And did I mention that it is also one of the funniest films I’ve watched? Lee Van Cleef is denied humour, almost denied humanity but Clint Eastwood gets a good number of first class one-liners. Eli Wallach’s Tuco is a comic masterpiece from beginning to end but so much more than a great comic character. In many ways Tuco is the crowning glory of the film. It takes a great writer, a great director and a great actor to achieve this. The Good the Bad and the Ugly had all three (two of them being Sergio Leone). Wallach doesn’t dominate the film but you can see why Eastwood called it a day with spaghetti westerns after this film. He had the same problem with Wallach as Tony Hancock had with Sidney James and Kenneth Williams. They made him better but they were so good themselves that he felt he was being over-shadowed.

A little digression. I’m a child of the sixties, peace loving, anti-war baby boomer. What am I doing not only watching, but loving, films that portray war and violence? First I love art for the quality of the art. Second I live in a violent world and I refuse to cut myself off from things I find unpleasant and third every good war film ever made has been an anti-war film. Every good violent film has been anti-violence. Fourthly, Leone doesn’t glorify the violence in any way. He takes a long time leading up to any moments of horror and when they eventually arrive, they pass very quickly. In contrast with contemporary director Sam Peckinpah whose violence arrives suddenly and is lingered over. (I’ve set myself up there. I love Sam Peckilnpah’s films as well. What would this life be without contradiction?)

Leone may be making a very important point. All three of his protagonists are violent men and they punctuate their stories with killings. But their stories are played out against the backdrop of the American Civil War: the first war where the casualty figures were so large as to lose true meaning. Leone never lets you lose sight of the carnage that is being done in the name of political ends. The horror, the violence, the tragedies that are lost in statistics, in names of battles and campaigns, in the “heroic” deeds of victorious generals, and the heroic failures of others. Leone is saying yes, this is horrible but there are reasons why these three are acting as they do. The reasons may be questionable and Leone allows us to question them; insists on it in fact. He also insists on our questioning why and how 360,222 union soldiers were killed and 258,000 from the Confederate army (figures that have been accepted for 100 years but are now regarded as being on the low side). Leone’s characters are but three cobs in a cornfield.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second digression. What is a spaghetti western? Basically a western made in Italy and Spain during the 1960s. Self-contained but referential. A tendency towards the operatic rather than pure naturalism. Multi-cultural cast with all actors speaking their lines of dialogue in their native tongue. These are later dubbed to appear, or almost appear to be in the language of the audience. Westerns were inexplicably popular in Italy during this period. There are waves like this: Punk Rock remaining big in Huddersfield, Peter Noone being a star in America. They defy history, geography and logic, but they happen. Sometimes it takes an outsider to be able to paint an accurate picture. There were plenty of good American westerns from this same period but they didn’t capture the genre in the way the spaghetti western did. And in Sergio Leone they had a true film-making genius. That is if you define genius as someone who changes the paradigm. The Good the Bad and The Ugly feels modern. Everything that came before it suddenly becomes old.

 

It’s a Jolly Holiday

Travels with Jolly (An occasional Series)

This one should actually be called Travels without Jolly, or perhaps Jolly’s travels without us. We disappeared off to lands of vacation. The first time we’ve been away together, for more than a single night, since Jolly arrived. It’s a sign of how far she has come and also on how much she has grown to love Frances and Steven and their back garden farm.

Some of you already know Jolly. To those who started following the blog more recently let me give a little in the way of introduction. Jolly came to us 4 years ago. She was a rescue dog and had got into some very bad habits including ferocious barking, biting and pulling.  We saw her on the web-site and rang up to express an interest only to be told that she was settled and that there were others on the list if her re-housing didn’t go well. It was late at night when the kennels rang to say she’d been returned, and were we still interested. The short-list of available homes had disappeared. I was put through to her original owner. A woman who cared deeply for the little dog but had found her more than a handful in a house full of husband and children.

When she arrived at our house, she settled under my chair, accepted some roast beef discreetly passed down from my plate and didn’t bat an eyelid when her carers left. She was a dog with issues. A dog in need of some serious anger management, some consistent love, patience, affection and knowing she belonged; a place where she wouldn’t be plagued, mithered, ignored or given a crack. The sight of another dog would set up barking to match Cerberus. She hated everybody outside the family and held a particular fury for children and tall alpha males. Something in her background had made these her especial enemies.

