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All I want is to enter my house justified
[The following post was begun around two in the morning and then my brain hit a wall. I dreamed of a haunting that had something to do with subways and marigolds. A few days ago I saw a car crossing the Alewife Brook Parkway wreathed in yellow and orange flowers and wondered if it was for a wedding, but I don't think that was where it came from.]
I got six hours of sleep last night, so of course tonight I stayed awake for my second midnight movie in a row. I am nowhere near as articulate as I would like to be right now. On the bright side, I don't have to feel bad for Randolph Scott anymore. I last saw him in Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941), a movie I truly cannot recommend to anyone except fans of embarrassing racist humor.1 On the recommendation of David the projectionist, I just watched Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962), Scott's last film and his favorite of a thirty-four-year career. He might have been on to something.
The thing that makes Ride the High Country difficult to describe is the way it changes over its runtime, as if we were watching the Western genre itself evolve in ninety-four minutes; it sets itself up like a simpler and much more familiar kind of movie than it closes as. Sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century, aging former lawman Steve Judd (Joel McCrea, unshowy and really good) is hired to safeguard a shipment of gold from the mining camp of Coarsegold to the town of Hornitos. It's comedown work from his heyday as a town-tamer, but it's better than he's had in years; he's still a tall man, still a strong man, but his hair is grey and his clothes are frayed and he needs to put on spectacles in private to examine the fine print of his contract with the bank. Riding amiably up the streets of Hornitos, he's all but run over by a newfangled motor car, the classic symbol of progress and modern speed. An aggrieved policeman shouting, "Can't you see you're in the way? Watch out, old-timer!" sounds like the film stating its thesis in the first thirty seconds. (Just in case we didn't get it, the president of the bank was expecting a much younger man. Steve responds gravely, "I used to be.") Steve's past achievements are unquestionable, but his future is dubious. The obvious direction for the film is an exploration of the changing face of the West as personified by one man's crisis. The four days into the high Sierras and back will be the crucible: will Steve still have what it takes to get the gold safely to Hornitos, and if he doesn't, what does that mean for the way of life which he embodies—strong, stoic, decent, hard-won?
But that's not it at all. Almost as soon as this pattern settles in the audience's mind, the film begins to bend away from it, almost aimlessly; it doesn't undermine its own clichés so much as lose interest in them. We can start with Scott, playing beautifully against type2 as Steve's former deputy Gil Westrum, these days a carnival con man passing himself off as the unbeatable "Oregon Kid" with a nickel-palming patter and false whiskers straight out of Buffalo Bill's Wild Central Casting. His lean good looks have weathered into a droll grey fox's face, rake-browed and curiously difficult to read for all his amiable disposition and cynical humor; he is not trustworthy and neither is he the villain of the piece, though for a while it looks like the story might be drifting that way, positioning the once-fast friends on opposite sides of the moral divide. Between the two of them falls Gil's young sidekick, cocky, callow Heck Longtree (Ron Starr), who races a mean camel but doesn't know how to rein in his own impulsive behaviors. Are we in for a psychomachia, then, with Steve and Gil playing good and bad angels to the undecided soul? By the time the party halts for the night at the farmhouse of repressively religious Joshua Knudsen (R.G. Armstrong) and his rebellious daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley), there are Bible quotes flying quick and fast over the dinner table, but the man of God is even less of a role model than sly Gil, who follows up a compliment on Elsa's cooking with a straight-faced glance at her father: "Appetite, Chapter 1." And by the time Elsa is being married to her miner fiancé and his four lascivious brothers in a raucous, parodic ceremony that plays like the brutal takedown Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) really had coming,3 we are very nearly in a different movie altogether, as jaggedly plotted as real life where curveballs have nothing to do with dramatic irony and violence is not something performed by firing blanks at twenty paces. The plot doesn't lose sight of its original threads. There's a showdown at the climax, and a resolution to the questions of Gil's honesty and Steve's steadfastness and Heck's uncertain maturity, and we even know by the end whether those eleven thousand dollars in gold will get back to Hornitos; this isn't the Western L'avventura (1960). But the emotional tone is very different by then, and for that matter so is the cinematography, and Ride the High Country transitions so reasonably from one style to another that only in hindsight does it become clear how much more complex a world the characters inhabit by the finale than they did at the outset. Against that wider backdrop, the ostensible goal is almost an afterthought.
