The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE              A 
USA  (123 mi)  1962  d:  John Ford

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
—Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), newspaper editor

The last great work by Ford, which interestingly looks back at characters who are themselves reflecting back upon their lives, making this something of a memory play where Ford not only examines his own role in revitalizing the American Western, using some of his own stable of familiar stars to do it, he also questions the truth about our own history, raising some interesting questions about the role of newspapers, government, literature, cinema, and other artforms, showing how truth is often buried in order to form a more perfect and idealized legend, which becomes the substitute for the truth, but instead of an examination of the misperceptions of history, much of this film unfortunately feels like a rationalization for the director’s own actions.  Certainly Ford is guilty of elevating heroes to mythical status, like the iconic stature of actor John Wayne, seen as the great American hero, the man who boldly stands above all others as an example of hard grit and that individual frontier spirit, always seen as the toughest guy and the fastest gun in the West.  But despite his penchant for so-called accuracy and historical authenticity, Ford also negatively stereotypes the West, creating racial stigmas that have lasted through generations for more than half a century, where his repeating stream of derogatory stereotypical images have contributed mightily to the racist depiction of Indians as savages in order to make way for the coming white settlers, where his own mythology has not only proven inaccurate, but helped perpetuate the myth of white superiority in a historical era of the American West when Indians were subject to attack by the U.S. Cavalry and forced to a life on isolated reservations, or total annihilation if they refused.  Surrender often led to starvation, rotten food, or worse, as so many Indians died from infection and contagious diseases. This bleak inevitability coincides with the slaughter of the plains buffalo to near extinction, all but eliminating their food source and the Indian way of life, a nomadic existence that followed the buffalo herds.  You won’t find any cultural reference to Indian genocide or extermination in a John Ford movie, with the exception of the apologetic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which instead focuses on the legendary white heroes who settled the West. 

One of Ford’s best films, as it’s likely his most provocative and self-reflective work, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is a different kind of western, as it’s not shot in the great outdoors of the Monument Valley and doesn’t include a single Indian, instead it’s a chamber drama that moves indoors as it looks back at the first vestiges of democracy and government in action, as represented by a feisty but thoroughly domesticated James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, a man hell-bent on bringing what he learned from East coast law school to the savage wilderness of the West, pitted against notorious gunslingers and outlaws like Lee Marvin’s deranged Liberty Valance, a sadistic killer turned monster, hired by the wealthy cattle barons to force their will upon the populace, as they believe in open range as far as the eye can see with absolutely no government intervention.  Stuck in the middle of so-called progress is John Wayne as Tom Doniphon, given the reverential treatment here, as it’s his funeral that brings an ominous tone of solemnity to the opening of the film, told nearly entirely in flashback.  Doniphon is seen as a man already forgotten, as time has passed him by, yet he’s the heart of the story, as the West would never have survived without men like him.  Ford absolutely loves paying tribute to characters like this, unsung heroes that fought the pitch battles in a lawless frontier out in the middle of nowhere to make the world better for those that followed, laying the groundwork for a progress yet to come, eventually becoming a reality through the construction of the railroad, which changed the West, as humans came in droves afterwards.  This western is not interested in the Wild West, which Ford has already shown before, where men like Doniphon and Liberty Valance prevailed, but in the taming of the West, showing the first signs of civilization, when men put down their guns and attempted to reason with one another, developing the first laws of the land, where the idea of an endless frontier instead emerges into the first arguments on statehood, becoming a highly entertaining piece of feelgood, patriotic Americana, the kind of thing you can watch on the 4th of July along with Cagney’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942). 

Something of an auteur project, Ford located the property, developed the script along with long-time associates Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah and raised half of the money needed himself, while choosing an all-star cast, including the first time John Wayne and James Stewart worked together in a movie.  The film represents an older and wiser man in the twilight of his career looking back, having already made MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) and THE SEARCHERS (1956), critically acclaimed works that suggest something of an alternative mythology while accentuating the struggles between the individual and society, or chaos and civilization.  The decision to shoot the film in Black and White was startling to some, as the western genre in the 60’s tended to glorify the West by emphasizing the beauty of the landscape through panoramic Cinemascope vistas, like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) or Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), but this film was shot in the murky darkness of confined spaces, creating a claustrophobic, character driven world where Stewart, for instance, spends the majority of the time wearing an apron and washing dishes with Vera Miles as Hallie and the other women in the restaurant kitchen.  It’s quite a contrast to Wayne’s swaggering outdoor independence, a man who wouldn’t be caught dead doing women’s work.  Interesting enough, both men are vying for the same woman (outside of a Mexican cantina, she is the only available woman seen in town), though their lives are on different trajectories, as Doniphon is doomed to live in a world where he cannot adapt, while Stoddard becomes one of the West’s first schoolteachers attempting to eradicate an epidemic of illiteracy.  The already outdated western hero loses his girl and fades into obscurity while the lawyer from the East, a veritable Lincoln among the ruins, marries Hallie and rises to political power, becoming a 3-time Governor before ascending to the United States Senate.  Meanwhile, in the ultimate showdown between good and evil, order and violence, or truth and legend, the awkward tenderfoot Stoddard stubbornly faces off against the gleefully overconfident Liberty Valance as the rest of the town shirks its responsibilities, hiding in the crevices and cracks in the dark, best expressed by the over-eating, freeloader sheriff Andy Devine as Marshall Link Appleyard, a man who stays alive by continually avoiding confrontation.    

One interesting aspect of the film is it never shows the audience definitively who kills Liberty Valance, though most would assuredly think it does, but it’s impossible to tell from the footage provided just who’s gun the bullet came from, nonetheless, a legend is born, as Stoddard most certainly takes all the glory and credit which stays with him throughout his lengthy career, immortalized throughout history as the two men remain inseparable.  What Ford pessimistically shows is how fate is more of an accident or even a misunderstanding, while history depends largely upon who’s telling it.  By the time this film opens, at the end of Stoddard’s illustrious career, the West has already been settled and the myth of the western hero is remembered only in storybooks and flashbacks.  Stoddard may have attempted to bring the civilized values of the East to the town of Shinbone, but he only does it through deception and violence, earning his reputation not through the law, but by killing an evil incarnate.  At a nominating convention for statehood, his name is dragged through the mud as a murderer and his reputation sullied by the flowery language of the cattle baron’s mouthpiece, none other than John Carradine as Major Cassius Starbuckle, whose own candidate is nothing more than a grotesque spectacle.  But Stoddard has his own image-maker in the form of newspaper publisher and town drunk Dutton Peabody, Edmund O’Brien, whose own overly verbose, chiché-ridden performance nearly ruins the film with such an obnoxious, self-inflated sense of ego, where at one point in a rambling drunken stupor he even resorts to quoting (incorrectly) Shakespeare’s Henry V.  Yet it’s Peabody that sings the praises of Stoddard, anointing him to his new career as a mythical western hero, a noisy, frenetically wild sequence of pure mayhem and pandemonium where Ford seems to enjoy mocking the origins of the American political process with the same cynical tone reserved for the equally empty rhetoric of today.          

