Politics and Hollywood in the Post War Period

1. The film community has been active in politics since the beginning, and it continues to be so. Think of the obvious: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Governator, Ronald Reagan becomes President, Fred Dalton Thompson goes from films to the Senate and then to Law & Order. George Clooney is perhaps as good an example of a politically engaged film person as we have now.

2. Just as the film community has been engaged in political activity, so too have people in power been intent on monitoring the political influence of Hollywood. Remember Joe Lieberman who sided with the Republicans in their desire to control the products of the film industry.

History:

Let’s begin in the 1930s and run through 1947 when things really began to heat up.

The Depression

The New Deal and Roosevelt

The Screen Writers Guild and unions generally

-familiar goals: higher wages, fewer hours, regularized hiring practices, standardized contracts, and arbitration.

Red baiting and the Dies Committee 1938

-Martin Dies (D-Tex) chaired the Dies Committee, a branch of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities – later known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

1939 and the Anti-Nazi League

-the war years saw an abatement of pressure on the unions.

-Russia was an ally

-1944 and the creation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (Sam Wood, Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney)

1945 and renewed suspicion

-the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Daughters of the American Revolution, Knights of Columbus, etc. actively work to expose Communist influence in America.

- J. Parnell Thomas and HUAC

-Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 – a sort of early Patriot Act.

-October hearings and the Hollywood Ten: Edward Dmytryk, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Herbet Biberman, Adrian Scott, Lester Cole (Bertolt Brecht)

-renewed hearings in 1951

- the famous McCarthy hearings from 1950 and 1954 had nothing directly to do with HUAC because McCarthy was a Senator (from Wisconsin) and HUAC was a Committee of the House of Representatives. However, both the McCarthy campaign against Communists and HUAC are manifestations of the same paranoia..

-Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Trial in 1951 and Execution in 1953

The Blacklist (and Graylist)

-lives ruined, freedom of speech checked, fear and paranoia.

-dovetails with Cold War mentality and fear of nuclear devastation.

American individualism versus communist collective thinking surfaces in films such as High Noon and Silver Lode.

Noir reflects something of the paranoia of this period. We have a time of great optimism and surface cheerfulness (“What, me worry?” Alfred E. Newman).

-look back at advertisements of the 1950s and see the glory of new appliances, suburban neatness, shiny cars (cars began to have shape and colour), and fancy duds. Ostensibly, this was a Happy Hour – a time of upbeat feeling.

The Jungle:

-films such as Blackboard Jungle, Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Knife, The Asphalt Jungle, High School Confidential, The Big Heat, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Touch of Evil, etc. revealed the fear of social disintegration and corruption.

-films such as Big Jim McClain (1952), I Married a Communist (1950), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) fed the fear of communism. We have seen touches of this in Johnny Guitar and Pickup on South Street.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

-‘Body snatcher’ is an old term for someone who robs graves. As Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) observes in the film, people had begun to lose their humanity before the strange epidemic began in Santa Mira (‘mira’ means ‘look’ and it reminds us of ‘mirror’). People have not looked at themselves for some time; rather they have allowed a sameness to take over, a taking for granted that results in a Borg-like homogeneity.

-today, such homogeneity is sometimes attributed to consumerism, that is, to the very forces that set out to stamp out communist sameness in the 1940s and 50s.

-‘invasion’ suggests both warfare and alien attack. In the film, Miles speculates that something may have come from outer space. Science fiction had postulated, at least since the time of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), the possibility of alien invasion.

-another of Miles’s speculations is that the strange epidemic results from some nuclear fallout. This is mild, but nevertheless telling. The film does take place in the mid fifties when the fear of nuclear devastation was real and visceral. Note the town siren that sounds near the end of the film. This is a reminder of the sirens placed strategically in many North American urban centers (including in the schoolyard of the school I attended when I was a boy).

-ultimately, the film posits some strange seeds from outer space generating the pod people. The notion is spurious, or at least silly. This is the point. The idea of seeds falling from space is difficult, if not impossible, to accept. Consequently, the viewer can look for another source for the pod people.

-we might say the same of the apparent “holes” in the plot: the arrival of a new body and the disappearance of the old one, the need for sleep to accomplish the full takeover. Why such silly oversights hardly matter is that the pod people are actually the same people who existed before the arrival of the pods. In other words, the pods are a device that signals the change from life-style to another, from life under capitalism to life under communism.

The Birthings:

-we have at least two images of “birth” in the film, one associated with the pods and the other associated with Miles and Becky. I doubt that we should make too much of this, but it is worth noticing.

-pod-birth: the scene in the greenhouse makes it clear that the pods are a sort of womb from which a forming body emerges. The connection of a re-birth into an emotionless existence with plant life is interesting. On one level, the connection with Soviet farming methods might be implied; on another level, the image associates soulless life (communism) with nature. The idea might be that communism is life in a state of nature (in all its ultimate brutality), whereas life under capitalism and democracy is human life, life that cultivates not natural tendencies but human ones such as family and love and relationship.

-we have two other “pod-births” in the film – one associated with Jack Belicec (King Donovan) and one associated with Becky. We see Jack’s pod body on his pool table and we see Becky’s pod body in a coffin-like box in her father’s basement. The pool table is a masculine image (more about this table later), but the coffin-like box in which Becky’s look-alike lies is a reminder of death.

-earth-birth: late in the film, Becky and Miles flee from the townspeople (and by the way, the filming of this chase with the two fugitives situated in relief high on a hill is reminiscent of all those horror films from the 30s in which the townspeople chase the monster. Here, the monsters are clearly not the fugitives – a reminder that something similar is at work in the ‘Frankenstein’ films.), and they take refuge in an old mine shaft. Here, they hide under some loose boards below the floor of the mine. They are in a sort of coffin. They emerge from this reborn, as it were, Becky soon to be a pod person and Miles soon to travel miles to find help. The birth here is something of a contrast to the pod births.

Setting:

-small town of Santa Mira. This America at its best, the small town where everyone knows everyone and where community rests on mutual trust and shared values.

-we see the railway station, main street, streets of clean, well-kept houses. This is Main Street, USA.

-family: Miles and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) have both been to Reno (i.e. they have both been divorced). This places them, to some extent, as outsiders in this small tight town. The word ‘divorce’ hardly appears in their conversation; they avoid using the word. In this world, divorce is a sad reality; the ideal is the close family. When a son thinks his mother is not his mother or a grown woman thinks her uncle is not her uncle, then something is truly rotten in State and Main.

-rural feel: This town has something of a rural feel with fruit and vegetable stands and a main square where farmers’ trucks gather, and where mowing the lawn is a regular activity. Back yards have green houses. This is not the urban jungle; it is pastoral. This is the kind of setting we see in such Spielberg films as E.T., Poltergeist, and Gremlins.

-people here are just “regular” people: family members, doctors, nurses, the cop on the beat, fathers and mothers.

Significance of rural setting:

-these people are the proletariat, close to the land and to labor associated with the land. We see late in the film, the extensive farm work just adjacent to the town. This may remind us of the clunky 5-year plans for both industrial and agricultural progress in the Soviet Union at this time. From the point of view of the west, these plans were dismal failures. Inefficiency was the order of the day when it came to collective organization and government run business.

-so let’s return to that fruit and vegetable stand we see right at the beginning of the film. Here is evidence of the failure of communism. Obviously, we have to suspend a bit of disbelief here. The good doctor has been away all of about 3 days. When he left, the fruit stand was in full flourish; when he returns, it is in disrepair, a mess. The point is that once these people have been “snatched” by the communist body (politic), they no longer can run an efficient and successful business.

-we also have care-givers: doctors, nurses, psychiatrists. The audience gave a laugh when Dr, Bennell gave Jimmy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark) a friendly pat on the bum. This gesture may be out of touch with the realities of 2010, but in the context of the film, it communicates affection and community and care. It suggests just how trusting this community is.

