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It's not a posse, it's an armed police squad with some gringo kibitzers
The Capture (1950) is a new one on me. A Western which questions the inevitability of gun violence does not fall outside the liberal ambivalence of mid-century Hollywood, but a Western which rejects it entirely approaches a unicorn. If a gun is hanging on the wall of America, the dead hand of the Second Amendment mandates that it must go off. When it does in this offbeat, thoughtful, occasionally id-blunt picture, it doesn't stop, save, or solve a thing.
Written and produced by Niven Busch and directed by John Sturges for RKO, The Capture almost offhandedly demonstrates the futility of trying to distinguish a film noir from a psychological Western as it turns the shape-shifting skepticism of one genre on the quick-draw vigilantism so often taken for granted in the other, sharpened rather than glossed over by the modern, international interests of the setting—a wounded fugitive confessing his past to a desert priest may sound straight out of a dime-novel horse opera, but a year ago Lin Vanner (Lew Ayres) was an American engineer working the oil fields outside of Tampico, his biggest headache the recent spate of payroll thefts that had left him sarcastically wondering if he was going to have to pay his riggers with "lock washers and seashells." It takes less than ten seconds in a daybreak of dry-scrub boulders to throw him all out of kilter with his life, acclaimed by the executives of Bolsa Grande for his fearless frontier justice when he knew as soon as he pulled the trigger on a man shouting something he couldn't make out with one hand up that the shooting of Sam Tevlin (Edwin Rand) was anything but. Cleared at the inquest, sickened by the company reward of $2000, he lights out on the first train out of town which just happens to be carrying a familiar coffin to Los Santos and the ranch of Ellen Tevlin (Teresa Wright), where the combative, delicate relationship he forms with the widow and her son presently spurs him to investigate the sticky suspicion that an innocent man was set up to be swatted and Lin with the wild west ethics of a citizen's arrest spooked himself into the role of executioner. "I'd shot too soon. I hadn't given him a chance to explain about his arm." As the title catches up to the manhunt of the frame story, however, whether through the fatalism of noir, the debts of the Western, or merely his own unexorcised guilt, Lin's sense of stepping into "Sam's shoes" seems to be coming true and no genre convention can tell either the audience or the agonized onlookers whether, hunted, injured, cornered like that other man at dawn, Lin will take Sam's road or find his own.
Even Westerns that repudiate violence tend to show a lot more of it, risking glamour by sheer exposure. It doesn't feel coincidental that the gunplay in The Capture is confined to Lin's nervous trigger finger and the textually self-destructive shootout of the climax, with a couple of chases and a fatal hand-to-hand accident making up the rest of the action; there's not much chance for it to look cool as opposed to fast and scared and suicidal. Despite the brooding hindsight of Lin's narration, the fatal shooting is staged without flair. It's over with the speed of stupidity: "Get your hands up!" Lin is yelling up the slope of the pass at the man who's yelling down at him, their voices bouncing and tangling off the distance until it's likely they are communicating only in the visuals of a drawn gun and a waving hand. "Both of them! Over your head! Get them up!" He fires without further warning, finds at the end of his climb one of his own denim-jacketed former riggers with an arm too busted to lift even as far as his shoulder and the truculent greeting, "Some posse man, shooting a guy with his hands up." Neither of them knows as Lin helps him down to his horse and then a waiting car that Sam is bleeding out already, plugged under the arm he had raised. It goes without saying that he was packing no heat of his own. Without reaching as far into horror as Try and Get Me! (1950) or as deep into fetishism as Gun Crazy (1950), Busch's screenplay casts a maximally jaundiced eye on the American entitlement to lethal force, the myth of the gun as an equalizer rather than an accelerant with all its concomitant anxieties of masculinity and freedom. "So I'm chicken," Lin deflects the peer pressure of joining the posse formed by no less an authority than a visiting VP, but even when he strikes out on his own like a loner of the classical West to test his conjecture of the suspect's whereabouts, he can't shake the feeling that he's been dared into it "like a kid turning handsprings on his girl's front lawn or something." He's playing cops and robbers with a borrowed horse and a gun on loan and however it raises his credit with the head office, he's mocked for it by the man he tracks down: "And I know you, Mr. Vanner, and you don't act no different now than when you were down at the plant." Shrewdly, the film takes care to frame Lin as a competent sort of everyman rather than uniquely ill-suited for a brush with violence; he's well-educated and well-traveled, as handy around an oil rig as a ranch or a tramp steamer, emotionally perceptive and more than credibly romantic as the plot comes around to require it; he's even good with children and the instant he has a gun in his hand, he turns into a dangerous idiot. It forestalls any hint of the popular apologia of the lawfully neutral gun, a necessary and life-preserving tool in the right hands. Watching Lin rather suggests that anyone's hands become the wrong hands with a gun in them, the world tapering to a succession of zero-sum choices of shooting or being shot. Not once does he try to defend the killing of Sam Tevlin as an act of manhood or even an excusable mistake, shameful beyond the specter of his quarry's innocence: "I think I shot too soon . . . I thought he was playing a trick on me." And yet as if the convenience of its violence were contagious, when precipitated into less incriminating circumstances than those which impelled him to need to clear a dead man's name in the first place, this same man who once asked sincerely, "What would I want a gun for?" grabs up the revolver that would have been used on him, justifying it as "something to fight with if I got caught." As he prepares to do just that with the federales on the other side of the door, Father Gomez (Victor Jory) observes with heroic understatement, "For a man of your intelligence, that is a poor decision."