I knew going in that Peckinpah had changed the original ending of the film. I didn't have any hints as to how. Viewed in context of the Production Code, it's really obvious: he changed who dies. In the final shootout between the protagonists and the vengeful Hammonds, who have tracked Elsa all the way to her father's homestead (killed her father, stationed themselves in the house to gun down her rescuers and reclaim her; it almost works except that Elsa realizes her apparently praying father is in the wrong place at the wrong time), Steve is fatally wounded; Gil is left to take on his old friend's responsibilities. "I'll take care of it," he promises, "just like you would have." That means delivering the gold to Hornitos instead of stealing it as he planned all along; that means burying Steve, who never expected grateful crowds weeping at his graveside; that may even mean looking after Heck and Elsa, at least as far as town where the young couple can begin to make their new lives. By the conventions of their genre, Gil should have been the one bleeding out in the dust, his last-minute heroism paying off his betrayal of his old partner, redeeming his wicked ways with his death. That's the standard moral exchange; I have hated it for years and I rejoice to see it subverted wherever I can, because it's still all too common, thank you, ghosts of Hays and Breen. Instead the man who wanted to enter his house justified does so with a death as principled as he always hoped to make his life and the man who double-crossed an old friend twice finds he can't do it a third time; he'll have to pay back his debt by living. It's elegiac, but it's not grim. And it's a great deal more complicated than the expected apportionment of ends. I wouldn't have liked the movie anywhere near as much as I did without it.
I might change my opinion when I've watched more widely in the genre, but I find myself thinking of Ride the High Country as a half-revisionist Western—it's not a total deconstruction, but it's not uncritical, either. Its violence is not graphic, but it's deliberately not bloodless; it is sympathetic to its female character's restricted range of bad options; it does not romanticize its lawlessness. It's an autumnal movie, the landscape through which its characters ride shivering aspen-gold and wind-scoured blue skies. In his one moment of lucidity, the alcoholic judge who performs Elsa's wedding speaks touchingly of the hard work and rewards of a good marriage, which he likens to "a rare animal . . . You see, people change. That's important for you to know at the beginning. People change." So do stories, sometimes even while you're watching them. This meditation sponsored by my patient backers at Patreon.
1. Seriously, I had to see Rancho Notorious (1952) before I stopped feeling uncomfortable about the concept of a Lang Western. Remind me to talk about that movie, too; it has an inexplicable theme song, but it's great.
2. He switched roles with McCrea.
3. With his clean-cut smile and his startled delight at Elsa's arrival, James Drury's Billy Hammond looks like the diamond in the rough of his unwashed, leering clan, but no amount of feminine influence is going to civilize any of them into chivalrous dancers. The grotesquerie of Elsa's wedding in Coarsegold tells her exactly what will be expected of her as Billy's wife—a bride-bed in the local brothel, a madam for a maid of honor and four prostitutes for flower girls, and four grinning brothers-in-law more than willing to supply the deflowering when her new-wedded husband drunkenly knocks himself out before he can do more than tear her dress and slap her around for trying to fight him off. I find Elsa a curiously opaque character for all that she's the catalyst for the second half of the film, but it's a point in the script's favor that we are not encouraged to despise her either for trying to escape her father by marrying or for trying to escape her marriage once its horrific nature becomes clear. It is the moral thing for Steve to take her with him when he leaves Coarsegold, never mind that she's bound legally to Billy and the miner's court found in her favor only thanks to some judicious strong-arming from Gil. It went some way toward amending the earlier scene where Heck gets way closer to date rape than makes me feel kindly toward a character and Elsa apologizes afterward for leading him on and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I shouted at the screen.
I got six hours of sleep last night, so of course tonight I stayed awake for my second midnight movie in a row. I am nowhere near as articulate as I would like to be right now. On the bright side, I don't have to feel bad for Randolph Scott anymore. I last saw him in Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941), a movie I truly cannot recommend to anyone except fans of embarrassing racist humor.1 On the recommendation of David the projectionist, I just watched Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962), Scott's last film and his favorite of a thirty-four-year career. He might have been on to something.