Alfred E. Newman

-let’s return to “What, me worry,” for a moment. The setting reflects a “what, me worry” world, as we have seen. This bright optimism is also apparent in the various mise en scenes. Interiors – living rooms, family rooms, kitchens – are neat, clean, bright, and ordered. Signs of prosperity are just about everywhere. This is the progressive fifties. What the film does is show the other side of this bright picture. It shows the “noir mirror.” In the still below we have the tight circle, men protectors on the outside, women inside. They inhabit a world of light and books, but all the light and all the books will not lift their burden.

Style:

-the style of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers owes much to expressionistic techniques by way of film noir. Note the sharp upward or downward angles, the shadowed rooms and corridors, and the crane shots. The camera follows characters like a surveillance officer. Often, we see them from above, an angle that accentuates their vulnerability. One noteworthy aspect of the filming is Siegel’s manner of shooting corridors. I’m not sure how he gets the effect, but when Becky and Miles are in the corridor outside his office, they are like trapped animals in a confined space. The corridor looks so narrow that two bodies sided by side are hardly possible. As the film moves from beginning to end, Miles and Becky find themselves more and more confined by walls, ceilings, and even floors (in the mine scene). Avenues of escape are few, even though Santa Mira is not far from Los Angeles.

-the noir lighting and camera angles signal the corruption at the heart of this world. Miles, like a noir hero, is trapped in a world he does not comprehend. He is incapable of controlling this world, and hence he becomes frantic. He is in danger of losing his sanity, and we have another instance of a theme we saw in Shock Corridor. The world is so frightening in its inhumanity that it can drive one crazy. (A side-note: often when we have shots of the main street of Santa Mira, we see the local drugstore. This is a “drugged” culture.)

Politics:

-Siegel never spoke of HUAC or communism when he talked of this film. He claims the film is an indictment of conformity and smallness of mind. The pod people, according to Siegel, are people without imagination or daring.

-perhaps the pod people are refugees from fear – the fear of nuclear war or of political tyranny. This reading might suggest the film is a comment on modernity (the post war fears of another war or of encroaching fascism or communism, both of which were considered obnoxious forms of mind control).

-but as we saw earlier, the real fear is the fear of a spreading plague of communism. The pod people are living zombies, human in everything but heart. They constitute a collective; individuality is ruled out in their world. They have no need for such things as emotion or faith. As we saw earlier, the dilapidated and neglected fruit and vegetable stand indicates their lack of initiative. We also know that they have little use for enjoyment; when Miles and Becky go out to dinner, they find a restaurant without any customers. Here is a place that used to have live music, but now can afford only a jukebox. The restaurant is on the verge of closing for lack of customers. Communists do not go out to dinner!

-on the surface, this film is another anti-communist statement. But might we not turn this reading of the film upside down and see the growing mindlessness as a result of consumerism (the bright kitchen appliances, the pool table and basement bars, the cars, the suburban houses and gardens)? Can we see what happens in Santa Mira as the result of an ideology that places all its interest and value in product rather than in the producer? We have that haunting moment near the end of the film when Becky and Miles hear music, what Becky refers to as “the most beautiful music” she has ever heard. When Miles goes to investigate, he discovers the huge pod operation at e nearby farm. As he watches from the hillside, a pod person goes to the cab of a truck and switches off the radio. The music dies. These workers have no need for music (i.e. for beauty or art or imagination).

DUCK SOUP (1933) and von Sternberg

The Marx Brothers made 5 great films before the decline:

The Cocoanuts (1929)

Animal Crackers (1930)

Monkey Business (1931)

Horse Feathers (1932)

Duck Soup (1933)

-all the above with Paramount

Night at the Opera (1935)

-the above with MGM. This is both the high point and the beginning of the end.

Films to follow include Go West, A Day at the Races, The Big Store, Room Service, A Night in Casablanca, and Love Happy.

The Marx Brothers (Gummo, Zeppo, Harpo, Groucho, and Chico), like many early comedians such as Keaton and Chaplin, began their work in vaudeville. Their first films were stage productions first with those elaborate musical numbers.

Coming at the very beginning of sound, they combine physical humour with verbal humour, and we can see some division of labour here:

Harpo’s humour is entirely physical – for obvious reasons (and yes, he could speak)

Groucho’s humour is irreverent, salacious (as is Harpo’s), and absurdist

Chico’s humour is based on ethnicity and linguistic games (puns and deliberate malapropisms)

Zeppo’s humour is difficult to locate (although he was supposed to be funny in real life).

Kinds of humour: we have so far listed physical or slapstick humour, and verbal humour based on play with language.

Satire and parody also form the basis of the Marx’s humour.

Absurdity through the literal

A sort of Punch and Judy with live actors (see Monkey Business)

The attack on class

1. Absurdity:

Take one example: the scene in which Pinky (Harpo) shows Firefly (Groucho) his tattoos. Firefly asks Pinky where he lives, and Pinky opens his shirt to show the tattoo of a doghouse on his chest. The camera moves in close to Pinky’s chest and suddenly the head of a dog emerges from the doghouse, and it barks. This kind of nonsense informs some of the humour we will see developed in later comedy by the likes of the Goons and the Monty Python group. It relies on the impossible, the improbably, and the nonsensical, such as Scotsmen in kilts turning into blancmanges. You might find other examples in Duck Soup. One example might be Mrs. Teasdale mistaking the disguised Chicolini for Firefly. The mirror scene is another example.

2. Verbal humour:

The fun with language that both Chico and Groucho have – “I can give you a Rufus over your head,” or Chico’s transforming of the words “taxes” and “dollars” into Texas and Dallas – turns up in the verbal play of Woody Allen (an obvious example occurs in Everyone Says I Love You (1996) at the end when all the characters are dressed up as the Marx Brothers).

3. Sexual humour:

We can’t avoid noting the sexual humour in the Marx Brothers’ films. In Duck Soup we have the obvious “wooing” that takes place between Firefly and Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont). We also have the lady spy who uses her physical charms to get what she wants (or she tries anyway – she is not too successful here, but we know the kind of character she is). We have Harpo eyeing any girl he meets such as the secretary to the leader of Sylvania. We also have that scene in which he plays a randy Paul Revere and ends up in bed with a girl and a horse. And we have the more cerebral (can I say this?) sexual comedy in the many phallic jokes in the film, the most obvious ones coming when Harpo uses his scissors to castrate various other characters. The question is: does this sexual humour make a serious point (so to speak)? Or is it just throwaway humour?

4. Satire:

Most obviously this film is a satire on war, its absurdity and stupidity. The reason war between Freedonia and Sylvania begins has to do with what?

An insult?

Sex?

Economics?

Desire for Power?

Territorial Claims?

Ideology (e.g. ethnicity or religion)?

Whatever you choose from the list above, the war is, as Shakespeare says in Hamlet, over an eggshell. In other words, it is meaningless.

Aspects of war that come under satiric fire: everything from war rhetoric to rouse the population to support the war, to uniforms, to masculinity and male posturing, to death and enslavement.

-note the various costumes Groucho wears in the battle scene at the end: these outfits bring in reference to a range of wars. They also allude to the Boy Scouts!

The most obvious war that comes under scrutiny is the First World War with its trench warfare (Groucho tries to buy trenches that are so high there will be no need to fight). But the message touches on war generally, and we might reflect on what was happening in Germany in 1933.

Other targets of satire: governments and the source of government authority; the judicial system; military ritual and ritual generally; high society; sex based on money, lust, and position; pomposity; art (this is, I think, the only film in which neither Chico nor Harpo play their respective instruments).

5. Parody:

The film parodies a number of things, most obviously the musical productions of the emerging Hollywood musicals such as The Love Parade (1929), which is set in a pseudo-Balkan state called Sylvania. The musical production number that precedes the war in Duck Soup covers most of American popular music from Yankee Doodle to “All God’s Chillen.” The various set pieces allude to big budget films, to the music halls, to clichés of war, to minstrel shows, and gospel singing.

