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Tag Archives: james stewart

Winchester ’73 (1950) : Part Two

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by simon682 in Western Approaches

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Anthony Mann, dan duryea, james stewart, shelley winters, stephen mcnally, westerns, will geer, winchester '73

This is Anthony Mann’s first western. It’s James Stewart’s first western. Rock Hudson and Shelley Winters get their first significant roles here and young Anthony Curtis shows enough promise to get more than two lines in each of his subsequent films.

js-winchester-73-1950

Not many films can claim quite so many debuts as Winchester ’73 but that isn’t why it is regarded as one of the most important films of the fifties and one of the most influential westerns of all time. There are two areas where this film breaks new ground.  First the cinematography; in the various ways in which a story is told pictorially. Secondly we have step change in moral certainty and predictability.

In the foreground a young Tony Curtis on film debut

In the foreground a young Tony Curtis on film debut

A typical TV western of the time had a single plot line, a predictable outcome and black hat/white hat moral compass. In other words we have beginning, middle and an ending that involves the good guy beating the bad guy. The audience are asked to watch, abdicate any need for ethical engagement, and enjoy the entertainment.

John Ford had disrupted this approach with Stagecoach in 1939. Essentially the good guy wins in the end but there are multiple storylines and the audience have to join a debate as to just who the good guys are. It is ravelled but it doesn’t take too much untangling. Once you realise that high social status doesn’t always equate to being a decent person, you’ve largely cracked the code.

In Winchester ’73 there is no beginning and an uncertain ending. The story had begun long before the first frame and will continue after the final credits. The audience are invited to make an imaginative journey from each of these poles. The true beginning (at least parts of it) is slowly revealed but the ending is left entirely up to the viewer. Does McAdam go off with Lola or stay with High Spade? Is his mission over? Will he be able to settle to a quiet life? Will he be tried for murder? The camera hovers over both Shelley Winters and Millard Mitchell in a teasing manner before settling on the rifle stock as a final shot. If there is a message it is that he may or may not keep/ditch the friend/girl but he’s definitely keeping the gun.

Duryea, Dan (Winchester 73) (2)

Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally playing a game of “Whose the Baddest?’

The moral uncertainties don’t relate to the bad guys. They are bad, period. There are two absolute stinkers in the film: Dan Duryea’s Waco Johnny Dean and the cold-hearted, unredeemable wickedness of Stephen McNally’s Dutch Henry Brown. The former an almost balletic portrayal of psychopathic sneering and masochistic pleasure in almost any misfortune, provided it isn’t his own. McNally plays it straighter but is actually easier to dislike. The areas of  moral doubt  are in the main character and his side-kick, in the treatment of women and in the treatment of Native Americans. The latter two seem to conform to the established practice of an unenlightened age. Shelley Winters is treated dreadfully by almost everyone and comes through the ordeal as a result of inner strength. What makes this film different is that we condemn what happens to her as not just wrong, but outrageously wrong, and by the stoical strength and flashes of anger that Winters displays in a remarkable performance.

Native Americans continue to be treated badly in the movie but there is at least some explanation why they are so ready to attack. It is the beginning of the movement that will seek a true telling of American history. What progress there has been can be measured by how ridiculous ( offensive even) we find the casting of a white man (Rock Hudson) as Chief Young Bull.

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Rock Hudson

Today, it is easy to point out the unacceptability of having a white man play a Native American. Rightly it has become accepted as just plain wrong. We can either condemn the earlier age for its uncomfortable views on race, or thank our luck to be living at a time that has, despite continued toleration of manifest injustices, learnt to respect the right of black actors to play black roles. Let us Brits not be too virtuous about it. Our track record in England isn’t all that good. It is only in the last decade that we have seen that black actors may be considered for any Shakespearean role and not just Othello and it’s only two decades since Othello was the only role considered suitable at all. Prior to that black actors were simply not considered. In 1965 Laurence Olivier blacked up to play an entirely unconvincing Moor. Anthony Hopkins applied the Leichner Number 7 as recently as 1981 and looked and fared no better.

It still goes on. Jake Gyllenhaal is a fine actor but what is he doing as the Prince of Persia. Ridley Scott would have been lambasted for casting Anglos as Egyptians if Exodus: Gods and Kings hadn’t already been lambasted for being bloody awful. And while I’m on the subject, what is Joseph Gordon-Levitt doing aping a French accent and pretending to be a tight-rope walker when Man on Wire already exists, is a brilliant film and stars the real (Philippe Petit) man who walked between the twin towers?