What’s truly groundbreaking about this film is the way Ford reverses the wheels, turns his back on his success, and makes a film that challenges the same assertions that led to his success in the first place.  This suggests a man confident enough of his place in history that he can challenge it while he’s still alive.  The stark look of the film, taking place entirely in one’s mental recollections, makes it almost an anti-western, where Doniphon’s bold and reckless man of the West has already outlived his time.  Usually placed just after THE SEARCHERS among Ford’s greatest works, it’s an interesting critique of his own mythmaking career, one that suggests history is filled with quasi-heroes, men whose public image and persona have been beefed up to hide and obscure the far different private lives behind the image, where suppression of the truth is a natural byproduct of the mythmaking process.  In this manner, the nation’s confidence is propped up by political lies and distorted exaggerations, where one assumes this is preferable to hearing the unwholesome truth.  But it also suggests “official” explanations may be leaving out what actually happened, case in point The Tillman Story (2010) or The Invisible War (2012).  While this rather dark and sinister film is itself closer to the truth, it’s also highly entertaining and often hilarious, such as when young Ransom Stoddard shuts down the bar, by law, while voting is in progress at the territorial convention, calling it one of the “Fundamental laws of democracy, no exception,” and Dutton Peabody is repeatedly reminded by Tom Doniphon that the bar is closed, yet he keeps squirming for just a beer, as “a beer’s not drinking!”  Reminded once again that there’s no exceptions, he quivers, “Why that’s carrying democracy much too far!”  The film’s maniacal violence from the whip-wielding Liberty Valance, who has to be held back by his own men, actually anticipates even greater, exaggerated choreographed extremes from Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and even Clint Eastwood, where ironically Liberty Valance’s two henchmen include Peckinpah’s Strother Martin and Leone’s favorite villain, Lee van Cleef.  Nowhere in the film, by the way, does Gene Pitney sing “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” though it is advertised in the film’s posters and movie trailer.  Almost overlooked in the structure of the film, due to the central tension focused between Stoddard, Doniphon, and Valance, is the film’s concern with American politics and the birth of civilization in newly formed western towns, showing democracy in action at such fundamental levels by showing the significance of the role of the press, a town meeting, a debate over statehood, and the influence of education—all indoor preoccupations. 

Something should be said about Woody Strode, Tom Doniphon’s black sidekick Pompey, who worked in five John Ford movies, from his final film going all the way back to STAGECOACH (1939).  Though Doniphon treats him like he owns him, viewed as his loyal and obedient lackey, being John Wayne’s confidante in this film also gives him a certain elevated status with the audience, as they know his loyalty is not in dispute, that he always has Tom’s back, but he’s still not allowed into the saloon in Shinbone, as the bartender won’t serve a black man.  This little bit of racial harmony among friends, but disharmony within the larger society, is interesting, as Ford is intentionally bringing attention to this racial disparity, pointing out the injustice, something he failed to notice with his own belittling portrayal of Indians.   

Convoy

CONVOY                   C+                  

USA  Great Britain  (110 mi)  1978  ‘Scope  d:  Sam Peckinpah 

After a couple of box office failures, Peckinpah was in no position to haggle with the Hollywood executives, taking a barebones script about runaway truckers armed with CB radios, inspired by the 1975 popular hit song by C.W. McCall, Convoy 1978 movie Theme Song YouTube (4:02).  So in effect, Hollywood was attempting to use Peckinpah to cash in on a recent American CB radio craze which was a precursor to the Internet, as anyone within range could listen in on conversations or get the word out in a hurry warning other truckers of speed traps, police sightings, blocked road construction, or cheap places to eat or buy gas.  After the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo where OPEC producing nations effectively boycotted the United States, the price of oil rose substantially from $3 dollars to $12 dollars per barrel, effectively doubling the real price of crude oil at the refinery level, causing massive shortages in the United States while also generating high inflation rates that persisted until the early 1980’s, with oil prices continuing to rise until the mid 80’s.  In response to this, the U.S. government imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit to help reduce fuel shortages, which especially had an impact on independent truckers who were often paid by the mile, so their productivity and potential earnings took a hit, where CB radios were crucial in helping alleviate some of the other unforeseen obstacles, like the presence of corrupt police who typically shake down truckers, threatening to impound their trucks unless a fine is paid.  This opened the door for fast car action comedy hits like SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, the 4th top grossing film of 1977, and The Dukes of Hazzard on TV in 1979, and this film, 12th highest grossing film of the year, making $45 million dollars, contributing to the CB radio craze that took on a life of its own, since it requires no registration fee, where all you need is the equipment to be hooked up.  While there was a small licensing fee, during the height of its popularity in the late 70’s this was routinely ignored, as people used anonymous nicknames called “handles.”  Due to lax enforcement, there was widespread disregard for regulations, allowing people to chat mindlessly with one another, often engaged in tedious exchanges, which also included highly aggressive racist and sexist views, like chat room conversations, often resulting in highly descriptive masturbation fantasies. 