Slowly, very slowly, with the aid of every know-all dog person in the neighbourhood telling us what we were doing wrong and every genuine dog person telling us what we were doing right, she settled. She stopped pulling on a lead, stopped her apoplectic rage at every person or dog we met, then every other, then every third. She started making friends with people and dogs who shared our routes. It took time. A lot of time. She got poorly and in her weakness managed to persuade us that her bed ought to be in the corner of our bedroom. It went upstairs and she got better. Still more time, time and attention. But there is a real reason for people or dogs needing attention and the cure is in the diagnosis. Give it to them!

She continues to dislike the macho-male; has frightened a few in her time. She continues to lack trust in any children or young people. It’s four years. You’d think those scars would have healed by now. Not if you know collies. They have the intelligence and sensitivity of a human. They come in all sorts; from as tame as a maiden aunt to as fierce as a tiger. They are bred to do a job. Jolly is amber-eyed. Amber-eyed collies were the ones who looked after the flock on the hillside; the ones who could sooth a frightened sheep or scare off a wolf. She’s now as gentle as a kitten in 95 out of 100 situations. David and Charlie have looked after her at home a few times when we’ve gone on short jaunts. This is the first time she’s gone to stay with anyone. I was aware of what could go wrong but I had few real worries. Steven and Frances are fantastic with animals. Jolly spends her weekdays with Dotty (their spaniel) who gets dropped off on their way to work. They have a big garden with chickens and quail and rabbits and a duck called Phillip. This is her holiday photograph album.

Just out of shot is Minnie, one of two cats in the house. Jolly struck up a particular friendship with Minnie and would watch her with rapt attention.

Phillip came from school. He was an egg that was incubated so the students could watch the process of hatching and to enjoy the fluffy little duckling. Once he had started to become a real duck and develop some independence he’d served his educational purpose. He needed a place to live. He couldn’t have found a better home than with Frances and Steven.

And he couldn’t have found a more curious new admirer than Jolly. She followed him round the garden. Sometimes she tried to herd him and sometimes she just lay flat and tried to work him out.

 

Jolly and Dotty have become very good friends. They are chalk and cheese. Dotty is still a puppy, hasn’t an aggressive fibre in her body, is full of bouncing energy and need to be at the centre of things. Jolly is slowly entering a more sedate adulthood where she can still run like the wind but is often happy to sit and contemplate.

The garden goes on and on. There’s as much and more beyond the little summer house. In fact, that is where the real garden begins.

Collies need plenty of exercise. They need their minds stimulated as much as their bodies. Helping Steven round-up the chickens (out of shot) is almost perfect for both.

A nice chuckle under the chin while watching Poirot on the telly.

I’m proud of you son. Helping Charlie celebrate finishing the Leeds Half Marathon.

Hard to believe this dog was the terror of the Dogs’ Home.

At her happiest in wide open spaces

Ready to help with the hay harvest.

Duck hunting on her holidays.

This was once an impossible dream: that she would settle down with another dog. Two very special dogs: Jolly and Dotty.

 

A Short Excursion into Books

Tags

A Man's World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith by Donald McRae, Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire by Martin Fletcher, ire in Babylon: How the West Indies Cricket Team Brought a People to its Feet by Simon Lister, Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager by Michael Calvin, The Game of Our Lives: The English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain by David Goldblatt

Reading Matters

Introduction

This is a glorious part of my life. And I know it. I’m busy and leisured all at once. My income more than equal to my needs. Enough demands to keep me honest and enough time to fulfil all of those and more at my own pace. Even at my busiest I found time to read, watch films, watch singers sing and painters paint. No life this without a daily read, a weekly film, a monthly play. With time now being mostly mine, I’ve simply doubled and trebled what went before. What’s that? A matinee in Manchester? What time’s the train? I’ll be there in a front row seat. I tend to keep the range to a hundred miles. It gives me extra pleasure to share the train, the tram with those who still slave to pay the bills. In my prime I often wished to drive straight past the factory walls, the school gates, the office door. And now I can. I’d be a fool not to. There are plenty of us. A silver grey army fill the theatre seats, enjoy the opera and ballet and county cricket in the afternoon. You’ll find them strolling down the banks of Lathkill and Dove, enjoying tea and cake in cafes that enjoy their trade.

My needs are simple. The walls of my house contain most everything I want. And when out, though I like to cross national boundaries and speak a different tongue, England holds most of what I crave. I like an old church to feel as much as see, a hill to climb and trees to wander in between. To watch the seasons pass slow day by day, the leaves from bud to fall; the ever-changing colours of it all. Most often just with sheepdog for company. She’s a Johnson after-all; but also Clare and Coleridge, Thomases (Welsh (x2) and English), Hughes and Gentleman and Byng and Defoe and Bryson and all who’ve trod these paths before. Two travel writers are we, Jolly and me.