What else is parodied? The spy film (cf. Mata Hari 1932), the society film (more of these would follow in the 30s), the silent cinema (especially in the mirror sequence), the bedroom farce (that precedes the mirror sequence); the conventional linear film (perhaps more so in earlier Marx Brothers films, but we can see an anarchic spirit here too).

We can add film itself. In one scene, Groucho speaks directly to the camera, breaking any sense of a self-contained world in the cinema.

Comedy: like earlier silent comedy, Duck Soup breaks the conventions of both high and low mimetic comedy. Traditionally, comedy is about social dissolution, the breakdown of community (see just about every situations comedy on TV for examples of this). The story begins with social cohesion, then something happens to break this cohesion, but finally things come round to a celebratory ritual of renewed communion (often a marriage). Comedy ends happily. Duck Soup ends with warfare and the pitching of vegetables at a lady.

Context: this is an early 30s film, and therefore a product of the Great Depression that followed from the Stock Market crash in 1929. How is this background reflected in the film?

How do we “read” the four brothers? Do they represent anything? Why are they the way they are?

More from Paramount:

The films of Josef von Sternberg (at least the ones with Marlene Dietrich)

Morocco (1930)

The Blue Angel (1930)

Blonde Venus (1932)

Dishonored (1931)

Shanghai Express (1932)

Scarlet Empress (1934)

The Devil is a Woman (1935)

Paramount is the artsy studio with a European flavour from directors von Sternberg and Lubitsch. The studio also boasted Cecille B. DeMille. The von Sternberg films are noteworthy for their rather melodramatic plots, usually about a fallen woman with the proverbial heart of gold, hackneyed scripts, and stilted acting. These films are noteworthy for these things precisely because under von Sternberg’s direction, they overcome such liabilities by their acute sense of form – especially in lighting, mise en scene, costumes (mostly from Travis Banton), and framing. In form, these films represent something of a decadent flavour, a sense of a world rich and crowded and filled with passion. The passion is reflected in the camera work itself, its set-ups and the lighting used to set off human faces and forms. The Blue Angel is perhaps not the best example of the fullness of von Sternberg’s filmic vision, but it is the first collaboration between him and Dietrich. In the street leading to the music hall, and in the music hall interiors, especially the stage and seating area, we can see the influence of Caligari and German Expressionism. In this film what is expressed is human passion and the network of filaments that this passion produces. The story is simple enough: a stuffy and obsessively orderly teacher, Professor Rath (rath = rat; unrath = garbage) discovers that some of his students are fascinated with a local music hall performer, Lola Lola. He goes to the music hall intending to catch his students and bring them out from their life of degeneration. Instead, he becomes fascinated by the same Lola Lola. She too becomes curious about the Professor, seeing him as someone who can bring paternal protection to her. The Professor’s fate is clear. He descends as Lola ascends. He becomes broken, fragmented, split, as the images of the mirror shows us more than once in the film. He becomes the clown, the cuckold, the rooster who is unable to perform as cock of the walk. Meanwhile Dietrich becomes more sexually assured than she ever was, prepared to indulge what she is – a woman of passion who lives for love. Her song, “Falling in Love Again,” tells us all we need to know. She lives only for sensual pleasures.

The film thrives on moving into the interior. It lives in rooms, smoke filled spaces. The spiral staircase leading to Lola’s bedroom is as good a filmic sign as we can look for, in a film filled with signs. First the stair leads up and down, the two directions the main characters take. Second, it leads round and round to remind us of just how stationary things really are. Life revolves around the passions. The stairway serves a deeply psychoanalytic function, reminding us of the mind and its various aspects, conscious and unconscious connected by a stairway. In other words, this film concentrates on the inner workings of the mind, rather than on the mind as that which allows us to function socially. Obviously we have areas of social life in the film through the school, its bureaucracy, and the implicit connection of music hall managers with governors and chairmen and such. But Professor Rath moves away from the social and into the personal realm of desire. Lola Lola has no life beyond the personal realm of desire.

Lola Lola is the quintessential femme fatale using her body and her siren’s song to lure men. She is la belle dame sans merci. She represents male fantasy at its most attractive and repulsive. She is desire itself. Her clothing, her cigarettes, her posture, her facial movements and looks of the eye are redolent of a threatening and dangerous sexuality. Something queer resonates in this sexuality, and it is this that makes here so dangerously alluring. And yet she is also, at least at the beginning, somewhat passive and even vulnerable. She is the child in need of protection. Later she becomes the dominatrix who demands performance from her man. And finally, she is the fickle woman who gives her love indiscriminately.

D.W. Griffith, BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919)

Griffith had been making films for ten years or more.

In 1915, he made what is one of the most famous (and infamous) films in history when he made Birth of a Nation. The film uses white actors to play Black men, as Hollywood continued to do with various racial types right up until recently. Broken Blossoms does the same, using white actors to play Chinese people. Birth of a Nation depicts the Black men as ugly and violent. The film was (and continues to be) seen as racist. In 1916, Griffith made the lavish (like a Cecille B. DeMille extravaganza) film, Intolerance (some prints are as long as 208 minutes). This film seems in some way Griffith’s attempt to assuage his guilt for his portrayal of African American people in Birth of a Nation, the way John Ford tried to do something similar when he made Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 as a way of revising his earlier depiction of Native Americans. But Intolerance is both very long and structurally demanding, telling four stories from different historical times simultaneously with a recurring bridging scene of a mother rocking a cradle. Griffith might have thought that to make his point he needed to make a more straight-forward film, something simple such as Broken Blossoms. Did I say “simple”? Well, you know what I mean: the story unfolds sequentially.

Broken Blossoms is a melodrama with oversized villain and pint-sized victim.

Broken Blossoms is obviously about race. The story is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, but instead of two families feuding, we have two races. The lovers cannot come together happily precisely because of the intolerance of the society in which they live.

What do you make of the opening scenes in China?

This is a film about broken dreams and aspirations.

This is a film about entrapment. The scene in which Lucy retreats to the closet and cringes as her father hacks away at the door with a hatchet will serve as example. But the entire shooting style communicates entrapment, from the opening shots inside a monastery, to the closed boxing ring, the soporific house of sin, the claustrophobic shop where the “Yellow Man” works, the short abrupt streets, the house where Lucy and Battling live, the enclosed space of the dock and work yard, the night shooting, the close-ups, the extreme narrowness of the bedroom above the shop. We seem unable to stretch in this film. For the most part , the camera cannot get distance from the actors or the action.

This is a film about love. But I wonder just how this film envisages love. Why does the Chinese man find Lucy attractive? Why does she find him attractive?

This is a film about inner struggle and turmoil. The camera locates much of the “meaning” in body language and, especially, eyes.

This is a film about the loss of innocence, its fragility, and its inevitable failure.

The intensity of such loss is, perhaps, nowhere more evident than in the scene in which Lucy mends her father’s work socks. She does this carefully, and just before she puts the mended socks away, she briefly strokes them. What does this suggest? (See a similar gesture in Ford’s The Searchers)

And what about Battling? His body language more often than not suggests arrogance, anger, violence, and a huge reservoir of frustration. Why, I wonder?

This is a film about xenophobia. I wonder how successful Griffith is in presenting China and Chinese people sympathetically.

Birth of a Nation was technically advanced. Andrew Rausch’s book lists the many innovations this film introduced (see pp.34-35).

Some of these techniques appear in Broken Blossoms: cross-cutting, tinting, close-ups. In fact, we might call Broken Blossoms a film of close-ups. We have many instances of facial close-ups and mid-range close-ups (from torso up).

The close-ups serve to intensify the emotional impact of the film.

The film gesture: perhaps the most famous feature of Broken Blossoms is the gesture Lucy (Lillian Gish) makes when her “Daddy” insists that she smile. She places her fingers to her mouth and pulls her lips into a smile. This gesture appears throughout the film, but most significantly in Lucy’s last close-up as she dies. Does this work?