Sure enough, in the opening few minutes of the film, Kris Kristofferson as 18-wheel truck driver “Rubber Duck” is involved in a cat and mouse game of leap frog with a convertible sports car driven by Ali MacGraw, a photojournalist, each passing one another until a policeman stops him for speeding.  Very cleverly, he gives the cop a story about how that female driver up ahead was driving without any panties, which certainly diverts the cop’s attention, as he heads off to arrest the woman.  A word about each of the stars, as both had worked with Peckinpah before, but this time Kristofferson had gotten himself clean and was totally sober, making it harder for the director to work with him, as without the booze and drugs there was little rapport between them, and as for MacGraw, heavily tanned and wearing what appears to be a short afro, one of her worst looks ever, this film really points out her acting deficiencies, where an exasperated Peckinpah wasted valuable time just running the camera, hoping later to find something of value.  The shoot was chaotic anyway, mostly in New Mexico, where half the time the CB radios didn’t even work, with MacGraw’s jealous husband Steve McQueen often intruding, thinking MacGraw was having an affair with someone on the set and making wild death threats, as his marriage was on the rocks, with many days where the raving and near psychotic director was so coked up that he never came out of his trailer, where the assistant director James Coburn actually shot some of the main shooting, with the film going overbudget, largely due to the difficulty lining up such massive vehicles for a second or third shot, which required substantial time and effort, where the script called for using a hundred 18-wheel trucks for a good portion of the film, doubling the initial $6 million dollars and the film went over schedule.  They actually shut down the entire production to allow Kristofferson and his band, seen in the film as the “eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus,” as described in the song, to complete a previously scheduled 30-day tour before resuming filming, where many of the crew simply never returned.  Even worse, the director was so disgusted with the film, shooting nearly three times the footage as The Wild Bunch (1969), where he was known to utter “I haven't done one good day’s work on this whole picture,” that he eventually abandoned the project completely, never able to get the film under three and a half hours, putting the final cut in the hands of the studios to finally complete.  Irrespective of all these problems, it was the highest grossing film in Peckinpah’s career.         

Despite the troubles on the set and the overwhelmingly negative reviews, Peckinpah immersed himself in a love affair with trucks, where more than any movie stars, they were the real stars of this show, where the film excels at glorified stunt driving sequences, including a handful of highly choreographed crashes, where often the thrill is to put the audience into the driver’s seat.  So as a purely adrenaline laced, entertainment venture featuring plenty of trucks and even muscle cars flying through the air, crashing through billboards, the film is a success.  Where it fails is in the human element, as Peckinpah’s idea was to explore the mystique of truck drivers as modern-day cowboys, as if they were the last bastion of freedom on the highways in the American West before the government all but put them out of business.  While the film attempts to build into something of a protest movement, it can never figure out what it’s trying to protest, linking independence and true freedom as outside any collaboration with politicians or a trucker’s union. While it does present the idea that a man alone is not as strong as someone with the force of 100 trucks behind him, this idea degenerates into the mass chaos of an extended wrecking sequence, where trucks simply destroy much of the local property, where instead of a hail of bullets and explosions from a prolonged gunfight, trucks annihilate everything in their path.  It certainly continues Peckinpah’s nihilist themes, but without the poetry behind it.  Only Ernest Borgnine stands out as the indefatigable, trucker-hating sheriff, as his contempt for these lawbreaking “modern cowboys” couldn’t be more devious, pulling out all stops to find a way to stop them in their tracks, where he’s really playing the constantly thwarted coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, literally rising from the dead on multiple occasions only to pull out more dirty tricks to try and trap them again, always with that gleeful look of anticipation on his face, where the audience, unfortunately for him, continually roots against him.  This kind of cartoon generates a few laughs, offers up some good ol’ boy trucker lore, sounding off on just about everything from Viet Nam to the proposed “double nickel” nationwide speed limit, where giant trucks barreling down the road are seen as an expression of rebellion and defiance of “The Law,” as represented by Borgnine, a guy who routinely shakes down truckers.  It’s a modern American parable of unnecessary government intrusion, where Uncle Sam is seen as dipping into the trucker’s pocketbooks and affecting their livelihood, or so goes the myth, as it was always more about inflation and the unstoppable price of oil from OPEC than anything having to do with the truckers.       

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA         B+ 
USA  Mexico  (113 mi)  1974  d:  Sam Peckinpah

Sam Peckinpah grew up in Fresno, California in a family with a legal background, where generations of lawyers, including judges and Congressmen went back something like a hundred years, where early on he developed a disdain for the subject, instead joining the Marine Corps during World War II, but saw no action in combat.  However he did witness atrocities in China between the Japanese and Chinese soldiers where the American forces were not allowed to intervene.  Additionally, he applied for a discharge while in Peking (Beijing) to marry a Chinese woman, but his request was denied, an incident that mirrors his troubles with authority throughout his lifetime.  After his discharge, he became a theater major, receiving his Masters degree in theater at USC, working as an assistant to director Don Seigel, but he got his first real start in the film business in the late 50’s by submitting scripts for many of the popular Western TV shows, one of which was rejected on Gunsmoke (1955 – 1975) due to the violent content but was developed into its own series, The Rifleman (1958 – 1963), where he directed four episodes.  Peckinpah’s insistence upon violent realism put him at odds against the show’s producers, but it was here that he met actor Warren Oates, who would become a lifelong friend, drinking and working companion, also one of his neighbors, living with an eclectic group of writers and artists in and around Livingston, Montana, including Richard Brautigan, Thomas McGuane, Peter Fonda, and Margot Kidder.  When Peckinpah directed his first film THE DEADLY COMPANIONS (1961), he quickly learned how easily studios could re-edit films to their liking, a practice that would haunt him to his grave, as few things in life irked him more.  Of his fourteeen feature films, only four were released the way he wanted, Ride the High Country (1962), THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970), JUNIOR BONNER (1972), and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974).  His quarrels with studio heads are legendary, where in the 60’s he was one of the few directors who went public with his growing discontent with the studio system, as he felt they were ruining his films.  Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) is a case in point, where the studios arbitrarily cut 15 minutes, even eliminated certain actors, releasing a truncated version disowned by the cast and crew, later restored fifteen years later in 1988, four years after Peckinpah’s death, to some of the best critical acclaim of any Peckinpah film.   

This is notable for being the last film Peckinpah directed that he wrote himself, giving him personal sway with the subject matter, where Oates rather brilliantly plays an ordinary character who is pushed beyond his limits, where he single-handedly takes on all the smug power brokers who think they control the world, but they’re little more than small time operators with hired guns, making them appear to be big shots.  The film can be seen as a nihilistic expression of Peckinpah’s feelings towards the movie industry, where he’d like to annihilate many of the controlling interests, who are seen as petty and vindictive, with very little separating their mindset from that of the mafia.  It should also be pointed out that those who serve in the military see a world on the battlefront of ruthless horror, where chaos turns to madness, and next to nothing makes sense.  Peckinpah brings this moral abyss into his films, where characters are hard-pressed not to cross that line into an interior wasteland where life has no meaning.  Much of the film was inspired by John Huston’s obsessive journey of greed and self destruction in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRE MADRE (1948), as both were shot on location in Mexico, significant portions of the dialogue are in unsubtitled Spanish, and one of the characters in the film, Gig Young as Quill, a local gangster, amusingly introduces himself, when asked, as Fred C. Dobbs, the name of Bogart's character in the movie.  Much like Tabu (2012), the film has two halves, opening with an idealized vision of innocence, love, and Paradise, but concluding with Paradise Lost in an ever more escalating series of violent and bloody confrontations, where Oates becomes unhinged, losing all sense of rationality, acting instead on pure instinct, where what was a trail of vengeance against Mexican outlaws becomes an interior journey of personal anguish and despair, guided by his own self-loathing and contempt, mostly with himself, setting a dour interior mood for what is easily one of the grimmest Peckinpah pictures. 