I would love to be pointed toward any examples to the contrary, but I cannot recall encountering another Western of this era whose successful resolution requires the defusing of a violent situation exactly as the protagonist was unable to do at the start of his journey, where the reclamation of his integrity as a man does not depend on picking up a gun and using it the right way this time, but on literally laying it down and making the first unarmed move, accepting the contrapasso risk of death at the hands of strangers who might open fire as heedlessly as his former self. "It's the full circle. This was in the cards. It had to come out this way, right from the very first." There's a touch of conversion disorder in the dead weight of his right arm which he only snagged on some barbed wire in the course of his flight, which he can't raise to surrender and save himself until he's used it first and instinctively to save someone else, but it's of a noirish piece with Lin's ultimate consent to be arrested as if paying for his earlier crime, the Pony Express always ringing twice. "We haven't lost," Ellen urges him to understand as he stares at his own hand gripping her arm where he pulled her out of the line of fire, "we've won. We can live!" It's an open ending, but not an un-optimistic one, even without a priest backing his decision along with his wife. There's no Christian, sacrificial symbolism, merely the recognition that justice does not reside in shooting first and remembering about questions later. It's a valuable moral. Could stand to be less rare.
It does not please me to have to report that once again the love angle is the least integrated into the plot. Wright was married to Busch at the time of filming and he gives her several welcomely spiky notes in her characterization of a widow drawn to her husband's murderer, such as the fact that while Lin tries to conceal his identity from her, Ellen finds a telltale newspaper clipping in his wallet on his first morning as her new ranch foreman and neither of them admits the truth while they feint around their mutual attraction and the complicating factor that her long-distance marriage to Sam may actually have been so damaged that she has no idea of how to conduct a healthy relationship even with a man she isn't working out a mixed lot of feelings on. When they trade accusations of cowardice and hypocrisy, it's the rawest scene in the film, which is part of the problem; there's too much banked behind their confrontation for it to resolve so instantly in a clinch, as if sexual chemistry conquers all without benefit of emotional processing, and it feels even more slingshot as subsequent developments make clear that the romance is the necessary trigger for Lin's creeping impression of being on the wheel of another man's life. "Sam's wife, Sam's kid—" Much less instrumental and so perhaps less forced are his interactions with Mike Tevlin (Jimmy Hunt), at first scornfully suspicious of the easy-mannered newcomer because he wears the wrong boots for a cowboy, gradually coming to seek him out for lullabies and an explanation of what it means to be dead, with which he wrestles like a real nine-year-old: "Heaven. What a place. I bet you nothing happens up there much." When Mike is teased by the local children for being the son of a "bandito," Lin is even more stricken than if he were the one being accused. The entire theme of The Capture raises the obvious and unanswerable question of whether Ayres was drawn to the part or sought for it because of his pacifist convictions, but it really is striking how unpreachily and yet consistently the film does not equate courage with violence. Even as Lin is trying to clarify without denying his role in her husband's death, Ellen interrupts him with a contempt that's meant to wound: "And you got the shakes . . . Men who get the shakes shouldn't go on posse rides. They should clean pigsties. They should crawl in the dirt." With dry restraint, holding himself more carefully and stiffly than we've seen from this small, neat-moving man, Lin responds, "I've been doing those things. I thought you knew." Whatever the truth of his nerves or his doubts, it lingers that the bravest thing he has to do in his story is not use a gun at all. Showing off his actor's real-life musicianship, he also gets to play the guitar and sing "Git Along, Little Dogies" in his soft, scratchy voice which can barely carry a tune and charms its audience completely. If you are in the market for a shirtless Lew Ayres, this film rather unexpectedly provides that, too. The rain-barrel scene is no threat to Jean Harlow, I should warn.