Gesture: we have many instances of signature gestures in film (Bogart pulling on his ear in The Maltese Falcon, Wayne holding his forearm in The Searchers, Woody Allen ‘s many ticks and mannerisms and those glasses, Henry Fonda’s play with the chair in My Darling Clementine). Can you think of others?

The gesture reminds us of the body. It reminds us of non-verbal communication. It draws our attention to character.

The gesture reminds us of visual cueing. Not only do we have Lucy’s gesture in Broken Blossoms, but we also have Battling’s fists, various smoking apparatuses, and flowers. These serve as visual “symbols” or signs. Each of these signs communicates to the audience. What have I missed in the list below?

1. gesture of forced smile
2. clenched fists
3. flowers (used for various “gestures”)
4. the dolls and the one doll
5. smoking apparatuses
6. feet and foot
7. clothes
8. food
9. streets and sets
10. use of establishing shots (e.g. dark shots of night and ships, or dockside with workers sawing and doing other things, shots with mist)

Opening shots establish themes: we see various contrasts, and the film builds on contrasts:

1. children/sailors
2. east/west
3. young (children)/old (merchants)
4. Buddhists (peace)/sailors (rowdy and pugnacious)
5. Buddhist priests/American clergymen missionaries
6. Chinese part of town/dock side

What do you make of the comment at the end of the film that this day has seen “40,000 casualties”?

The scene with the hatchet reminds me of “Here’s Johnny!”

Style and Technique in the Cinema

-random thoughts on cinema

Technique:

-how does the story unfold technically?

-“technique” refers to what we might refer to as “discourse”

-story and discourse

-story is the set of actions that constitute a narrative. The story is the basic set of actions carried out by a set of characters or actants.

-story may be narrated in many ways, the most obvious being “linear”: beginning, middle and end.

-but think of a film such as Christopher Nolan’s MEMENTO (2000).

This film tells its story backwards. The plot unfolds in a linear fashion, but in reverse beginning with the end of the story and proceeding to the end, which is the beginning.

-this brings us to discourse: how the story is presented.

-stories may be linear or non-linear. A good example of a non-linear presentation of story is Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994).

-various shifts in plot can interrupt a linear telling: e.g. flashback (analepsis), flash forward (prolepsis), dream sequences, fragmented sequences (various characters with differing stories as in CITIZEN KANE orRASHOMON, 1950).

-discourse in cinema refers to more than the manner of setting out the plot: it also includes such things as camera position and composition (mise en scene), camera movement, cutting, casting and acting, lighting, sound, long takes/short takes.

Camera Position and Composition

-where the camera is positioned relative to what we see. Close to the action, politely distant from the action, removed from the action

-looking up at the people and place, looking down on the action and place, or looking directly at the action and place on a normal eye level.

-how are things arranged in the frame? Like painting, the cinema frames its images. It offers us a semiotic field. Our eye finds direction in what we see. In other words, the composition directs our sense of what is important within the frame. (An obvious feature here is the use or non-use of deep focus.)

Camera Movement

-does the camera track the action or does it simply record in a stationary position?

-does the camera pan horizontally or vertically, from a dolly or from a track?

-does the camera track from a hand-held camera or from a helicopter?

-is camera movement fluid or erratic?

-the wipe and the iris.

-how does the camera record the speed of the action? Slow motion, fast motion.

-the tracking shot from Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958)

-or any film by Robert Altman. Altman's camera prowls and scans and investigates and examines. It rarely remains stationary.

Cutting

-shot and scene: the shot is the specific picture we see at any moment as the film moves in front of us (the picture may be static or in motion); the scene is the collection of shots that form one sequence of action (a fight scene, for example, may be comprised of many shots. Check out Welles’s Chimes at Midnight).

-the close-up shot – from The Searchers (1956)

-left on the cutting room floor. Remember Kevin Costner and The Big Chill (1983).

-shooting out of synch, and then piecing the picture together – sort of like a jigsaw puzzle that you can create as you go along.

-classic cutting is unobtrusive, cutting away from a shot only after the business of that shot is over. In classic cutting, we see the action as “normally” as possible. Hollywood cinema from the 30s through the 60s most often used this type of cutting. In the wake of certain television shows and MTV, a different kind of cutting has taken prominence.

-quick cutting or montage may take more than one form, but essentially it involves cutting pieces of film into each other in a way that draws attention to the cutting itself. This type of cutting can be frenetic, as in many music videos.

-montage in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Casting and Acting

-casting has a degree of serendipity to it, but since the beginning of cinema, casting has been connected with celebrity. We sometimes speak of a film as an actor’s film (e.g. a Clint Eastwood film or a Bette Davis film, etc). The connection between the actor and the character is often intimate – Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft! That really is Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible films. Some times an actor will play a character with the same name – hasn’t Jackie Chan done this? Or what about Being John Malkovich?

Often a film will cast against type – e.g. Collateral Damage with Tom Cruise or Once Upon a Time in the West with Henry Fonda. The force of the character comes from our knowledge and expectations of the actor.

-acting can take several forms from over-acting to method acting or inept acting to classical acting to silent acting. And sometimes, the camera does the acting.

Lighting

-the most obvious aspect of lighting comes in the difference between black and white filming and colour filming.

-neither black and white nor colour is one-dimensional. Lighting can make much difference in the black and white effect (see The Big Combo and Blonde Venus). As for colour, various colour effects are possible through the use of lighting and film stock. A film can accentuate one colour and de-accentuate others. The texture of the colour can change.

Sound

-silence, music, natural sound, voices.

Long takes/Short takes

Sample film: Tod Browning’s The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

Style

-now what about style?

-style derives from the manner in which a film uses technique. We might associate style with various components of a film: the director, the cinematographer, the actors, even the designers (see the work of William Cameron Menzies, for example – Things to Come 1936, The Maze 1953, Invaders from Mars 1954, and even Gone with the Wind 1939).

-director: often, perhaps most often, we think of style in film as the product of a director’s vision. Wes Anderson or Quentin Taratino have discernible styles that include such things as sensibility (difficult to define, but not impossible), use of colour, kinds of characters and stories (Howard Hawks worked in just about every genre, and yet he consistently shows an interest in similar types of men and women), use of camera (Robert Altman is noted for his almost continuously moving camera), use of sound and so on.

-cinematographer: the person who does the photographing can have an impact on the style of a film. John Alton who photographed The Big Combo can make a routine film special with his stylish lighting. Gregg Toland brings similar stylish flourishes to Citizen Kane. William Clothier has made many a mediocre film worth watching.

-actors: obviously actors can bring style to a film. We have distinctive actors such as Johnny Depp, Carrie Anne Moss, Kevin Spacey, Renee Zellwegger or Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford (alas!), Clark Gable who may or may not be fine actors, but who have something that lights up a screen. We also have the likes of Meryl Streep or Marlon Brando who can carry a film with the force of acting, a force that crosses over into style.

-style is what separates a film that is familiar in its use of conventions (amounting to cliché) from one that is unique.