This is on the list of often overlooked films, and rightly so, as it was critically condemned upon release, called ugly and repugnant, among the worst films ever made, it was a huge box office failure, yet others recognized the ingenious originality of the work, becoming a modernist expression plunging into the absurdist wasteland of a man’s soul, perhaps an American Western as Samuel Beckett might have imagined it.  A sloppy and rough-around-the-edges movie, it has a peculiar power to both disgust and enthrall, given a highly realistic yet seedy Mexican setting where heroes and outlaws all share many of the same traits, where at times it’s difficult to tell any difference between them, where humanity is a blend of good and evil, but the lines are too often blurred during the journey into the heart of darkness, obsessively driven to find the mythical Golden Fleece from Greek tragedy at the sacrifice of everything else, where choices often don’t make sense in the thralls of a magical quest that has life-changing implications.  This is a story of contradictions, given a near mythical opening of unspoiled innocence, yet in the next instant the mood couldn’t be more brutally shocking, where a young pregnant girl is stripped to the waist by her own father demanding to know the name of the man who dishonored his family, offering a million dollar reward for the man’s head.  Oates is a small-time American piano player and part owner of a tiny Mexican bar where women and drink are both cheap commodities, where Peckinpah distinguished himself from the John Ford westerns by offering seedy bars, cheap women, and men driven by self-interest, not any glamorized view of heroism.  While Peckinpah is known as one of the undisputed poets of alcoholic cinema, this film has B-movie written all over it, never missing an opportunity to show men behaving badly, often mistreating women who are involuntarily forced to bare their breasts, but rather than inducing any sexual appetite, the only thirst these men have is for the bottle and a lust for money and power. 

When a couple of local thugs offer Oates $10,000 to kill Alfredo Garcia (keeping a tidy $990,000 profit for themselves), needing his head for proof, he dreams of getting out of this dirty and rotgut world, taking his prostitute girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega) along with him, getting a fresh start somewhere else.  When she informs him Garcia is already dead, Oates thinks it’s a walk in the park, but to her, taking his head from the grave is an unthinkable moral transgression.  While the film is admittedly gritty and overly downbeat, it also reveals the most tender and affectionate relationship in any Peckinpah film, beautifully expressed in a picnic sequence where Elita even brings a guitar and quietly sings to him.  As they dream of building a new life together, the scene as written ends, but the cameras continue to roll as Vega surprises Oates by asking him why he never asked her to marry him?  Completely perplexed by the utter surprise, Oates has no way out but to gently propose, becoming a completely improvised dramatic center of the film, giving a romanticized quality that is rapturously dreamy before their little party is quickly interrupted by a couple of gun-toting bikers, one being Kris Kristofferson, who takes Elita and a bottle into the high grass, stripping her naked to the waist, but rather than be intimidated, she shows no fear, which has a way of unnerving the man, where the balance of power shifts, as she’s suddenly in control, displaying some of the more complicated sexual dynamics as she freely offers herself as part of a Faustian bargain in hopes no one will get killed and they will come out of this alive.  Oates, meanwhile, overpowers the partner, grabs his gun and comes after what he presumes to be a rapist.  When he discovers the sex is consensual, hardly what he expected, he shoots both men anyway, not out of any moral duty to her, but simply as an act of vengeance, like something Travis Bickle might be inclined to do in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), made just two years later, washing the “scum off the streets.”  Despite his professed love for Elita, Oates ignores her wishes and desecrates the gravesite, which sends him on a doomed whirlwind adventure well past the point of no return, growing increasingly existentialist, containing as much complexity and depth as anything Peckinpah ever created, extending into this no man’s land of psychic confusion where reality remains elusive, becoming an absurdist descent into one’s own personal Hell, a horrifyingly violent and bloody escapade that leads to a lonely man’s showdown with his grievously damaged and deranged soul. 

Man of the West

MAN OF THE WEST         A            

USA  (100 mi)  1958  ‘Scope  d:  Anthony Mann

I have seen nothing so completely new since—why not—Griffith. Just as the director of Birth of a Nation gave one the impression that he was inventing the cinema with every shot, each shot of Man of the West gives one the impression that Anthony Mann is reinventing the Western, exactly as Matisse's portraits reinvent the features of Piero della Francesca. It is, moreover, more than an impression. He does reinvent. I repeat, reinvent; in other words, he both shows and demonstrates, innovates and copies, criticizes and creates. Man of the West. in short, is both course and discourse, or both beautiful landscapes and the explanation of this beauty, both art and the theory of art of the Western, the most cinematographic genre in the cinema.

—Jean Luc Godard, listing the film #6 of the year Jean-Luc Godard's Top Ten Lists 1956-1965 from Cahiers du Cinéma (1958)

There's a point where you either grow up and become a human being or you rot, like that bunch.     —Link Jones (Gary Cooper)

Another critical and commercial failure upon its release, the controversy surrounding this film happened well before the movie was ever made, as James Stewart was initially targeted for the lead role until he had a falling out with the director who instead chose another all-too-familiar western figure, Gary Cooper, in something of a thematic reprise of his role in HIGH NOON (1952), though critics condemned his performance in 1958, calling him “too old.”  But Cooper is a calmer presence than Stewart and lends a quiet nobility to the role of Link Jones, exactly what’s needed as a counterpart to the other players, all of whom are marked by the bitter cynicism of the era, set in a time when settlers had grown weary of cutthroats, gunslingers, and card sharks and a prevailing sense of civilization was beginning to crop up throughout the West, eradicating the previous influence of Indians, outlaws, and thieves.  Link Jones is not a whisky drinking man, or even a man who carries a gun, though he has one tucked away in his bag as he leaves from desolate parts unknown on a train journey to Fort Worth in search of a schoolteacher for his barely formed community.  Part of the interest is the way Mann leaves out pertinent details about Link’s past, adding an allure of mystery to the quiet dignity of Cooper, who has always been notoriously polite.  Even more scintillating are the gorgeous landscape compositions from Ernest Haller in one of the most exquisitely photographed of all westerns, bearing a resemblance to Sam Peckinpah’s RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962) filmed four years later, even down to the use of familiar faces onscreen who represent iconic images already associated with many heralded westerns, where that chiseled and cultivated maturity lends credence to the truth and authenticity of the picture itself.  Stewart may have been the first choice, but Cooper is ultimately the better choice, where his reputation with the audience precedes him, where his stern countenance reflects the gravity of his every move, a precursor to later films like Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968), Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH (1969), and especially Eastwood’s own gravelly portrait of an aging, ex-gunfighter in UNFORGIVEN (1992). 