Jolly and Dotty

In winter though I tend to stay close and close the door. Light a fire and read still more. Each Christmas among the many presents (far more than I deserve, I’m sure) a pile of books from Charlie, my eldest boy, now a man. He knows his sport. We’ve shared the stand at many a game of football, cricket and the northern code. He’s taken it on further than ever I did. He knows his stuff and writes with a blend of skill and humour that could see him among the very best. My word! but I am proud of my children and what they have become; surpassing me by far in each their ways and achieving those two goals that I strove so hard to reach; independence and niceness. Quite the nicest children I have known.

The pile from Charlie are all sports books. These days I have a shelf or two. A section of my library that is a winter thing. And here I’ll start a little of my blog that is to do with reading. I’m almost addicted: have been from back along, but now I’ve allowed a habit to grow. Most of these last seven years have seen me pass a hundred books and fulfil many a dream; adding Melville, and Trollope and the complete Charlie D and Brontës three and many, many more I really should have read before. I’ve read every winner of the Carnegie prize to keep me with the changing shape and forms of children’s books. I’ve read books on subjects that school tried to separate from mine and have indulged in science tomes and history and geography and maths and food. I have a bookcase devoted to books about the north and another exclusively to rugby league. I’ve bought books of my own since paper-round days and have acquired several thousand which leaves plenty yet unread; ready to be devoured, explored. When T’s mother died we inherited many a thousand more and my own folks’ books (divided between six) still meant a need to put up yet more shelves. I don’t go much for objets d’art, big cars and I no longer give much regard to fine wines and rolled cigars. But I do like my books. And intend to read as many as I can before I go. I don’t have targets and neither have I limits. If its been published and I fancy reading it, it gets read. Morning, afternoon and as I sit in bed.

This year Charlie has chosen books that were short-listed for the William Hill Prize for the best sports book of the year. Over time I’ve read many winners and those that made the short-list. It is one literary prize I truly have respect for. Sportswriting is a very special genre. At its best it has something that no other writing has. There are some great names on my shelf: Norman Mailer, Paul Gallico, CLR James to name but three. These writers (and many more) transcend their sports and find a metaphor or two to take life philosophically through the higher, faster further of human endeavour. Some sports have been truly blessed over the years, and not always the sports you’d expect to find a man with a silver pen at ringside or in the stand. Boxing has attracted the very best, and cricket draws a few. I suppose there is more time watching England’s summer game to contemplate eternity (or experience it.) Some sports have never done much to attract the reader’s time. Anything with an engine attached – if you can call them sports – though horses are a different matter. It doesn’t all have to be a person’s muscles here. Golf is a sport I like to play but hate to watch; tennis is another. The first has made a scribe or two, the second happier in the gossip columns than the wordsmith’s page. The world’s most popular sports: fishing and football (soccer) depending on who is supplying the figures: have never made much impact after Walton and Cotton died. Until recently that is. Fishing not so much as a sport, though we mustn’t forget Hemingway. Soccer was the blandest of coverage for decades until it blossomed. Now year on year it attracts writers of every journalistic skill and one or two who belong even higher up the tree.

So, once Christmas passed from feasts and family to the more solitary quiet time between the feast of Stephen and Hogmanay, I turned to my presents. And what a treat they held. In not much more than a week I’d read all five. And think them all deserving of the prize. I’m unsure of the rights and wrongs of saying that one book is better than all the rest but with many a thousand books published every year (and finite time even for us grey adventurers) it’s good to have a filter or two; someone to draw us up a reading list.

The books I read (in the order I read them) were:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager by Michael Calvin  (Soccer)

A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith by Donald McRae  (Boxing)

The Game of Our Lives: The English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain by David Goldblatt (soccer)

Fire in Babylon: How the West Indies Cricket Team Brought a People to its Feet by Simon Lister (cricket)

Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire by Martin Fletcher (Soccer)

All five are remarkable books. I’d like to have had a go at writing them all, but could never have got close to the way they turned out. So I’ll have a go at writing about them instead. This little diversion from my films and bicycle and food will look at each in turn. I was going to give my judgement at the end, but will give it now instead. They all deserved to win. They all deserve to be read by anyone who loves sport and plenty of those who don’t. These aren’t just good sports books. They are good books, period.