RIO BRAVO (1959)

A Note on Epic
The question of definitions always irks me only because it is such a mug's game. We have to have a language to talk about whatever it is we talk about, and so we have legal language, medical language, sociological language, and so on and on. The study of the arts is no different. We have a language that is both consistent and inconsistent across the arts. Much of this language begins historically with literature (at least in western - that is, Eurocentric, cultures). Take, for example, "epic." This is a word that dates back to the Greeks who used the word to label long narrative poems on a grand scale (e.g. the Homeric epics, the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY– and we all know that the former was recently made into a movie with Brad Pitt!). Epics were about the adventures and the deeds of warriors and heroes. Epics employed myth and folklore and legend and history (is this beginning to sound a bit like SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON?) The epic in the sense I am using it here also has a nationalistic aspect. Homer's ILIAD is about the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Later Virgil writes a national epic for the Roman Emperor; this is the AENEID and it recounts the beginnings of the Roman empire. In English, we have Spenser's THE FAERIE QUEENE which relates to Arthur and the so-called "matter-of-Britain" (as does LA MORTE D'ARTHUR even earlier). I could go on and mention, for example, Derek Walcott's OMEROS (1990), an epic from the Caribbean. In the early days the epic contained specific conventions: the epic simile (works only in writing), the catalogue (in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON this occurs when Nathan recounts or catalogues the names of the soldiers killed with Custer), the epic epithet (standard and repeated descriptors - "rosy fingers of dawn," "the wine-dark sea," etc.), and the trip to the underworld. Epic usually takes the shape of a series of adventures or encounters with obstacles (monsters, temptresses, natural disasters). The big thing is scale. The epic is large in its sweep. It relates to what we now sometimes call "high fantasy." The "Lord of the Rings" trilogy in either fiction or film form is a prime example. Despite periods when epic has little cultural purchase, it has never fully gone out of fashion in literature; we can find examples right up to our own day. Epics tend to be nationalistic and so they appear at times of national crisis. “The Lord of the Rings” cycle appeared at a time of cultural desire for support (post WW 2 and in the first years of this century 2001-2005). But the epic has certainly lost its place as the premier narrative art. And it has passed from the long poem into fiction (WAR AND PEACE), cinema, and perhaps the opera. Epic is grand, large, and sublime as opposed to modest, small, and beautiful.

The epic does appear in non-western art, notably in the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

In painting, we might include large historical canvases dealing with the likes of Hannibal or Napoleon and even Generals Wolf and Montcalm. I would probably include John Martin’s huge paintings or at least some of them in this category.

In cinema, epic has been around since the early days (see for example, Abel Ganz's NAPOLEON (1925) or D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (1918)). It has usually been associated with "costume dramas" on a grand scale. Hollywood was interested in epic in the 1950s as a way of differentiating film from TV and keeping people coming to the cinema. Hollywood epic takes many subjects for its focus: the biblical epic, sagas of the Middle Ages and Knights of the Round Table and the Crusades and such, modern heroes such as Lawrence of Arabia, and other large-scale stories such as MOBY DICK or GONE WITH THE WIND. The one director most associated with the epic is Cecil B. DeMille who made many such films in the twenties and early thirties, including epic westerns (UNION PACIFIC, THE PLAINSMAN are two of these).

The western was also used for epic purposes. We have obvious examples: James Cruz's THE COVERED WAGON(1923), Raoul Walsh's THE BIG TRAIL (1930 and John Wayne's first starring role), THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), THE ALAMO (1960 and 2004). Not all westerns are epics. The films of Anthony Mann or Bud Boetticher, for example, are not epic. Films with or by Kevin Costner, however, tend to epic proportions – DANCES WITH WOLVES (199?), OPEN RANGE (2004). Epic needs grandeur and scale - HOW THE WEST WAS WON is a good example. In other words, most westerns are most likely not epic if we want to keep our definition strong. Our next film, for example, is not an epic. Hawks's RIO BRAVO is too internal and confined to be epic. Hawks and Ford are different in this way - Hawks is interested in individuals as they navigate small groups. He wants to understand something of their psychology. Ford, on the other hand, was interested in individuals as they merge into a group. He is less interested in psychology and more interested in the intersection between history and myth. In other words, Ford used epic conventions of myth, history, legend often on a grand scale - "guidons gaily flying, lusty men singing" and so on). Ford's visuals are carefully crafted to highlight shape and form and frame and the romance of land and animal and man. Hawks frames for more modest (and I do not mean any less "good") reasons.

SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON is, I think, epic in size and intention. So too is THE SEARCHERS, although this is a very different film from YELLOW RIBBON.

I mention opera somewhere in this blog, and I might as well note that the Italian western (e.g. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) is unabashedly operatic. Epic and opera may go together, but not necessarily. Here, however, they do. “Spectacle” is important to opera. It too is grand and exaggerated, filled with colour and romance and broad action.

Now let me retreat: epic, like all categories is elusive and we may have films (e.g. THE WILD BUNCH) that may be or may not be epic. What do you think?

Howard Hawks and the western:
-Hawks made a few westerns. Although his output was modest, his influence was huge. He is also the director credited with making John Wayne an actor when he cast him in RED RIVER.
Hawks’s westerns:
Red River (1948)
The Big Sky (1952)
Rio Bravo (1959)
El Dorado (1966)
Rio Lobo (1970)
-the first two are epic; the last three are not, and they are usually thought to be a trilogy. I recommend EL DORADO, a film about aging and about pain.

Hawks’s themes:
-Hawks is probably thought to be a “western” director because of his interest in masculinity and male communities. See for example, the fliers in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939) or the big game hunters in HATARI! (1962). Hawks was known for his realism; that is, he had his actors actually do the riding, herding, working, catching big game, pulling boats, and so on.

-professionalism – Hawks’s men are often professionals (in one case, they are actually professors)
-the strong woman – see below
-the individual – the rugged individual who fights through adversity
-action as opposed to thought (see BALL OF FIRE, 1941)
-unlike Ford’s characters, Hawks’ characters work out their identities in local and personal ways rather than in conjunction with “nation.” (See the verbal jousting between Hildy and Walter in HIS GIRL FRIDAY.)

Hawksian Woman:
-both Ford and Hawks take an interest in women. Ford’s women are more often than not keepers of the home fires. They are domestic, and they represent the stability of home and family and civilization. We have exceptions, of course (see Ford’s SEVEN WOMEN 1966) or MARY QUEEN OF SCOTLAND 1936), but more often than not the woman is associated with the garden, the house, the east, marriage and motherhood. Hawks’s women are notable for their toughness. They attempt to get inside the male community, to be one of the boys, as it were. See Jean Arthur in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS or Barbara Stanwyck in BALL OF FIRE (1941). In RIO BRAVO, the girl who infiltrates the male group is Feathers (Angie Dickinson). She discombobulates the Sheriff, Chance. She makes him uncomfortable. She also helps to protect him. She must, because she is a woman, remain to some extent outside the male group, but she proves her worth. In the end, she proves worthy to be a helpmate/sidekick to Chance. In the film she is associated with both Colorado (youth) and Carlos (the Mexican), and this is a familiar grouping of woman with the “other.” The point here, perhaps, is that these usually ineffective (and sometimes fearful or caricatured) others are necessary to the hero’s survival and safety. The hero cannot (or does not) stand alone.

RIO BRAVO:
-the film is a parody of HIGH NOON (1952). HIGH NOON was an anti McCarthy film in which a sheriff, on his wedding day, faces four very bad guys (Frank Miller and his 3 henchmen) who come on the noon train. Rather than flee, he stays, against the wishes of his new wife, to face the baddies. He tries, vainly, to find help among the towns people. They refuse to stand up for what is right. The sheriff faces the bad guys alone or almost alone. RIO BRAVO reverses this situation. Here the towns people come forward to offer the sheriff help, but he keeps turning them down because they are not professional enough. Despite turning them down, he gets help anyway!

-it is also something of an anti-western, taking place mostly in claustrophobic places: hotel rooms, bars, the jail, the livery stable. Like HIGH NOON, RIO BRAVO is not so much interested in the myth of the west as it is interested in the question of ethics. Who is right and who is wrong? How should a community act when faced with peril? What is the responsibility of the professional policeman? What kind of person does it take to be a law enforcer? The characters are cowboys, but we are less interested in them as cowboys than as people in a tight situation. Whereas Ford’s SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON is necessarily a story of the “west,” RIO BRAVO is a story that just happens to take place in the west.