After a comical beginning, seeing the obviously uncomfortably Cooper awkwardly attempt to fit his long legs behind a train seat, the tone quickly changes when the train is ambushed at a water stop out in the middle of nowhere, leaving three passengers stranded behind who were knocked off the train in the shooting melee, including Jones, but also Julie London as Billie, a heady but also attractive saloon singer who’s been forced to acquiesce to the slimy nature of man, and Arthur O’Connell as Sam, an overly friendly confidence man known for dealing off the bottom of the deck.  Having no choice except to walk, as the next train doesn’t come by again for another week, Jones leads them to what resembles an isolated, uninhabited shack where they are quickly commandeered by ghosts of his past.  Unfortunately, they have walked right into a den of thieves headed by Dock Tobin, Lee J. Cobb as a demented old geezer who happens to be Jones’s deranged outlaw uncle who raised him as a kid.  Despite this bittersweet family reunion, the homecoming resembles a kidnapping at gunpoint, a psychologically crippling moment of terror where at one point the drunken men revel at forcing Billie to perform a striptease with a knife at the throat of Jones, her supposed “husband,” a lie he fabricates for her own protection.  This humiliation is the moral centerpiece of the film, as it shows how women remain vulnerable and are degraded in the wilderness of the Western frontier, a far cry from the supposed civilization depicted in the opening where she exerts the independence to make her own living, but it also challenges the unarmed Cooper to find a way against insurmountable odds to overcome this disastrous turn of events, where his honor in protecting the woman he calls his own is at stake.  Entrapped by thugs that used to be his family, he has to rely upon his wits to reflect a defining heroic masculinity instead of a gun, where his calm, self-assured nature is quite a contrast to the twitching anxiety of his kidnappers, who always seem to be distressed, continually flying off the handle, always at war with themselves.  

This is a film about choices, where characters are challenged throughout to make difficult choices, but here their lives depend upon them, which add a threatening intensity to every moment, where one wrong move could cost someone their life, and eventually does.  Civilization is given a mythical status here of dueling parallel options, where one is the undefined, almost imaginary town where Jones comes from that is depicted as hard working but true, a place where nothing comes easy, but it’s here that Jones built himself a better life, lifting himself out of the muck of his uncle’s thieving and murderous ways into a place of respectability.  The other is every outlaw’s dream, the imaginary oasis of fortune, the unprotected, two-bit town with a lone bank secretly holding untold gold reserves, where all they have to do is make one final score before they can make a clean break to Mexico.  Like THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE (1948), these men are both motivated and doomed by their respective obsessions, where Jones is driven to overcome his haunted past, while Tobin and his men are destined to mercilessly re-live their failures over and over again, where just the sight of seeing Jones again is like pointing a mirror reflection into their own failed pasts, reminding each one how little they’ve grown or accomplished.  Part of the brilliance of this film is balancing the haunting beauty of the exterior landscapes with the psychologically probing interior states of mind, which seem challenged at every turn of the road.  Adapted by Reginald Rose, who a year earlier wrote 12 ANGRY MEN, from a Will C. Brown novel called Border Jumpers, the film centers around familiar Anthony Mann themes, a vast untapped territorial beauty undermined by the devious nature of man, a film noir sensibility featuring flawed and damaged characters in the lead roles, where there’s an element of cruel inhumanity inside every man, not just the outlaws, but more importantly films that feature men who seek justice without resorting to violence, who are in fact forced into action, often against their will, to defend their inherent beliefs about the kind of world they want to live in.  What distinguishes Mann westerns from others is this rough edged vision, where they’re not just defending a person or a family, but the “idea” of a place where a man can live in peace.  Mann exposes the raw elements of nature and man, using fierce landscapes and cunning outlaws, not standard types, where overcoming these overwhelming obstacles is more than a thrilling adventure usually fraught with violence, but a legacy to our own perseverance and capabilities as a populace, as by now the untamed West has been tamed, but at what price, as certainly elements of our darkest nature survive intact as well and are also part of our historic legacy.     

Ride the High Country

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY             A                    

USA  (94 mi)  1962  ‘Scope  d:  Sam Peckinpah    
Ride the High Country (S. Peckinpah) - Trailer (2:36)

This is one gorgeous looking CinemaScope western, beautifully shot by Lucien Ballard, capturing all the grandeur of the Inyo National Forest in the Eastern Sierra Mountains just west of the California border with Nevada, including Mount Whitney (Full resolution)‎, which at 14,496 feet is the highest peak in the lower 48 states.  In a movie like this, location is everything, as the film is all about a 2-day journey up the mountains, and another trip back down.  Starring two icons of American westerns, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, both near the end of their legendary careers, where their declining age parallels the waning years of the frontier West, McCrea rides into town for a job transporting gold from the nearby mountains back into town safely delivered to the bank, a job that comes with high risks, as these carriers make easy targets.  Scott, on the other hand, is wearing his wig and Buffalo Bill outfit and working the Western carnival road show circuit as a touted gunman, the Oregon Kid, challenging would-be gunslingers to hit his rigged target.  But once they meet, they’re like two peas in a pod as they’re old friends with a history between them, and their clever dialogue together, written by N.B. Stone Jr, with a few Peckinpah ad libs thrown in, is delightfully comical making their screen time together thoroughly entertaining.   