I could no more live without words than I could live without air.

The Tall T (1957) Part Two

Tags

Budd Boetticher, Elmore Leonard, Maureen O'Sullivan, Richard Boone, The Tall T

Heroes and Villains?

A Brief Synopsis:

Losing his horse in a bet that he can ride a bull, Brennan (Randolph Scott) hitches a ride on a stage driven by an old friend, Rintoon, which carries The honeymooning Mimses and is mistakenly held up by Richard Boone, Henry Silva and Skip Homeier. Brennan and the woman, who is an heiress, are kept alive while word is sent to her father. Undermining the trust of the outlaws in one another, Brennan separates and kills them.   Jim Kitses: Horizons West

There are a number of plays, films and novels that seem to pack much of the key action into the beginning or end. If you only read the opening two chapters of Great Expectations you will read a great novel. Julius Caesar is dead long before the halfway point in the play that bears his name, and the first half of The Tall T is taken up entirely with painting a picture, the purpose of which seems to be, to provide a contrast with what happens in the second.

Very little of what we learn in the opening hour survives for long as the second hour gets going. Almost everybody Pat Brennan talks to in the opening scenes (and they are largely a peaceful, get on with life as best you can, sort of a bunch) meets a violent and unforeseen death in part two. The Kiplingesque hero reveals an altogether darker side of his character. The plain and sexually frustrated woman discovers enough danger and excitement to light fires that hadn’t previously burnt. Most intriguingly of all are the villains. We’ve waited a long time to meet them. So long in fact, that they arrive most unexpectedly, and waste no time in establishing themselves as ruthless, arrogant, cruel and despicable. Yet, when they, in turn, die, we feel as much sorrow as relief.

The greatness of the film is in the way it subverts its own apparent intentions. In the way it veers from the well-trodden path it appears to be following. In the way it engages an extra element in the watching audience; a confused and questioning moral register. There is nothing straight forward here. Everything is both what it seems to be and its opposite at the same time. And this makes for an exhilarating and rewarding ethical ride.

Ethical engagement may well be the difference between art and entertainment. In entertainment the audience are largely asked to accept the moral standpoint. When pushed to extreme it can even arrange your emotions for you. Walt Disney made great films by controlling the audience response. There’s a great deal of pleasure to be had but few educational opportunities. Boetticher is the opposite. There is ethical complexity here and the audience must engage in questioning rather than acceptance. The Tall T gives us the best of both worlds. In the first half we are shown right from wrong. Ninety-nine out of a hundred viewers would reach agreement on where each character and each action fits on a moral scale. In part two there would be no such consensus.

At first it seems easy. Richard Boone and his “animals” (his word not mine) have cold bloodedly killed the swing station manager and his boy. An act of absolute evil and presented as such. They soon kill Rintoon. This time its is mostly evil. But Rintoon was trying to kill them so it has at least an element of self-defence. Yet they almost provoked Rintoon into the action so it seems more like murder. Yet the main villain has nothing to do with any of the killings. There is no evidence at all that he ordered them. He certainly didn’t commit them. I merely open up the debate. Boetticher and his writers, Burt Kennedy and Elmore Leonard, allow the web to become more and more tangled.

Everything the villains do, which marks them as villains, is also done by the hero. They kill, he kills, they entrap, he entraps, they try to force themselves on the woman, he actually forces himself onto the woman and on and on. The main villain shares Brennan’s individualistic desire to have something of his own, craves an honest independence. He points out the terrible upbringings of his accomplices and the twists of fate that have left him on the wrong side of the law. That being on the wrong side has forced him into decisions he wouldn’t otherwise have taken.

This is like The Sopranos and The Wire forty years before their time. Villains we detest and sympathise with at the same time. Heroes we have to excuse when then undertake unethical practices because the end may justify the means.

In the silent ‘shoot-em-ups’ from the Tom Mix and William S Hart days there was a clear distinction. The white hat and the black hat. A tradition that continued and arguably found its finest hour in Shane. In Stagecoach there is no doubt in the audience’s mind who is a good person and who is a bad. The only confusion (and it was a big one at the time) was that true goodness was represented by a drunk, an escaped convict and a prostitute and badness by a Southern Gentleman and a banker. In Winchester ’73 the boundaries are blurring. James Stewart is undoubtedly the hero but is far from being an entirely good man. He’s crossed over the boundary into obsession and is almost as dark and capable of doing wrong as those he is up against. His heroic status saved, in part, by the black-hearted villainy of his adversaries.