The characters:
the hero – John T. Chance (John Wayne)
His name might suggest that he represents “fate” or some such thing. He’s a guy who will take a chance (on luck, on love, on friendship, on being able to stave off the bad guys until the Marshall arrives). He is big, confident, capable, stubborn, consistent, reliable, and like his hat – a bit battered. He is self- reliant. He is the hegemonic male – except that he is not as self reliant as he thinks he is.


the borrachin – Dude (Dean Martin)
The friend who has been jilted by a woman, and who has, as a consequence, descended into self-pity and abjection. As “abject,” he is outside community, a laughing stock, worthless, and weak. His story is the story of confidence regained. He needs an injection of self-respect.

the old man – Stumpy (Walter Brennan), one of a line of limpers. His limp associates his with infirmity but also with the earth, nature, old verities. He is as old and strong as the earth. Stumpy reminds us of change and mortality – human weakness that is itself a strength. He does, after all, save the day when he brings the dynamite.



the woman – Feathers (Angie Dickinson)

-Feathers, as her name might suggest, is the sexual focus of the film. She represents the libido just as much as she represents female strength. More often than not, we see Feathers and Chance in her hotel room (she is closely associated with hotels and what they represent in the world of the cowboy). The frame often shows them separated by distance and by the doorframe and the stove pipe in the foreground. This distance is what Feathers has come to displace. She has him cornered, boxed in. She takes on the moral stiffness of Chance and breaks through his tough exterior. He gives her masculine strength and she gives him feminine warmth. The sexuality we can assume they will enjoy has nothing, or appears to have nothing, to do with domesticity. Feathers is not out to tame Chance, but rather to participate with him in enjoying each other. Her change of clothes from what we see above to the dance hall garb she later wears (see picture below) signals her erotic motive.

the young man – Colorado (Ricky Nelson)
what to say about this character? [In passing, I note that films of this time made a habit of showcasing young pop stars from the music world. The most obvious example is Elvis Presley, but we also have films with the likes of Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Jerry Lee Lewis, and you can most likely think of one or two others (e.g. Pat Boone).] Colorado is reminiscent of Billy the Kid in that he is young, a fast gun, cocky, and associated with a big cattleman, Wheeler (Ward Bond). (Billy the Kid was involved in the Lincoln County Cattle Wars in New Mexico on the side of John Tunstall.) He is young, but principled. He tries to stay out of the fracas, but he finds he cannot when he sees Chance tricked into a situation in which he (Chance) will have to get himself killed. Rather than see a good man go down, Colorado helps out and thereby finds himself involved in the situation. Shades of U.S. non-involvement before the second world war? Where Stumpy is the past, Colorado is the future.

-these are the five main characters, but we have several other important characters:
hotel man – Carlos Robante (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez)
the friend – Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond)
the villain – Nathan Burdette (John Russell)
the villain’s brother – Joe Burdette (Claude Akins)

-the film works as a dynamic examination of the interactions of the characters. At the center is Chance.

The Hero:
Chance is mentor to Dude
Chance is caregiver to Stumpy
Chance is father figure to Colorado
Chance is nervous roué (or a roué manqué) to Feathers
Chance is cared for by Feathers, Colorado, Dude, Stumpy, Carlos
-the trick is that the hero appears to be in control and alone – one man standing against the collective might of the villain – but in fact he is aided by a rag-tag assortment of ostensibly weak characters – an old man, a drunk, a kid, a woman, and so on.

[Clint Eastwood’s THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES 1976 does something similar with its hero. And then we have John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 1976, a film that is clearly a homage to RIO BRAVO.]

Chance is the moral center of the film
-he stands for duty, justice, the law, and professional pride.
-his morality manifests itself in his relationship to Dude: friendship and strength (“Sorry don’t get it done, Dude”)
-his morality manifests itself in his sense of civic duty and justice: his refusal to bend to pressure from Burdette
-his morality manifests itself in his relationship to Feathers: his disapproval of her clothing and her means of making a living

Dude, on the other hand, is the psychological center of the film.
-he is clearly a temporary alcoholic. His alcoholism appears to be a result of self-pity. His self-respect has crashed because he was jilted by a woman – a no good woman, as Chance would have it. Dude needs to find self-respect; he finds it within the male group.

-the opening sequence in which Dude grovels for money shows us how low he has sunk. He is just about to put his hand into a cuspador when a foot appears and knocks it away. The camera looks down on Dude and up at Chance; the one character has fallen low and the other is morally upright, stiff as a board. Chance looks down at Dude with both disgust and friendship. Dude, for his part, is so abject that he strikes his best friend – probably for two reasons: 1) to get the drink he desperately wants/needs, and 2) to register is own self-disgust. Striking Chance is tantamount to striking himself.

Unlike EL DORADO in which the cure for alcoholism is physical, RIO BRAVO focuses on a psychological approach to alcoholism. Dude pours his drink back into the bottle when he hears the Deguello (the death song).

The Deguello: played by the Mexican army on March 6, 1836 before the attack on the Alamo by Santa Anna. The music means, take no prisoners. In RIO BRAVO, the Deguello reinforces the resolve of the good guys to hold out at all costs; it brings them closer together as a group. It also gives the bad guys an edge of “otherness.” The bad guys are a threat from outside (both literally and figuratively).

-the death song reminds Dude of what is at stake here: justice, freedom, democracy, but most importantly friendship.

Music is important in the film because it is a reminder of friendship/comradeship.

“My Rifle My Pony and Me” – the performance of this song (followed by “Cindy, Cindy”) serves as an interlude in the film. But it is not a throwaway. The scene enacts the relationships of the film. Stumpy, Dude, and Colorado form a trio (Stumpy plays harmonica), while Chance remains on the periphery. Dude, Colorado, and Stumpy are a group, but the hero remains outside the group, appreciating it but not participating in it. We might remember how often Chance refuses the help of others. He positions himself on the periphery here and in the town.

The song speaks of friendship between a rifle, a pony, and the singer. But it also speaks of a love to return to. In other words, the song ties into the plot. The plot gives us a hero who has a rifle and a pony, and who is in the process of finding a girl. The point is that in a strong film everything serves a plot and a thematic purpose. The song’s meaning is opposite to that of the “Deguello.”

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

This is not a western; it is an epic. And it needs epic proportions. One aspect of these epic proportions is colour and density. The filming of Monument Valley in this film is breathtaking, and we should see it as breathtaking. The characters inhabit a landscape that is huge and dominating. Out of this land come danger and elemental forces that only the most courageous and even pathologic men can face. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of the land in this film. Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive Carey) says that Texicans are human men way out on a limb, but that once many of their bones are in the ground “this place will be a fine good place to be.” She might have said Texicans are human men and women out on a limb, but she knew her place. In any case, Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen) does not blame Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) for the death of his son Brad (Harry Carey, Jr.), because he believes that it is “this land” that is responsible for Brad’s death (“Oh, Ethan, this country...”). The land is hard, primitive, arid, wild, mysterious, and dangerous. And most of all, it is large and defined by colour and shading and brilliant skies. We have to see this. This is landscape as sublime, in the Burkean sense of a landscape that signifies pain and terror. It represents the limit of human thought and activity. The land is harsh but also compelling. It has a spiritual dimension. Men and women and animals die here, but they also create life here. This is a land of possibility, as Mrs. Jorgensen suggests, and it is a land of regressive desire. It is redolent of a distant past, and it is poised toward a future. This is limbo land. It is a border between times and places. This land represents both something to tame and something that cannot be tamed. It contains humans within an alien space; it looks like a moonscape at times. It suggests primeval time, the world in its beginnings. Human beings who are part of this land (the natives and Ethan and, for a time, Marty (Jeffrey Hunter) are frightening in their willingness to engage in violent acts. Ethan and Scar/Cicatrice (Henry Brandon) are the two characters most closely associated with the land. Scar, leader of a band of Comanches (“say they will go one way, then they go t’other.”), is a mysterious chief whose name causes tension whenever someone mentions it. Scar and his people come and go unpredictably; they are not fixed to a place. We learn that Scar has a reason for hating white people; his sons have been killed by white men. He is the double of Ethan whose family has been killed by Indians. We can see these characters as doubles in the scene in which Ethan tries to stare Scar down, and says to him: “You speak good American, for a Comanch. Someone teach you?” A moment later, Scar remarks: “You speak good Comanch, for a white man. Someone teach you?”). Each knows the ways of the other; they taunt each other. Ethan speaks Spanish and Comanche; he knows the ways of the Comanche. He is a creature of the land, as his association with dogs and horses might indicate. And he is crazy with hatred of the Indian, just as Scar is crazy with hatred of white people. These two men are larger than life and they need a larger than life space in which to function; they are both “scarred” by their pathologies. In effect, each of these men “wanders forever between the winds.” They can have no home if we think of home as a place of circumscribed space, or a place in which to settle. Ethan walks away from the Jorgensen home at the end of the film, and the door shuts him out.