Scott’s young partner is Ron Starr, an overly rambunctious kid who operates a camel race scam against horses and gets into fights at the drop of a hat.  In the West, it’s not always important to win or lose, just that you get into a fight and give it your best.  That’s all anyone could ask.  The three of them working together form a team, though Scott and the kid have plans of their own to steal the gold, thinking it could be worth as much as a quarter of a million dollars.  McCrea, on the other hand, is a morally righteous man, a former lawman who characteristically serves as the emblematic code of ethics for the West, setting the right example, being honest, morally upright, honorable, loyal to your partners, true to your word and commanding the respect of others.  These are the values being fought over in nearly every western and they’re certainly fought for here.  Along the way up, they stop at a preacher’s farm, where R.G. Armstrong is a puritanical father (cast in a familiar role in other Peckinpah films as well) in raising a lone daughter (Mariette Hartley) alone.  She, however, has never seen anything beyond the borders of her farm, as her father won’t even let her accompany him into town, so her curiosity about spending time with the overly game kid is understandable, as he’s one of the only young men of the opposite sex she’s ever seen.  No sooner are they off the next morning before she joins them, claiming she’s running away to marry Billy Hammond (James Drury) in the mining town where they’re heading.  When the kid makes a move on her the first chance he gets, he gets clobbered by the two older men reminding him of his better judgment.

When they get to the mining town, it’s nothing but tents and a whorehouse that serves women and liquor, where the kid delivers her to her young fiancé, one of four brothers and a father that comprise the Hammond clan, one of whom is Warren Oates, the one with a bird on his shoulder who never takes a bath, where the idea of marriage gets them all stirred up, as their idea of marriage is little more than condoned gang rape, where what belongs to one belongs to them all.  The marriage itself is a crazy scene in the whorehouse where they arrive in procession on horseback, she in the lead wearing her mother’s white wedding dress, with the brothers singing a rousing rendition of “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” When the roll is called up yonder - Twila Paris - YouTube (4:43) or Johnny Cash Johnny Cash - When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder ... (1:37), with the Madame as the Maid of Honor and her hired help are the bridesmaids, married by the town’s drunken mayor, where she has to fend off not only the brothers but all the customers as well, which turns into a madcap scenario until McCrea hears her screams and decides to put an end to the nonsense and return her home to her father.  The clan has other ideas and the frontier spirit is alive and well as there’s several day’s ride ahead to sort all this out.  Scott and McCrea really carry the show, where they supposedly reversed characters at the last minute, but as partners in a long line of memorable partners seen in westerns, their friendship and well-worn characters make each of them feel perfectly comfortable in their roles, where the back and forth banter between them is a special highlight not often seen in westerns, as there’s a compelling, age-weary wisdom that tests the limit of their friendship as well as their understanding of the spirit of the West.  An engaging and highly personal film that is simply spectacular to look at, where these two leads could just as easily be chatting on your living room sofa—they’re that comfortable.     

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID              A-                   

USA  (106 mi)  1973  ‘Scope  d:  Sam Peckinpah              

1988 restored version (122 mi)             2005 DVD Special Edition (115 mi)

There are various cuts of this film, the original at 106 minutes which was drastically cut by the studios, a 1988 restored version which adds 15 minutes, and a 2005 Special Edition DVD that cuts half of the added minutes.  By all accounts, the 1988 restored version is the way to go, but a recent theater screening turned out to be the 115 minute Special Edition version which cuts some actors out of the movie completely, edits out certain lines as well while re-structuring various scenes.  Peckinpah’s last western feels like a somber death march, a mournful, poetic elegy to an end of an era where the values that men stood by were slowly disappearing along with their freedoms, replaced by the will of a few rich and powerful men who ruled the territory, monetarily and politically, putting an entirely new restricted face of commerce on what used to be wide open spaces and the land of the free.  The applicable metaphor, which is mentioned in the film, is their utter disgust at men who would fence in the West, in this case, cattle barons.  Set in New Mexico in 1881, James Coburn, in what is easily the performance of his career, chucks that career-defining hustler’s grin for a solemn frown as Pat Garrett, a world weary former gunslinger turned lawman, a man who rode with Billy the Kid in some capacity in their past, who opens the film riding into town visiting the Kid, a very young and clean shaven Kris Kristofferson, warning him to get out of the territory, as in 5 days he’ll become a lawman sworn to get rid of him, cleaning up the state, making it safer for bankers and cattle owners and prospective business ventures.  Even earlier, before the opening credits, there is a Black and White sequence of Garrett himself getting gunned down, an event that happens some 30 years into the future, certainly a foreshadowing of ominous things to come, and an interesting use of differing time periods where the death of both are mysteriously but inevitably linked together.    

The first 45 minutes of the film are simply extraordinary, featuring the music by Bob Dylan, whose name is credited above the title of the film and who also appears in a small role, where the mixture of sepia and Black and White from the opening set the tone for some astonishing use of ‘Scope by cinematographer John Coquillon, capturing the essential brightness of the empty desert landscape in early morning, but also the extreme light at dusk, where one of the more brilliant shots is seeing a rider on a horse on the far shore of a river get buried in the dark shadows, but a clear and vivid silhouetted reflection can be seen in the water as he rides across the entire length of the screen.  Two of the opening set pieces are riveting, among the best in the film, the taking of Billy alive and his subsequent jailhouse break out, which is unlike anything seen before or since.  After his memorable escape, someone brings him a horse which immediately throws him, an unusual commentary since it happens in front of a gawking crowd on Main Street right in front of the hangman’s execution site they are constructing.  From that point on, Garrett is on a mission to appoint involuntary deputies to help go after him, avoiding until the end the one place he’s most likely to be, instead visiting a litany of ornery characters throughout the vast territory who are never introduced but seem to have a history together, whose faces are synonymous with westerns, who simply appear out of thin air, where virtually every sequence is built around inevitable killings, compiling a high body count by the end, even for Peckinpah.  These secondary characters are essential, however, as they provide the emotional heft of the film, starting out with Slim Pickens and his rifle toting wife Katy Jurado, carrying bullets in her breast, both of whom appeared in Marlon Brando’s ONE-EYED JACKS (1961) a decade earlier, who silently express with their eyes everything we need to know about the murderous and endlessly bleak landscape.  