The thing that makes Ride the High Country difficult to describe is the way it changes over its runtime, as if we were watching the Western genre itself evolve in ninety-four minutes; it sets itself up like a simpler and much more familiar kind of movie than it closes as. Sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century, aging former lawman Steve Judd (Joel McCrea, unshowy and really good) is hired to safeguard a shipment of gold from the mining camp of Coarsegold to the town of Hornitos. It's comedown work from his heyday as a town-tamer, but it's better than he's had in years; he's still a tall man, still a strong man, but his hair is grey and his clothes are frayed and he needs to put on spectacles in private to examine the fine print of his contract with the bank. Riding amiably up the streets of Hornitos, he's all but run over by a newfangled motor car, the classic symbol of progress and modern speed. An aggrieved policeman shouting, "Can't you see you're in the way? Watch out, old-timer!" sounds like the film stating its thesis in the first thirty seconds. (Just in case we didn't get it, the president of the bank was expecting a much younger man. Steve responds gravely, "I used to be.") Steve's past achievements are unquestionable, but his future is dubious. The obvious direction for the film is an exploration of the changing face of the West as personified by one man's crisis. The four days into the high Sierras and back will be the crucible: will Steve still have what it takes to get the gold safely to Hornitos, and if he doesn't, what does that mean for the way of life which he embodies—strong, stoic, decent, hard-won?
But that's not it at all. Almost as soon as this pattern settles in the audience's mind, the film begins to bend away from it, almost aimlessly; it doesn't undermine its own clichés so much as lose interest in them. We can start with Scott, playing beautifully against type2 as Steve's former deputy Gil Westrum, these days a carnival con man passing himself off as the unbeatable "Oregon Kid" with a nickel-palming patter and false whiskers straight out of Buffalo Bill's Wild Central Casting. His lean good looks have weathered into a droll grey fox's face, rake-browed and curiously difficult to read for all his amiable disposition and cynical humor; he is not trustworthy and neither is he the villain of the piece, though for a while it looks like the story might be drifting that way, positioning the once-fast friends on opposite sides of the moral divide. Between the two of them falls Gil's young sidekick, cocky, callow Heck Longtree (Ron Starr), who races a mean camel but doesn't know how to rein in his own impulsive behaviors. Are we in for a psychomachia, then, with Steve and Gil playing good and bad angels to the undecided soul? By the time the party halts for the night at the farmhouse of repressively religious Joshua Knudsen (R.G. Armstrong) and his rebellious daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley), there are Bible quotes flying quick and fast over the dinner table, but the man of God is even less of a role model than sly Gil, who follows up a compliment on Elsa's cooking with a straight-faced glance at her father: "Appetite, Chapter 1." And by the time Elsa is being married to her miner fiancé and his four lascivious brothers in a raucous, parodic ceremony that plays like the brutal takedown Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) really had coming,3 we are very nearly in a different movie altogether, as jaggedly plotted as real life where curveballs have nothing to do with dramatic irony and violence is not something performed by firing blanks at twenty paces. The plot doesn't lose sight of its original threads. There's a showdown at the climax, and a resolution to the questions of Gil's honesty and Steve's steadfastness and Heck's uncertain maturity, and we even know by the end whether those eleven thousand dollars in gold will get back to Hornitos; this isn't the Western L'avventura (1960). But the emotional tone is very different by then, and for that matter so is the cinematography, and Ride the High Country transitions so reasonably from one style to another that only in hindsight does it become clear how much more complex a world the characters inhabit by the finale than they did at the outset. Against that wider backdrop, the ostensible goal is almost an afterthought.