I am all-round fascinated by the existence of this movie, essentially. Even the politics, while not prominent, are interesting; contrary to noirs in which Mexico and its borders feature as a kind of lawless, liminal region where American rules need not apply, the crime in The Capture is of Yankee origin and points toward the exploitative behavior of American oil interests in their southerly neighbor. DP Edward Cronjager had started his career in the silents and sets up deep-shaded, day-baked shots throughout, the most chilling being the shadow of a man hanged in the bells of a Spanish mission like Hitchcock was taking notes, but the film even establishes itself with stylistic fanfare as our first good look at Lin crash-zooms in on the hunted man as he drags himself from a river, fumbling a hat and a gun from the overgrowth with his working left hand. I stumbled across it on Tubi, but I bet it looks a lot better on the Film Detective's Blu-Ray/DVD—in its unrestored form, it can also be found on YouTube. I don't even want to regard it as an artifact of naïveté when it seems so unusual and assertive in a genre where even a pacifist can have to blow a bad man away. I might double-feature it with Suddenly (1954) as a Janus-edged study in American gun culture, God help us. This circle brought to you by my turning backers at Patreon.
Written and produced by Niven Busch and directed by John Sturges for RKO, The Capture almost offhandedly demonstrates the futility of trying to distinguish a film noir from a psychological Western as it turns the shape-shifting skepticism of one genre on the quick-draw vigilantism so often taken for granted in the other, sharpened rather than glossed over by the modern, international interests of the setting—a wounded fugitive confessing his past to a desert priest may sound straight out of a dime-novel horse opera, but a year ago Lin Vanner (Lew Ayres) was an American engineer working the oil fields outside of Tampico, his biggest headache the recent spate of payroll thefts that had left him sarcastically wondering if he was going to have to pay his riggers with "lock washers and seashells." It takes less than ten seconds in a daybreak of dry-scrub boulders to throw him all out of kilter with his life, acclaimed by the executives of Bolsa Grande for his fearless frontier justice when he knew as soon as he pulled the trigger on a man shouting something he couldn't make out with one hand up that the shooting of Sam Tevlin (Edwin Rand) was anything but. Cleared at the inquest, sickened by the company reward of $2000, he lights out on the first train out of town which just happens to be carrying a familiar coffin to Los Santos and the ranch of Ellen Tevlin (Teresa Wright), where the combative, delicate relationship he forms with the widow and her son presently spurs him to investigate the sticky suspicion that an innocent man was set up to be swatted and Lin with the wild west ethics of a citizen's arrest spooked himself into the role of executioner. "I'd shot too soon. I hadn't given him a chance to explain about his arm." As the title catches up to the manhunt of the frame story, however, whether through the fatalism of noir, the debts of the Western, or merely his own unexorcised guilt, Lin's sense of stepping into "Sam's shoes" seems to be coming true and no genre convention can tell either the audience or the agonized onlookers whether, hunted, injured, cornered like that other man at dawn, Lin will take Sam's road or find his own.