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James Stewart (Lin McAdam) gets the better of Dan Duryea (Waco Johnny Dean)

Winchester ’73 introduces the morally ambiguous hero. There is no more affable fellow in the film than Lin McAdam just so long as his brother isn’t in the same room. He is an almost wholly good man. He is loyal and considerate. He bravely steps in to halt the obvious injustice of bundling a lady into a stagecoach against her wishes. He joins with the lost cause of fighting with the massively outnumbered cavalry troop and we discover that he (and High Spade) had fought bravely in defeat in the Civil War. Yet he cannot let go of his quest. One mention of Dutch Henry and his face contorts into violence and rage. The red mist descends. He is quite capable of almost any deed when in this state. And we gather that such anger is a regularly recurring state of mind. They say that when you go after vengeance you should carry two shovels: one for your victim’s grave and one for your own. McAdam’s unstoppable need for revenge results in a lot more than two deaths. There is nothing attractive, good or decent about this quest. These are Old Testament Westerns. Right and wrong depends as much on who is doing it as what is being done.

Millard Mitchell as High Spade Frankie Wilson

Millard Mitchell as High Spade Frankie Wilson

High Spade Frankie Wilson is an interesting character. At times he seems to be a calming figure and yet he has ridden with McAdam for years in this mad pursuit. He seem balanced and the exchanges between them can be fast and very funny. They both have a highly developed sense of irony and both appear to have an equally developed sense of right and wrong. Stewart’s character is doing it all to avenge his father’s memory (a father shot in the back by Matthew McAdam  a.k.a. Dutch Henry) and yet the father’s contribution to parenting seems to have been to teach them both how to track and shoot and turned out a couple of killers. And yet we (rightly?) admire one of the sons and despise the other. We cannot reach this judgement without a complex moral argument with ourselves and it is in this internal debate that the greatness of the film lies.

What is High Spade’s role. In the previous post I suggested he was side-kick and psychiatric nurse. There is always a question of possible homosexuality (either spiritual or physical) when the buddy relationship is as close as this one. Neither man seems particularly interested in the beautiful woman who is making strong advances on them. Is he a platonic lover? Is he a servant? A sort of Sancho Panza to Stewart’s Don Quixote? Or is he a device for telling the story. We find out far more about McAdam from High Spade than we do from the  man himself. I would suggest the answer is most of the above. If you are familiar with Anthony Mann westerns you will find the storyteller sidekick is a recurring feature and quite often the sidekick is played by Millard Mitchell.

Shelley Winters as Lola Manners

Shelley Winters as Lola Manners

Shelley Winters later joked that the men were so set on shooting and gaining revenge that, for all they noticed, she might as well not be in the picture. It was a joke. Without Lola this film doesn’t look forward. She is in many ways the development of the character Dallas, played so wonderfully by Claire Trevor in Stagecoach. The whore with the heart of gold. But the character has moved on. She’s both tougher and more resigned to her lot. To say she has been unlucky with men is a powerful understatement. It is no wonder that she is prepared to take a gamble on the obviously unbalanced hero.

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As for cinematography. Just sit back and enjoy. Seldom will you see so many different shades in a black and white movie. And never will you see depth of focus to match this. It’s like spearing fish through fathoms of crystal water. In the vast hill country you can make out the individual hairs on a characters head while picking out the twigs on far away trees. In the city scene you can focus in on the uneven hairs of Will Geer’s moustache or pick out almost as much detail on the people standing on a distant balcony. Dialogue has an importance here but there are several sections where barely a word is spoken for whole pages of script. Mann, like Ford and Hitchcock believed in the primacy of the visual image in telling the story. I think you could watch Winchester ’73 without hearing the words and not lose too much of the glory of the film.

 

 

 

 

 

Winchester ’73 (1950) : Part One

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by simon682 in Uncategorized, Western Approaches

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Anthony Mann, james stewart, john wayne, Martin Scorcese, stagecoach, The Searchers, winchester '73

The Good, The Bad and the Deeply Troubled (and that’s just the main character!)

There was a perceived movement towards increasing violence in westerns as the genre developed. Some said it was a case of producers and directors outdoing each other, and there may be something in that. But violence has always been present in epic literature; be it poetry, drama or film. Sophocles is violent, Paradise Lost is violent, King Lear and Macbeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are violent. Anthony Mann described Shakespeare as “The most violent writer who has ever been”. The violence didn’t become more violent during the century but the portrayal of the effects certainly did. And Anthony Mann is quite possibly the man to credit or blame.