Moral ambiguity doesn’t always sit happily with box office success. The Randolph Scott/ Budd Boetticher films were extremely popular. Audiences in cold war America were far more open to questioning good and evil than they have sometimes been portrayed outside the United States. Round about the same time as this film was being made, an even greater western was being shot in Utah. In The Searchers, John Wayne has come a long way from The Ringo Kid of Stagecoach. It is a brilliant and deeply uncomfortable performance that walks a very thin line between hero and villain, between good and evil, between right and wrong.

Two moments serve to define the moral compass of The Tall T. First, Frank Usher (Boone) saves Brennan (Scott) from summary execution on the grounds that there is something he admires in him. The irony is not lost on either the characters, or the audience, that what the villain sees, in the hero, is virtue and an element of cowardice. It was rare for a hero to admit to being afraid. Brennan does so on two occasions. It probably saved his life. In the second, Usher is allowed to escape by keeping his back turned to Brennan who is holding a gun and intending to shoot. A strong code dictates that the worst thing you can do in a western is to shoot someone in the back. Brennan certainly can’t (despite pleadings from Mrs Mimms (Maureen O’Sullivan)).

Is there a moral in the story? Well, the white hat comes out on top. He may even have got the girl (many elements of the relationship are left ambiguous). He walks away with saddle bags full of money and no great need to explain them. But he too has lost. Everyone has lost something of enormous value to them.

When we first meet Brennan he is a jaunty, stoical fellow, ready to endure and make the most of life. And do it with a smile on his face. Yet there is something in his manner that hints at a darkness in his past that has left him a changed man. What he endures in the second half of the movie is as dark as anyone could wish, and yet he emerges as a jaunty and stoical fellow ready to take on life and endure what it has to throw at him with a smile on his face. Life is tough and it doesn’t seem to have a purpose. Fate is a much stronger influence on people’s lives than planning. Everybody seems to be a loser in a game that has to be played. It might appear that Boetticher’s is  a cynical view of life but once again appearance can be deceptive. Life is also rather funny. The smile on Randolph Scott’s face at the end isn’t just one of gritting his teeth and accepting his lot. It’s one that has found that the whole episode is better understood as a comedy than a tragedy.

I’ll finish by including the whole of Kipling’s famous poem as much to contradict as to illuminate the heroic viewpoint of the film. And because I like it. It’s a great poem. It’s a great movie.

 

If by Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

The Tall T (1957) Part One

Tags

Arthur Hunnicutt, Budd Boetticher, Randolph Scott, Romeo and Juliet, The Tall T, The Virginian

A Film of Two Halves

As a child I liked Randolph Scott and I liked all of the Ranown cycle of westerns. They were regularly shown on British television and they pleased me in the same way that The Virginian pleased me. A resolute good man stands up against engaging bad men and wins. 90 minutes of satisfying story in an inspiring (if bleak) landscape with a few shots of horses and cows thrown in. Scott was affable and engaging, at times humorous if not exactly funny. All was right with the world. It’s the sort of thing televisions seemed to have been invented for in the fifties and sixties.

I came back to the films in the knowledge that these films have a stronger reputation than that. That the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott/Harry Joe Brown westerns were regarded as some of the greatest ever made. That Scott is up there on the very top table of western film stars with William S Hart, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, James Stewart and Clint Eastwood. That Boetticher is ranked as highly as John Ford, Anthony Mann, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood as a director. I’m going to focus on this single western from the Ranown Cycle (named after the company set up by the principals to make the films) to see if it reveals just why the films are so highly regarded. As I say, my memory is of a series of satisfying rather than inspiring films. Did I miss something? Were they really great? Was their greatness in the fact that they disguised their greatness.

John Wayne, Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher

It is sometimes said, in educational circles, that everyone can tell a good teacher but the truly great teacher often passes under the radar. I have considerable experience of teaching and can confirm this. It doesn’t mean that great teachers are ineffective but it does mean that they often go unrecognised and invariably unrewarded for their special skills.  In football, I’ve long been a huge admirer of the much maligned French player, Didier Deschamps. Derided by supposed experts as a “water carrier”, he was at the centre of many of the truly great teams of modern times. Was he simply lucky? It’s very difficult to see him doing anything other than being in position and making passes (invariably to his own player). Football is a complex game at the highest level. The killer pass often goes un-noticed by those who think it is the pass immediately prior to a goal. Great players of the game are like chess grand-masters. They are thinking many moves ahead. They know that the killer pass can be the one that draws an opponent fractionally out of position a full minute before the attack on goal. It’s the one that has the significant consequences and those consequences are often difficult to  analyse. Deschamps was one of the most influential players of the last twenty years. He was astonishingly good but you had to be bloody good to see just how good he was.