Even Westerns that repudiate violence tend to show a lot more of it, risking glamour by sheer exposure. It doesn't feel coincidental that the gunplay in The Capture is confined to Lin's nervous trigger finger and the textually self-destructive shootout of the climax, with a couple of chases and a fatal hand-to-hand accident making up the rest of the action; there's not much chance for it to look cool as opposed to fast and scared and suicidal. Despite the brooding hindsight of Lin's narration, the fatal shooting is staged without flair. It's over with the speed of stupidity: "Get your hands up!" Lin is yelling up the slope of the pass at the man who's yelling down at him, their voices bouncing and tangling off the distance until it's likely they are communicating only in the visuals of a drawn gun and a waving hand. "Both of them! Over your head! Get them up!" He fires without further warning, finds at the end of his climb one of his own denim-jacketed former riggers with an arm too busted to lift even as far as his shoulder and the truculent greeting, "Some posse man, shooting a guy with his hands up." Neither of them knows as Lin helps him down to his horse and then a waiting car that Sam is bleeding out already, plugged under the arm he had raised. It goes without saying that he was packing no heat of his own. Without reaching as far into horror as Try and Get Me! (1950) or as deep into fetishism as Gun Crazy (1950), Busch's screenplay casts a maximally jaundiced eye on the American entitlement to lethal force, the myth of the gun as an equalizer rather than an accelerant with all its concomitant anxieties of masculinity and freedom. "So I'm chicken," Lin deflects the peer pressure of joining the posse formed by no less an authority than a visiting VP, but even when he strikes out on his own like a loner of the classical West to test his conjecture of the suspect's whereabouts, he can't shake the feeling that he's been dared into it "like a kid turning handsprings on his girl's front lawn or something." He's playing cops and robbers with a borrowed horse and a gun on loan and however it raises his credit with the head office, he's mocked for it by the man he tracks down: "And I know you, Mr. Vanner, and you don't act no different now than when you were down at the plant." Shrewdly, the film takes care to frame Lin as a competent sort of everyman rather than uniquely ill-suited for a brush with violence; he's well-educated and well-traveled, as handy around an oil rig as a ranch or a tramp steamer, emotionally perceptive and more than credibly romantic as the plot comes around to require it; he's even good with children and the instant he has a gun in his hand, he turns into a dangerous idiot. It forestalls any hint of the popular apologia of the lawfully neutral gun, a necessary and life-preserving tool in the right hands. Watching Lin rather suggests that anyone's hands become the wrong hands with a gun in them, the world tapering to a succession of zero-sum choices of shooting or being shot. Not once does he try to defend the killing of Sam Tevlin as an act of manhood or even an excusable mistake, shameful beyond the specter of his quarry's innocence: "I think I shot too soon . . . I thought he was playing a trick on me." And yet as if the convenience of its violence were contagious, when precipitated into less incriminating circumstances than those which impelled him to need to clear a dead man's name in the first place, this same man who once asked sincerely, "What would I want a gun for?" grabs up the revolver that would have been used on him, justifying it as "something to fight with if I got caught." As he prepares to do just that with the federales on the other side of the door, Father Gomez (Victor Jory) observes with heroic understatement, "For a man of your intelligence, that is a poor decision."
I would love to be pointed toward any examples to the contrary, but I cannot recall encountering another Western of this era whose successful resolution requires the defusing of a violent situation exactly as the protagonist was unable to do at the start of his journey, where the reclamation of his integrity as a man does not depend on picking up a gun and using it the right way this time, but on literally laying it down and making the first unarmed move, accepting the contrapasso risk of death at the hands of strangers who might open fire as heedlessly as his former self. "It's the full circle. This was in the cards. It had to come out this way, right from the very first." There's a touch of conversion disorder in the dead weight of his right arm which he only snagged on some barbed wire in the course of his flight, which he can't raise to surrender and save himself until he's used it first and instinctively to save someone else, but it's of a noirish piece with Lin's ultimate consent to be arrested as if paying for his earlier crime, the Pony Express always ringing twice. "We haven't lost," Ellen urges him to understand as he stares at his own hand gripping her arm where he pulled her out of the line of fire, "we've won. We can live!" It's an open ending, but not an un-optimistic one, even without a priest backing his decision along with his wife. There's no Christian, sacrificial symbolism, merely the recognition that justice does not reside in shooting first and remembering about questions later. It's a valuable moral. Could stand to be less rare.