As Garrett wanders through the vast expanse of the territory, it’s obvious he’s not in any hurry, that he’s simply setting the tone for his mission by announcing his intentions across the state.  The Kid as well shows no sign of panic or alarm, as the film loses much of its initial vigor and sense of expectation and instead seems to meander slowly to its inevitable conclusion.  Unlike Brando’s film, based on the same Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid source material, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider, who inverts the story making the Kid the killer, another infurioratingly downbeat western where a maniacal lawman (Karl Malden) seeks public glorification by building a reputation of killing or humiliating a notorious outlaw (Brando), similar to Gene Hackman’s Sheriff “Little Bill” in Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN (1992), sadistic lawmen who will resort to murder as a way of enforcing the law, Garrett seeks no public affirmation and asks for no special compensation, and is instead driven by a complex code of honor that is already outdated, like the end of the samurai era, and he wearily knows it, where the routine of killing has become a rotten job doing the bidding of others who are more ruthless and brutally despicable than the so-called outlaw.  While there may have been a motivation at the outset, as the Kid broke out of his jail and he sought revenge, but by the end, after the passage of time, all that is surprisingly meaningless, as what he’s asked to do is kill a friend, man to man, someone he respects perhaps above all others, especially those who are paying him to do it.  This hint of anguish and regret affects every move he makes as he eventually closes in, actually waiting patiently outside the Kid’s window as Kristofferson is making love to his eventual wife Rita Coolidge, another sign of obvious affection and respect.  But this is a story of a destroyed friendship, one who remains a free spirit until the end and another who is encumbered by age, duty, and responsibilities, who disappointingly accepts compromise and domesticity, all of which adds to an alcoholic portrait of bitterness and scorn, contemptuous of the vile men he works for and the short-sighted interests of lawmen who seek the same aim, thinking a kill may somehow bring them glory.  For Garrett, fulfilling his duty leaves a pathetic emptiness, dulling any hopes that the future offers any glimpse of righteousness or respectability.    

The Left-Handed Gun

William Henry McCarty, Jr. aka:  William Bonney, aka:  Billy the Kid (1880)

THE LEFT-HANDED GUN      C+                

USA  (102 mi)  1958  d:  Arthur Penn

A society has its mirror in its outcasts.           —Arthur Penn

A romanticized and sympathetic portrayal of one of American’s iconic outlaws, William Henry McCarty, Jr. aka:  William Bonney, aka:  Billy the Kid, whose legend has been lionized into mythical status through exaggerated newspaper accounts and dime store novels, becoming one of the great figures of the American West.   While there are more than a dozen movie versions of his story, most are fairly second rate accounts of his life, where even the title of this film has been discounted as myth, suggesting the real Billy the Kid was right-handed, but for nearly a century wrongly thought of as left-handed from an archival photograph that was originally viewed through a reversed mirror image.  More interesting accounts of the Kid's story both come from the same source, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, a 1956 novel by Charles Neider, used in both Brando’s ONE EYED JACKS (1961) and Sam Peckinpah’s PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (1973), where Peckinpah actually worked as one of the screenwriters on Brando’s film.  Both of those films use a more naturalistic style, though in Brando’s film, he’s hunted down by a maniacal lawman seeking public glorification by killing a notorious outlaw, while in Peckinpah’s he’s regrettably shot down by his best friend, initially seen as an act of revenge for breaking out of jail, but eventually seen as a hollow and meaningless act.  This film, written by Gore Vidal, was originally a 1955 made-for TV movie called The Death of Billy the Kid, expanded by screenwriter Leslie Stevens for a feature length film, using the same lead actor in each, Paul Newman.  Penn’s account turns the Kid into a martyr figure, a common portrait seen throughout Newman’s storied career, especially during the 60’s, THE HUSTLER (1961), HOMBRE (1967), and COOL HAND LUKE (1967).

This is Arthur Penn’s first film, made than a decade before his most infamous outlaw movie, BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), where one common factor in each is the director’s love for outsiderism and actor Denver Pyle, depicted as a bellicose lawman in each.  Newman’s acting is overly theatrical, typical of the times, where there wasn’t much difference between the histrionics and largesse of stage performances and those before a movie camera.  It was largely the 60’s influence of European films and Jack Nicholson whose understated portrayal in FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) altered the standard, though the existential realism of the Penn performances in MICKY ONE (1965) and BONNIE AND CLYDE certainly helped pave the way.  Newman’s role was originally scripted for James Dean, where the misunderstood feelings of alienation and personal torment are present, where it’s clear the character is curious, but illiterate and uneducated, where from the outset he seems to be lost (wandering without a horse), aimlessly running away from his difficult past.  He hooks up with a cattle drive on their way to Lincoln, becoming something of a hot-headed boy apprentice to his gentleman boss, Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), known as "The Englishman," who affectionately takes him under his wing.  When a crooked sheriff shoots the unarmed Tunstall down in cold blood, the Kid vows revenge, soon joined by two partners in crime, Charlie (James Congdon) and Tom (James Best), though when together, these boys act like mere adolescents.  It’s the speed of the Kid’s gun that brings them quick notoriety, killing the sheriff and one of his partners, quickly idealized in pulp novels that became instant best sellers.  Relatively unknown during his lifetime, his legendary reputation, whose exploits were exaggerated after his death, turned him into a folk hero.   

Like Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1968), the Kid has no rest until he can gun down the other two that still remain at-large who were involved with Tunstall’s murder. There are certain story elements that simply get lost, like what happened to all the cattle, as we never see them again, or who became the next sheriff, as we see several men wearing badges afterwards.  Instead, the Kid and his two partners recuperate from injuries and hang out in Mexico where they meet Pat Garrett (John Dehner), another former outlaw who is attempting to settle down there and even get married, where he makes the Kid steadfastly promise there’ll be no trouble at the wedding.  But when he violates that pledge, creating a bloody disturbance on the street, causing mayhem on his wedding day, Garrett grows furious, reverses the roles and vows to hunt the Kid down.  This back and forth of outlaw justice, inseparable from the supposed court appointed civilized justice, creates a moral vacuum, where justice prevails only at the end of a gun.  In an attempt to make the Kid a sympathetic character, he never initiates any of the action, but is always seen as personally trying to implement that non-existent justice of the land, as otherwise the real killers get away scot free.  But in his obsession to carry out this revengeful deed, he loses sight of the world around him, where he interferes with larger political implications, such as the Lincoln County War, a lengthy feud of Kid-included gunfighter killings which instead get confusingly lost and fictionalized in this movie version.  While the director oversimplifies Christian metaphors, such as a man dying with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross, or using a newspaperman as a betraying Judas, the film is at least an attempt to break away from the reliance upon Western myths and misconceptions, but in doing so creates an overly contrived, black and white moral universe where the Kid’s humanity-at-all-costs approach supersedes authenticity or any effort at uncovering the real truth.   