Budd Boetticher is like that. Randolph Scott is good and most people can see that (it takes most people a second look and an opportunity to reflect to see just how good), Budd Boetticher is great.

Budd Boetticher directs Randolph Scott and Michael Dante

The Tall T is the second in the series. It doesn’t matter which order you see them, unless you are studying how a real artist refines his work. The films get better and better but there is no narrative continuity nor do the same characters appear. The series is linked solely by the people making the films. They can be compared to the work of Clint Eastwood in that they consist of a number of first class films leading up to a masterpiece (The Unforgiven). They (Renown and Eastwood westerns) follow the same type of characters, the same issues, similar storylines and settings.

To bring The Tall T down to its bare bones you have a good man trying to do the best he can yet finding himself caught up in an unintended kidnap and ransom drama. He keeps a cool head despite those around him losing theirs (At first viewing he is very much the sort of hero Kipling is seeking in his poem If), saves the damsel from the bandits and walks off into the sunset.

It could almost be Shane

This précis is accurate but incomplete. It only deals with the second half of the film but the first half really does only show a good man trying to do the best he can and putting up with the ups and downs that life, and the script, put in his way.

In fact the film is almost a film of two separate halves. Two halves that are so different as to appear not only parts of different films but actually parts of different genres. The first half is almost a comedy and ends with the hero being thrown from a bucking bull and seeking refuge in a water trough; emerging from it with a crooked smile of stoical acceptance and looking like the scarecrow off The Wizard of Oz after a dousing.

The opening scene of the film could almost be described, in modern parlance, as being Shane-Lite. The opening credits are shown over a rugged foreground with high mountains in the distance and a single rider, dressed in desert colours, approaching the camera. The lettering of the credits is in the same rusty wheat coloured, scratchy, woodblock lettering as the earlier masterpiece. Once the credits end, the similarity to Shane continues, with a round faced small boy watching the rider arrive and, recognising him, showing an almost hero worshipping affection. His dad, like Van Heflin in Shane, is protective but welcoming. Unlike Shane, we soon find out who the rider is and about his past. There remains a great deal unspoken. The man is Patrick Brennan (Randolph Scott) and we can see, through his almost jaunty exterior into a background that contains enough hurt to have bought his stoical amiability.

This scene is almost lyrical. These are people who live apart from society. These are the western characters that Wordsworth would have written about had he been American. The second scene takes us into the town of Contention. The amiable lyrical qualities slowly turn to a gentle cynicism (brilliantly led by Arthur Hunnicutt) and a sense of comedy, as the films heroine and tragic buffoon (as newly weds) are introduced. (In a way which underplays the importance they will have in the later parts of the film).

Arthur Hunnicutt (Rintoon) and Randolph Scott (Brennan) in The Tall T

The third scene takes us onto the ranch where Brennan used to work and where the owner wishes to lure him back. We get two scenes of fast moving rodeo style action; the first with a stirred up corral of horses breaking free despite our hero’s best efforts; the second where Brennan is offered the bull he seeks as a bet against his horse. He’s wise enough to turn the wager down until taunted by the man who took his job. We see in this moment (beautifully played in silence on screen using a slowly breaking smile) where his previous problems may have come from. The bet is to ride a bull to a standstill and he can have it. Fail and he loses his horse. It’s good hearted, all-action comedy. It’s the clowns in the rodeo. It’s a lot of fun to watch and it ends with a drenched and resigned Brennan leaving the ranch with considerably less than he arrived with. (Not before socking the jeering foreman on the jaw and into the trough).

The fourth scene ends the comedy section. It’s back in the desert where he flags down the stage containing the people we met in town. He gets a lift to the swing station and jokes to the driver (Hunnicutt) that he’s never been on a honeymoon before. The honeymoon period of the film is about to end in horrific style.

One of the great actor/director teams of all time Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher

A comparison could be made with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The first half deals with serious issues but in a way that suggests that the entire play is going to joke its way to a happy ending. The funniest character (Mercutio) then dies in an unforeseen manner and the play turns dark. Here the funniest character Rintoon (Hunnicutt) is about to die and the film is about to darken. And darken in a way I’m sure Shakespeare would have approved of.