Monument Valley echoes with time in this film. It is haunted. It is a land time forgot. It reflects unconscious forces, the deep well of desire and the perversions desire can seek. The journey of the characters in this film is as much a journey to the interior as it is a journey across the American southwest. This is an inner landcscape.

And so we need to see epic space in order to understand at an emotional level the size of these people, and the intensity of their quests. As in all epics, the plot here involves a quest, the five-year quest to find Debbie Edwards (Lana Wood/Natalie Wood). In the end, two men accomplish their quest. Ethan makes clear that they will accomplish their end “just as sure as the turnin’ o’ the earth.” Ethan’s resolve is elemental, just as certain as night turning into day or summer into winter. He is a force of nature; he just keeps coming on. The question is, why? Why is Ethan so hell-bent on finding Scar? At the beginning perhaps we can say that he and the small band of Rangers hope to find the girls alive. But even then, we know that Ethan is intent on riding the Comanches down, fully aware that to do so will mean that the Comanches will kill the girls. As time goes on, of course, he knows that Lucy (Pippa Scott) is dead, and that Debbie has been taken into the band of Comanche people as one of them. Then it becomes clear that Ethan’s only purpose is to “put a bullet” in Debbie’s brain (“Martha would want him to,” says Laurie (Vera Miles)). Why is he so intent on killing Debbie? Well, the answer is that he hates the Indians, and he thinks that Debbie has been transformed from white person to native person; she has been tainted, sullied by contact with the native peoples. This is clear. Miscegenation is the theme of this film, and it is something Ethan detests. Why does he hate the natives, and why does he hate the thought of miscegenation? We know that his mother has been killed by Indians, and we know that his brother and his family have also been killed by Indians. And yet his rage is pathological. He shoots buffalo just to keep food from the Indians. He looks with scorn and rage and disgust and hatred at the white women who have been rescued, and he scowls: “They ain’t white. At least not any more.” He is, in short, a racist. This is fine, but we might still ask why? Why does he hate with such vehemence? Revenge is one thing, and absolute and irrational hatred is another. Even after Scar is dead, killed not by Ethan but by Marty, Ethan scalps him. This is an act of desecration, violation, a sign of Ethan’s extreme hatred of this Indian leader. And then, if he hates with such immensity, why does he not carry out his resolve to kill Deborah when he catches up with her at the end of the film? Is the end of the film just a Hollywood happy ending? Or does it make sense in terms of the character of Ethan and what we experience in the film? What Ethan fears is, ultimately, himself. He is his very ‘other.’ He and Scar are two sides of the same identity, and Ethan hates the Scar side of himself. He wants to eradicate this, and once Scar is eradicated, Ethan is no longer whole. He needs to reconcile his two selves, but this does not happen. No reconciliation takes place for Ethan as a subject, He may renounce his desire to kill Debbie, but he cannot live a half person with others, just as he could not live with others when he was a double self. Ethan’s fate is “to wander forever between the winds.”

Like so many of Ford’s films, THE SEARCHERS celebrates the human capacity for survival. This theme surfaces early in the film in the conversation between Ethan and his brother Aaron (Walter Coy), when Aaron tells of others who have gone back east, and how his wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) just wouldn’t let a man quit. Perhaps this theme is best expressed in the character of Laurie. She has waited years for Martin Pawley to propose to her. She expresses her frustration and dissatisfaction with the life she leads. Having nowhere to go, she finally agrees to marry Charlie McCorry (Ken Curtis). We know that she does not love Charlie, but a young woman has to survive out on the frontier somehow. We might also consider her parents. Lars obviously has come to America from Scandinavia. His wife has been a schoolteacher (“she’s a schoolteacher, by golly.”), but they now live out here on the edge of things – out on a limb, as Mrs. Jorgensen says. Their house is larger and more architecturally elaborate (note the patterned woodwork on the porch) than the Edwards’s place. Clearly, they are trying to bring a touch of civilization to this outpost. We never do see a town in the film, and the forts that Ethan and Marty visit seem a long way from the Jorgensen’s or the Edwards’s places. One of the nicest touches in the film is Lars’s use of glasses. He cannot read, but whenever someone else reads a letter, he puts his glasses on. This gesture suggests that he ‘sees’ reading as important, an activity separate from his usual activities. He puts his glasses on as a gesture of respect for reading, even though he does not read. He also protects letters, taking the one Laurie had tried to burn and placing it in his pocket. Reading seems far removed from the necessities of life out on the frontier; nevertheless, it is crucial. The letter Jerem Futterman (Peter Mamakos) writes eventually leads Ethan and Marty to Debbie. The letter Martin writes leads to Laurie’s decision to accept Charlie’s proposal. Letters and reading suggest a new way of life coming to the frontier, and we know this way of life will remain; it will survive the vagaries of the land and its dangers. (Ford extends this theme later in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.)

We know that Ethan can read. He reads better than Martin. He reads in more than one sense. He reads letters and he can write his last will and testament in something resembling legal language. He can also read signs. He knows a Comanche lance when he sees one. He knows what the dead bull means (and by the way, the killing of the cattle is an act as ugly as Ethan’s killing of the buffalo later in the film). He can read Look’s (Beulah Archulette) reaction when she hears the name Scar. He can read the intentions of a man like Futterman. And yet with all his skill at reading, he is left behind by the coming civilization. He has no place in the social group. We might ask why he remains outside the group even after he has changed his resolve and returned Debbie to the Jorgensen place? Why does he not shoot her? A number of reasons come to mind. First, Debbie is Martha’s daughter. We see him lift her when he first returns to the Edwards’s home at the beginning of the film. He lifts her the same way at the end just before he says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” He learns during the five-year search for her that Martin Pawley is a good person, despite being an eighth (or is it a quarter? Ethan’s assertion is hardly a mistake.) Cherokee. Martin quite literally removes the poison from Ethan, and Ethan is prepared to leave all his worldly goods to him. The scalping of Scar serves as a ritual cathartic, purging Ethan of his hatred; the scalping is the only ritual Ethan participates in and he does so privately. Seeing Debbie cringe in fear moves him to change his resolve. And so we might conclude that Ethan is not the same demented person at the end of the film that he was at the beginning and through much of the action. And yet we know that he is a man marked by mystery. He belongs nowhere. He has this mysterious past. He has not changed his sword into a ploughshare, and he believes in taking only one oath at a time and his is to a lost cause, a war over and done with for everyone but him. He lives in the past, not for the future. He lives with an unrequited love. He is, in short, marked by something – call it a sin or an evil or a wrong choice – that keeps him from full partnership in the human community. This is why he has a special relationship with Mose Harper (Hank Worden), the half crazy old galoot who also knows how to survive (he eats dirt and pretends to be crazy when the Indians capture him). And even Mose joins the community at the end by succumbing to his insanity; he may be off his rocker, but he finally gets the rocker he wants. He won’t tell Ethan where the Indians are camped, but he will tell Marty (“Seven fingers, Marty. Seven fingers.”) Ethan is insane but not insane. He succumbs to nothing but his own iron resolve. Even at the end, he tells Clayton (Ward Bond) that there are about half a dozen Indians for each of the Rangers, “enough to go around.” Ethan, like his brother, has a biblical name. These two are Old Testament figures, members of the wandering tribes of Israel, although Aaron (brother of Moses) is a priest of the Israelites. Ethan is associated with music (possibly the author of the 89th Psalm). The names are not particularly precise, but they do locate these figures in a chronotope of search for a promised land.