It does not please me to have to report that once again the love angle is the least integrated into the plot. Wright was married to Busch at the time of filming and he gives her several welcomely spiky notes in her characterization of a widow drawn to her husband's murderer, such as the fact that while Lin tries to conceal his identity from her, Ellen finds a telltale newspaper clipping in his wallet on his first morning as her new ranch foreman and neither of them admits the truth while they feint around their mutual attraction and the complicating factor that her long-distance marriage to Sam may actually have been so damaged that she has no idea of how to conduct a healthy relationship even with a man she isn't working out a mixed lot of feelings on. When they trade accusations of cowardice and hypocrisy, it's the rawest scene in the film, which is part of the problem; there's too much banked behind their confrontation for it to resolve so instantly in a clinch, as if sexual chemistry conquers all without benefit of emotional processing, and it feels even more slingshot as subsequent developments make clear that the romance is the necessary trigger for Lin's creeping impression of being on the wheel of another man's life. "Sam's wife, Sam's kid—" Much less instrumental and so perhaps less forced are his interactions with Mike Tevlin (Jimmy Hunt), at first scornfully suspicious of the easy-mannered newcomer because he wears the wrong boots for a cowboy, gradually coming to seek him out for lullabies and an explanation of what it means to be dead, with which he wrestles like a real nine-year-old: "Heaven. What a place. I bet you nothing happens up there much." When Mike is teased by the local children for being the son of a "bandito," Lin is even more stricken than if he were the one being accused. The entire theme of The Capture raises the obvious and unanswerable question of whether Ayres was drawn to the part or sought for it because of his pacifist convictions, but it really is striking how unpreachily and yet consistently the film does not equate courage with violence. Even as Lin is trying to clarify without denying his role in her husband's death, Ellen interrupts him with a contempt that's meant to wound: "And you got the shakes . . . Men who get the shakes shouldn't go on posse rides. They should clean pigsties. They should crawl in the dirt." With dry restraint, holding himself more carefully and stiffly than we've seen from this small, neat-moving man, Lin responds, "I've been doing those things. I thought you knew." Whatever the truth of his nerves or his doubts, it lingers that the bravest thing he has to do in his story is not use a gun at all. Showing off his actor's real-life musicianship, he also gets to play the guitar and sing "Git Along, Little Dogies" in his soft, scratchy voice which can barely carry a tune and charms its audience completely. If you are in the market for a shirtless Lew Ayres, this film rather unexpectedly provides that, too. The rain-barrel scene is no threat to Jean Harlow, I should warn.
I am all-round fascinated by the existence of this movie, essentially. Even the politics, while not prominent, are interesting; contrary to noirs in which Mexico and its borders feature as a kind of lawless, liminal region where American rules need not apply, the crime in The Capture is of Yankee origin and points toward the exploitative behavior of American oil interests in their southerly neighbor. DP Edward Cronjager had started his career in the silents and sets up deep-shaded, day-baked shots throughout, the most chilling being the shadow of a man hanged in the bells of a Spanish mission like Hitchcock was taking notes, but the film even establishes itself with stylistic fanfare as our first good look at Lin crash-zooms in on the hunted man as he drags himself from a river, fumbling a hat and a gun from the overgrowth with his working left hand. I stumbled across it on Tubi, but I bet it looks a lot better on the Film Detective's Blu-Ray/DVD—in its unrestored form, it can also be found on YouTube. I don't even want to regard it as an artifact of naïveté when it seems so unusual and assertive in a genre where even a pacifist can have to blow a bad man away. I might double-feature it with Suddenly (1954) as a Janus-edged study in American gun culture, God help us. This circle brought to you by my turning backers at Patreon.
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I have not seen, but I have heard of Gunless, and it is part of the reason I carefully specified the parameters of this review!
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Thank you!
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I'm so glad to have found it! I had no idea it was going to be so interesting. The summary on Tubi was not offputting, but sounded much more normal.
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Wow. I'd say this was ahead of its time, but I can't think of contemporary American movies that do this.
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Honestly, I think you're right. It's just not something you see from stories with guns.
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the instant he has a gun in his hand, he turns into a dangerous idiot. It forestalls any hint of the popular apologia of the lawfully neutral gun, a necessary and life-preserving tool in the right hands. Watching Lin rather suggests that anyone's hands become the wrong hands with a gun in them, the world tapering to a succession of zero-sum choices of shooting or being shot. --This is just so, so well said.
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I hope it's not alone, but I really could not call any others to mind—High Noon (1952), nope, Friendly Persuasion (1956), nope, any of the crime pictures or war movies where characters who are horrified by violence have to use it to save or avenge someone dear to them, nope, nope, nope . . . Even by an independent producer, I'm still kind of amazed this film got made.
And it's absolutely wonderful that the film's message is that neither violence nor gun toting make you a man.
Yes! And the film's structure doesn't make it obvious that it's leading to this conclusion, so I was all the more thrilled when it arrived.
--This is just so, so well said.
Thank you.