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Wayne as Captain Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Between 1939 and 1962 John Ford had elevated the western to the first order of films: films that had something to say about the human condition as well as entertaining with action and tense storylines. Films where we saw real people. People who are shaped by their experience of justice or injustice, comedy or tragedy. You can watch a deepening and darkening of Ford’s view of mankind in the way he used his main star; John Wayne. In Stagecoach, the Ringo Kid is a good hearted young man, hurt by events and determined on vengeance while losing none of his humanity towards those not directly associated with his quest. (Though he can shoot a dozen Apaches without qualm or conscience.) Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon ten years later is gruff and grizzled, tough and fatherly with a more ambivalent attitude to the native population. By the time we get to The Searchers in 1956, Ford and Wayne had discovered a complexity of character to compare with the truly great writers. Ethan Edwards  is both hero and monster. It’s a troubling and inspirational film and Wayne is superb. There is a great deal to fear in the world of this movie and the most fearsome thing of all is the dark underside of Ethan Edwards. (Reflecting, as it does, a dark underside to society.)

Stagecoach 1939

Stagecoach

The Searchers 2

The Searchers 1956

Almost as if to emphasise that the change between Ringo and Edwards is internal, Ford had Wayne dressed almost identically in the two films.

Westerns were now hitting maturity and other great directors were making their contributions, inspiring each other to greater things: though they often set the bar pretty high with their first attempts. One such was Anthony Mann. Here was someone who transferred the pattern of shadows, that had been created by lighting and set designers, into the very characters themselves. It was the dawn of the psychological western, the continually shifting patterns of darkness and light were now internalised and Mann was to play a masterstroke; albeit unintentionally: he got James Stewart.

Universal Studios wanted to make Harvey, the story of a man who converses with a giant invisible rabbit. It had been a huge hit on Broadway and they were sure it would be a box office success as a film. They also had a screenplay called Winchester ’73 that had been knocking around for years looking for a star name. They wanted James Stewart to transfer his stage role with the talking rabbit and tied him to a double deal with the western. A young untried director was taken on. It was to be a low budget film. A make-weight in the deal. To say it exceeded expectations is a considerable understatement. Not only did it recoup production costs many time over but it also resurrected Stewart’s career which had suffered a string of flops (including It’s a Wonderful Life – which only reached its status as a much loved classic 30 years later) in the years following the war.

Winchester '73So Mann had the much loved gentle actor with a bumbling delivery playing the part of a man on a mission to kill. The public were about to see a side of Stewart that was troubled, dark and brooding. There is no more engaging actor to watch in his hesitant, thoughtful, whimsical mode but, as Mann was the first to discover, there are few more disturbing actors than Stewart when you open up seams of pain, resentment, anger and vengeance. On the surface we are watching a homely, even comic western. Underneath things are very different.

“While John Ford only alluded to the dark side, Anthony Mann dwelt in it. The mythology of the frontier, of a land in perpetual expansion, has given way to greed, vengeance, megalomania, sadistic violence.”                       (Martin Scorcese)

Winchester ’73 opens with a familiar world. An excited crowd gather around a shop window to admire a rifle. Young boys are the first to eulogise but it soon passes on to their elders. Each admires it in their own way. This is the tradition of portraying the gun as a status symbol, an aspect of being grown-up and in an unspoken way, a human right enshrined in the constitution. It is only the start of the journey. The framework of the film will follow the gun through several owners. The hidden story of the film is what people do with guns and what guns do to people. It became an important question with individual film-makers providing their own answers – or, more accurately, their own ways of re-stating the question. George Stevens asks his questions in Shane, Clint Eastwood finds his most eloquent approach in Unforgiven.

This is no ordinary gun. This is “the gun that tamed the West” and this is the most perfect, the one in a thousand, model of this gun. People covet the weapon, fight for it and die for it. The point is unspoken and shouted at the same time. It’s guns that kill people not people.

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Will Geer as Wyatt Earp

Once the gun has been introduced we see Lin McAdam (James Stewart) and High Spade (Millard Mitchell) amiably smiling and joshing and we seem all set for a comedy. The sense of comedy is enhanced by the peculiar portrayal of Wyatt Earp by veteran character actor Will Geer. He’s clearing Shelley Winters out of the way for the July 4th celebrations. Wyatt Earp has been portrayed in many different ways in westerns but rarely in a manner so out of keeping with the legend. This Earp is amiable, ubiquitous and safe. We seem to be heading in the direction of family viewing, but its a blind. Earp’s affability and measured control is contrasted with hints of McAdam’s troubled past. It doesn’t take long to realise that looking into Stewart’s eyes is like looking into caves of flickering shadows. The apparent happy-go-lucky nature of the two friends is more than that. It is a buddy movie but High Spade is more than a close friend. He’s there to act as a minder; a psychiatric nurse. McAdam needs looking after.