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON                B                   

USA  (103 mi)  1949  d:  John Ford

Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness.   —Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne)

A movie that typifies director John Ford’s Achilles heel, a man whose cinematic visualizations are renowned, but his hatchet job of American history is equally legendary, as he insists on perpetrating the same racist myths about Indians that have been in effect for the past 100 years, which makes his historic vision as a filmmaker no better than the dime store novelist that originated these misconceptions.  Ford has always portrayed Indians in the least desirable light, showing them to be less than human, vicious savages, terrible shots, poor military strategists, and little more than pathetic wretches of humanity, so little sympathy is ever shown when a gazillion Indians are killed onscreen, such as in STAGECOACH (1939).  Compare that to the elevated sympathy offered in this overreaching drama when a cavalry troop escorts two white women through hostile Indian country.  The film opens in 1876 just as news is spreading about the defeat of General Custer at the hands of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, sending waves of anxiety and fear throughout the West, where a newsreel style narrator misinforms the audience straightaway, probably exactly as the newspapers speculated in that era, believing various Indian tribes were gathering together in great numbers to purge the West of white settlers. 

In reality, Indians were gathering in record numbers to defend themselves against the inevitable advance of the whites into their territory.  After the Custer debacle, however, rather than remain a fighting force of multiple tribes united in opposition, as is suggested here, they split back up into smaller tribes, each going their own separate way, as they had always lived, reflective of their nomadic lifestyle of living off the land.  But that’s not the way the movies tell the story, instead projecting a view of the white settlers as victims of random and indiscriminate Indian violence, overlooking the genocide initiated against Indians by the U.S. cavalry throughout the West, ordered to militarily defeat one tribe after another, rounding up all free Indians in a form of ethnic cleansing, eventually forcing them into submission, legally requiring that they live away from their traditional hunting grounds, forcing them to live in isolation on desolate reservations, subject to rampant disease and the rotted food of government rations where more than half died within the first few years.  Ford conveniently leaves out all references to the true story of “American” history and instead recounts the same mythological racist lore that turns Indians into savages while the whites are noble heroes. 

In this film, the second of a 3-part cavalry trilogy, between FORT APACHE (1948) and RIO GRANDE (1950), Ford is really paying tribute to the men in uniform, offering a glowing and idealized portrait of romanticized courage under fire.  James Warner Bellah wrote the short stories on which the entire trilogy is based, while screenwriter Frank Nugent adapted the first two into movies, a character driven and nearly plotless story offering an intimate glimpse of military life at a remote cavalry post.  This is largely a nostalgia piece, complete with a rousing Americana musical score that doesn’t shy away from playing Dixie, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and several variations of the title tune, which is still the official anthem of the United States Cavalry, where despite some strong individual performances, the collective portrait of the Second Cavalry Regiment is really the featured star of this film.  Ford and his cinematographer Winton Hoch, who won an Oscar, use vivid Technicolor to continually frame them on the move in single file formation while traveling through the stunning panorama of the natural backdrop of Monument Valley in Southern Utah, which is now part of the Navajo Indian Reservation.  These compositional images so completely resemble authentic Western artworks, particularly those of Frederic Remington, that Ford’s Westerns are forever associated with Old West authenticity.  The same can’t be said for the subject matter, however, where Ford tends to mythologize the West, once more overlooking the real history of the Second Cavalry, which was responsible for the Marias Massacre in 1870, where despite warnings from scouts that they were attacking the wrong camp filled with Blackfeet Indians friendly to whites, some 200 Indians, mostly women and children were slaughtered in an act of wrongful brutality, while the Piegan tribe and their Chief, the military’s actual target, escaped safely to Canada.     

Here, however, the cavalry is depicted as a harmonious place where soldiers from both the North and the South have come together after the Civil War under one flag and one common purpose, to keep the West safe from Indians.  The charismatic leader holding them all together is John Wayne in one of his better performances as Captain Nathan Brittles, a savvy veteran of 40-years in service whose long deserved retirement is expected within a few days, though he has mixed feelings about becoming a civilian.  This is one of the first Westerns to pay tribute to an aging Western hero, along the lines of Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) or Clint Eastwood’s aging gunfighter in UNFORGIVEN (1992).  Still served by his orderly Quincannon (Victor McLaglen) from their days together in the Civil War, their morning ritual has a relaxed, comic flair of longtime friends as Quincannon is expected to join him in retirement just two weeks afterwards.  Also interesting is Brittles’ respectful relationship with Sgt. Tyree (Ben Johnson, a real cowboy, a champion calf roper discovered by Ford), a man with equal rank while serving the Confederacy, whose opinion he values, but Tyree is reticent to offer, claiming “That’s not my department,” sarcastically claiming the orders come from the Yankee War department.  When a fellow Southern soldier dies, Brittles finds it noble and befitting to bury him with a Confederate flag.  

When a paymaster stagecoach carrying the troop’s wages is attacked by Indians with the passengers murdered and robbed, Brittles is ordered on one last patrol to quell the vicious outbreaks by a band of renegade Indians who have broken from the reservation.  Added into the mix are his orders to escort the commanding officer’s wife and niece, Abby (Mildred Dunnock) and Olivia (Joanne Dru) to the nearest East-bound stagecoach, claiming they could not withstand an “Army” winter, where Olivia has inflamed the hearts of a few soldiers by adhering to a cavalry tradition of wearing a yellow ribbon in her hair, which symbolizes her faithful devotion to one of them.  But this doesn’t prevent two young officers, John Agar and Harry Carey Jr., from spending more time fighting one another than they do with her, a sign of their youthful inexperience for leadership, making Brittles even more reticent to give up his command. When a long line of Indians is spotted moving their entire village with them, Brittles thinks it wise to avoid contact, as they’re not in battle mode, preferring to take a longer route, even though the delay has serious consequences, eventually missing the stage which is destroyed in a violent Indian encounter at the stage post, including several lives lost.  Flabbergasted at the turn of events, believing he failed every mission he was assigned, this tribute to an old soldier reveals Brittles has a few more tricks up his sleeve, all of which exhibit a flair for intelligence and cunning, displaying the kind of wisdom and experience that endear him to his troops.  In the end, Ford depicts them as one and the same in this loving tribute to “the regulars, the fifty-cents a day professionals riding the outposts of a nation.”