I knew going in that Peckinpah had changed the original ending of the film. I didn't have any hints as to how. Viewed in context of the Production Code, it's really obvious: he changed who dies. In the final shootout between the protagonists and the vengeful Hammonds, who have tracked Elsa all the way to her father's homestead (killed her father, stationed themselves in the house to gun down her rescuers and reclaim her; it almost works except that Elsa realizes her apparently praying father is in the wrong place at the wrong time), Steve is fatally wounded; Gil is left to take on his old friend's responsibilities. "I'll take care of it," he promises, "just like you would have." That means delivering the gold to Hornitos instead of stealing it as he planned all along; that means burying Steve, who never expected grateful crowds weeping at his graveside; that may even mean looking after Heck and Elsa, at least as far as town where the young couple can begin to make their new lives. By the conventions of their genre, Gil should have been the one bleeding out in the dust, his last-minute heroism paying off his betrayal of his old partner, redeeming his wicked ways with his death. That's the standard moral exchange; I have hated it for years and I rejoice to see it subverted wherever I can, because it's still all too common, thank you, ghosts of Hays and Breen. Instead the man who wanted to enter his house justified does so with a death as principled as he always hoped to make his life and the man who double-crossed an old friend twice finds he can't do it a third time; he'll have to pay back his debt by living. It's elegiac, but it's not grim. And it's a great deal more complicated than the expected apportionment of ends. I wouldn't have liked the movie anywhere near as much as I did without it.
I might change my opinion when I've watched more widely in the genre, but I find myself thinking of Ride the High Country as a half-revisionist Western—it's not a total deconstruction, but it's not uncritical, either. Its violence is not graphic, but it's deliberately not bloodless; it is sympathetic to its female character's restricted range of bad options; it does not romanticize its lawlessness. It's an autumnal movie, the landscape through which its characters ride shivering aspen-gold and wind-scoured blue skies. In his one moment of lucidity, the alcoholic judge who performs Elsa's wedding speaks touchingly of the hard work and rewards of a good marriage, which he likens to "a rare animal . . . You see, people change. That's important for you to know at the beginning. People change." So do stories, sometimes even while you're watching them. This meditation sponsored by my patient backers at Patreon.
1. Seriously, I had to see Rancho Notorious (1952) before I stopped feeling uncomfortable about the concept of a Lang Western. Remind me to talk about that movie, too; it has an inexplicable theme song, but it's great.
2. He switched roles with McCrea.
3. With his clean-cut smile and his startled delight at Elsa's arrival, James Drury's Billy Hammond looks like the diamond in the rough of his unwashed, leering clan, but no amount of feminine influence is going to civilize any of them into chivalrous dancers. The grotesquerie of Elsa's wedding in Coarsegold tells her exactly what will be expected of her as Billy's wife—a bride-bed in the local brothel, a madam for a maid of honor and four prostitutes for flower girls, and four grinning brothers-in-law more than willing to supply the deflowering when her new-wedded husband drunkenly knocks himself out before he can do more than tear her dress and slap her around for trying to fight him off. I find Elsa a curiously opaque character for all that she's the catalyst for the second half of the film, but it's a point in the script's favor that we are not encouraged to despise her either for trying to escape her father by marrying or for trying to escape her marriage once its horrific nature becomes clear. It is the moral thing for Steve to take her with him when he leaves Coarsegold, never mind that she's bound legally to Billy and the miner's court found in her favor only thanks to some judicious strong-arming from Gil. It went some way toward amending the earlier scene where Heck gets way closer to date rape than makes me feel kindly toward a character and Elsa apologizes afterward for leading him on and
derspatchel and I shouted at the screen.
no subject
no subject
Thank you! I do recommend the movie; I enjoyed it while watching and found it rewarding to think about afterward. (I'm realizing the latter is important—even fun movies that are just like well, that happened do not prove as durable for me in the long run.)
no subject
Panel?
As ever, an insightful review.
Nine
no subject
Oh, nice call. For years I've wanted a venue to discuss in the ways in which Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000) changes genres as it goes—it begins as historical fiction, passes through historical fantasy and alternate history, and ends as hard science fiction. What other books and films would you include?
[edit] Derp: the way A Canterbury Tale (1944) starts like a mystery and then ends like a mystery.
As ever, an insightful review.
Thank you. It was a really interesting movie. It felt transitional.
no subject
Yes! (It also looks for a while in the middle as though it might just detour in Wicker Man territory, but it doesn't.)