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Millard Mitchell’s smiles belie his understanding of the troubled Lin McAdam

The director hurries through the exposition. We learn that McAdam is a man on a mission to gain revenge for the death of his father. We are introduced to his prey. The two make no effort to avoid each other, indeed they both enter the shooting competition to win the eponymous rifle.

At the end of the first five minutes we have a developing plot line, a rapidly developing back story, a couple of western legends (Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson), a hero, the hero’s sidekick and a villain. But with Anthony Mann the lines between hero and villain can become blurred.

As Anthony Mann himself said:

“He was a man who could kill his own brother so therefore he was not really a hero.”

Martin Scorcese sums it up rather well:

“Anthony Mann’s brooding heroes were no saints, seeking revenge was their obsession, an obsession that would consume and nearly destroy them. Even James Stewart, the All American hero of Frank Capra’s fables, succumbs to outbursts of savage violence.”

thumb_anthony-mann

Anthony Mann

Shakespeare’s greatest plays are psychological dramas containing a huge amount of violence. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello all have the main character wracked with demons and uncertainties and the stage scattered with bodies. Anthony Mann was a profound student of literature and an enormous fan of the Bard. We don’t actually believe we are watching murders, killings and assassinations on the Stratford stage. We are deeply affected by the violence. The violence is necessary to feeling, and therefore understanding the plays. Anthony Mann came very close to capturing the essence of this in his films. The westerns he made during the 1950s are some of the best ever produced. I don’t think it foolish to compare them with the very greatest works of drama.

 

 

 

Cowboys on the Screen

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by simon682 in Uncategorized, Western Approaches

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

101 dalmations, cinemascope, henry fonda, james stewart, john wayne, technicolor, westerns

Western Approaches : Episode Two

At the Movies

Going to the cinema was a big event in our family. It happened only twice; once to see a film of the Tokyo Olympic games a good three years after the games had taken place and once to see 101 Dalmations. Family legend allows that this happened somewhere 0fe6759864a7e58a18a6a02ec8e8a40bin Scotland in the early 60s and that we took the dog. In fact, everybody took their dog to the cinema and the midnight barking on the film was enjoined by hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves all howling and barking in a Scottish accent. I’m not able to provide conclusive proof of the story but I’m not going to start disbelieving it now. In my mind I have a clear memory of a hundred dogs all with their paws on the seat in front and glued to the screen. The fact that some of the dogs in my image bear an uncanny resemblance to Huckleberry Hound, Scooby Doo and the bulldog out of Tom and Jerry in no way indicates that I’m confusing memory with imagination. Many philosophers and writers would say that they are the same thing anyway.

I never saw a cowboy on the big screen until I was 16. I’ve tried to make up for it since. Unfortunately cowboys had been a staple of the film-maker’s output right up until I was 16. Since then they have become an occasional treat. The problem doesn’t lie with the film-makers. They love westerns. They know that the west is where to head if you really want to tell a story where history and mythology mingle (and where else would a sensible person want to centre a story?) The problem lies with the movie-goer. They want their films to be set in schools (where student types are identifiable – only a little bit older and a sight more beautiful than those from any real school) or modern cities where guns and drugs are in the foreground and people buying newspapers and going to work and chatting about the weather have been shifted into the shadows.

4-101dal0022panThe golden age, or the hey-day of the western was back in the forties and fifties. There have been some very good westerns in recent times (The Assassination of Jesse James, The Unforgiven, There Will Be Blood, Brokeback Mountain, Tombstone… ok I’m stretching the meaning of recent) but they have been strictly filed under minority interest. One of the down sides of this is that we no longer have western heroes either actors or characters. No modern actor is remembered primarily for a western role. Under twenties may have heard of William Bonney or the Sundance Kid but they don’t want to be them. It must be a while since anyone woke up on Christmas morning to find a cowboy outfit at the foot of the bed. Unless, that is, they’d bumped into a festive hen party and got lucky.

the-assassination-of-jesse-james-by-the-coward-robert-ford-jeremy-renner-18446528-853-480Cowboy hats are a niche item of clothing. You’ll find plenty if you go to a festival of Americana or wander the streets of seaside towns on a Friday night. I had a friend (a term used in the loosest sense) who was in charge of stapling cartons of cakes to pallets at a well-known British bakery. He dressed in full cowboy regalia and kept his staple gun in a holster. Some considered him “a bit of a character” and some just thought him an arse. All kept their distance.

man-who-shot-liberty-valance-pdvd_01001As a boy I got my western films on the television which meant that every western I saw until I was 16 was in black and white. It didn’t matter. Many of the best films; Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Ox Bow Incident and High Noon had been made in black and white. We distinguished them from colour films in a way that seems clever to me now. We had views on whether Technicolor or De-Luxe was better even though we’d never seen anything other than monochrome. You can actually tell the difference between a made with black and white film and a colour film shown in black and white. It may seem negligible but it isn’t. I’d compare it to those music lovers who have returned to vinyl and analogue because they say cds and digital don’t have the right sound. The same was true of screen ratios. Television companies couldn’t make up they minds over Cinemascope in those long before wide screen television days. Half the time we had the picture scrunched up to fit the 4:3 screen (an advantage was that diminutive actors like Alan Ladd and Richard Widmark looked more imposing) and half the time we watched the film through a letter box. I much preferred the latter. Not only did we get the full picture but, for someone who longed to go to the cinema but found it beyond the family purse, it gave the feeling of something different. At the end of the film I genuinely felt that my experience had been enhanced by Technicolor and Cinemascope.

TwoRodeRiverSceneThese days I’m not too bothered whether the film ratios are respected by the projectionist. I prefer it if they do but it isn’t a big issue with me. They always get it right in the Showroom (Sheffield) where the end of the trailers is announced by an adjustment of the side curtains to accommodate the selected screen size and ratio. They don’t always do this at the multiplex (though they do it more often than Mark Kermode would have you believe) but there the screens are much bigger, the chairs have more leg-room, the Baskin-Robbins Lucky 8 ice-cream is more plentiful and you don’t have to put up with the endless whispered conversations of a bunch of pompous twerps as you settle down to the movie. (If you’ve ever wanted to know if working class or educated middle class people are better mannered I’d suggest  trips to multiplex and arts cinemas as a good place to start.)

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Right from the beginning there was a big difference between these 2 hour feature films and the episodes of tv westerns. Both absorbed me but in different ways. You had to do a lot more work with the films and I liked that. On the telly most of the exposition had been done by previous episodes. We didn’t even need to do much work with new characters. We only had to wait and see if Trampas and the Virginian liked or disliked them to know if we were going to like or dislike them. On films we had to establish the who, the where, when, what and why. There was a shorthand. If the film had been made before 1950 then any native American was going to be a bad guy, John Wayne was always on the side of right though not necessarily on the right side of the law, as was James Stewart and Henry Fonda; women were always in a subservient role and the cavalry would always ride in to save the day at the last minute (accompanied by a tootling bugle being played by a rider galloping at improbably high speed).

010-john-wayneFilms divided into categories. The most obvious was according to the star actor. There were certain expectations of a John Wayne film (and the BBC certainly loved the Duke). There were cowboys and indians, gunfighter films, based on a true story films, films involving the army (invariably the 7th Cavalry), log cabin (pioneer and homesteading) films, journey films which included cattle drives and outlaw films. These sub-divided. If it was a cowboys and indian film we wanted to know which tribe was featured. There were over 550 tribes, nations and pueblos of native Americans. Film makers stuck to a very few. They divided into two; friendly and unfriendly. The Navajo and the Mohican were on our side (yes there was an our side) and the Cheyenne, Apache and Sioux were to be feared. In the playground at school little boys in the north of England would argue over who were the scariest indians. It was generally agreed that it was the Apache and these were the tribe we’d pretend to be when we climbed the hills once the school bell had gone. If you were very lucky you’d get to play the part of Geronimo. (This largely consisted of jumping off boulders onto people shouting “Geronimo”. A limited but most rewarding role!) Even in the face of Hollywood and accepted protocol I had a feeling that the warriors and braves of the tribes were victims of a propaganda machine.

048-Geronimo,xlarge.1403597864Westerns allowed us to go against the law. Nobody wanted to work for the Pinkerton Agency in our games. We all wanted to be Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Curly Bill Brocius, Billy the Kid or Doc Holliday. We liked gunslingers, six-shooters and gunfights enormously. Westerns showed us that shooting and playing were much the same thing. A single shot could bring down three bad guys, cowboys never missed and (most important of all) death was clean (remember, in my world even blood was grey not red). It wasn’t until I encountered the westerns of Sam Peckinpah that the west began to take on a heavier perspective. If you were shot in a James Stewart sort of a way you had time to stage a dramatic death (always falling forward)  and be in a fit state to count to seven and become alive again. If you were shot in a  Peckinpah way you stayed dead.

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