References to belief systems run throughout the film. Ethan explains what the Comanche believe about death and the spirit world. We have the two Christian rituals of death (funeral service) and marriage (wedding dance). At both the funeral and the wedding musicians play, or the people sing, the same piece of music: “We Shall Gather at the River.” The Reverend Samuel Johnson Clayton is also a Captain of the Texas Rangers. Religion and law go together. And religion and law are two things Ethan does not accept. Religion and law are marks of civilization. Both are associated with ritual, and ritual is also a mark of civilization. Even Marty and Charlie fight in a ritual manner, and Clayton keeps warning them not to cheat by biting or gouging. The clashes between white men and Indian that we see in the film also have the quality of ritual (the ritual putting on the war bonnet before the Indians charge). Indeed, the entire film has a ritual quality, beginning and ending with shots that echo each other. Standing outside the various rituals – even violating ritual -- is Ethan Edwards. We also have at least two other violations of ritual: the attack on the Edwards’s ranch and the slaughter of the native village (a scene that is reminiscent of the Sand Creek massacre). In other words, the wholesale slaughter of innocent people by either side is condemned in this film. We might remember that the cavalry are not always innocent or even ethical in their actions, and Scar and his group are not representative of the entire Comanche nation. Violence is not celebrated in this film.

We might also consider money and its uses in the film. From the look of things, money is not in great abundance on the frontier. It is also not necessary on the frontier since the ranchers seem to make a living from the land. And yet the opening scenes make clear that money is important. Ethan has a couple of bags of newly minted double eagles – gold coins that are obviously worth a lot. His brother shows his self-interest (greed?) when Ethan gives him the money. Aaron does not spend much thought as to where Ethan has got his money, and Martha seems anxious that no one probe too deeply into what Ethan has been up to for the past three years. Then we have Futterman who is obviously interested in money, even if he has to write letters to get it. Or even if he has to kill to get it. Money leads to criminal activity. Or we could say that money is just what serves as capital in a good market-influenced society. Money reminds us of capital. Capital for the Natives takes the form of goods such as blankets, hats, cigars, blue prize ribbons, and so on. Ethan wants to trade goods for information, but Martin ends up trading for a wife. The bartering for various things is a rudimentary sort of economic activity. What Martin’s mistake shows is the importance of communication in such economic dealings.

What do you make of Look’s role in this film?

Aside from the shots of Monument Valley, what is most distinctive about the filming of this film? For me, two aspects of the filming are noticeable. First, and most obvious, are the many doorways that frame things: the opening and closing doorway shots, the first time we see Martin as he dismounts easily from his horse and we see him through the doorway, the doorway through which we see Lucy and Brad kissing, the framing of Ethan in shadow of the doorway as he looks inside the burning building at the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law, the open teepee doorways (once when they find Look’s body, later when they sit inside Scar’s teepee, and still later when Marty rescues Debbie), and the distinct cave opening that is reminiscent of a doorway when Martin and Ethan escape from the “hostiles” in New Mexico. Have I forgotten any? Well, perhaps. We have clear use of a door in the scene in which Martin and Charlie fight when Ethan guides Mrs. Jorgensen inside the house and shuts the door on her. She just goes to the window and leans out, but this simply reinforces the framing motif and takes us back to the beginning when Debbie leaves the Edwards’s place through the window and her mother falls prostrate over the sill. And we might collects other doors – at the fort when Ethan and Martin see the rescued white women, in the New Mexico canteen, in Futterman’s place, the double doorway when Ethan, sitting outside on his brother’s porch looks back inside and sees his brother enter the bedroom to go to sleep with Martha, and the doors that the Reverend Clayton kicks shut and leaves from in the opening breakfast scene.

Mention of the opening breakfast scene allows me to segue into the second aspect that strikes me as important in the filming. This is when, at the end of the breakfast scene (which itself is amazing), Clayton stands at the table holding a donut and a mug of coffee. He looks to his left and sees through the bedroom door Martha picking up Ethan’s coat. As he watches, she strokes the coat affectionately (something early viewers of the film did not seem to notice). Then she comes back into the dining room and we have a scene in which no dialogue occurs and the viewer must watch two simultaneous actions – one is the stance of Clayton and his eyes as he stares intently forward, and the other is what goes on behind him when Ethan takes his coat from Martha and then leans down to kiss her on the forehead. Ethan then leaves, Clayton turns and he turns away from Martha so that he never does make eye contact with her as he departs through the door. She leaves her hand raised as if in futile gesture to caress the now departed Ethan. This is a remarkable scene. Clayton has respected the privacy of Martha and Ethan. Ethan and Martha have respected Clayton’s presence and their own position as brother and sister-in-law. And Ethan and Martha have expressed their own love. Nothing needs to be said in this scene and yet so much body language communicates more than words can say. First Ethan, and then Clayton depart through the door and this is the last they will see of Martha Edwards alive. Something we might note here concerning doors: doors shut out the outside; they are defenses from outside threat. But we learn that they are easily broken defenses.

And so we come back to doorways. The doorway reminds us of that which separates. Doors are reminders of passageways in and out, in and out both literally and figuratively. In John 10: 7-9, Jesus calls himself a door. In a film so resolutely about passage (from this life to another, from one state of being to another through marriage, from a wild past to a civilized future), the doors are reminders of the way—I mean this in the Biblical sense of the way to the Promised Land. Doors are also reminders of how vulnerable such a way is. Doors may be broken. From another perspective, doors, like windows, also frame characters. The frame is a richly ambiguous reminder of how circumscribed the lives of these people are. The frames belie the openness and freedom of the big sky and the far horizons. Only by being framed can people find safety and community. People need to be contained within structures, whether these structures be concrete (towns, forts, or ranches), or abstract (marriage, the law, believe systems and rituals). One thing noticeable in this film is the relative absence of fences. The front of the Jorgensen ranch appears to have no fence; it simply merges with the expansive landscape of Monument Valley, as unfettered horses wander about water holes. We do see a fence when Martin takes Laurie’s horse to follow Ethan. The fence is clearly visible because Laurie leans upon it as we see Martin ride away behind her. She leans on the fence for support—at this point in the story, she really does need support, something that Charlie McCorry will also offer to her. Ford often uses the fence (we have a clear instance of this in both STAGECOACH and MY DARLING CLEMENTINE) as a borderline, the thing that separates civilization from the wilderness. Here the fence separates (not literally when we watch the scene, but strongly figuratively) Laurie from that which she has waited and wished for- marriage with Marin Pawley.

Martin rides off to catch Ethan. And eventually Martin will kill Scar. Why have Martin kill Scar and not Ethan? The act of violence that results in Scar’s death is “justifiable” because Martin acts in self-defense. What follows is not justifiable – the raid on the Indian encampment. In this raid, we see an innocent mother and child shot. The raid reminds us of the earlier raid in which Look was murdered. Violence, the film seems to say, is irrational, an aspect of life lived without reason. Take for example, the scene in which the Indians attack the Rangers across the river. As they retreat, Clayton says let them carry off their dead, but Ethan continues to fire his rifle until Clayton physically stops him (“Well, that tears it, Reverend,” Ethan spits out. He uses the word “Reverend” rather than “Captain” to show his contempt.). Ethan’s savage shooting marks him as wild, uncontrolled, irrational. He is marked by violence. The scene in which he tells Brad that Lucy is dead serves to clinch his impossible connection to violence; he remains passive as Brad rides off to his death. Brad’s act is as irrational as anything in the film, and Ethan lets him go accepting Brad’s need to succumb to violence. But let’s return to Martin. Ethan gives him reason to want to kill Scar when he tells Martin that one of the scalps they saw on Scar’s lance was that of his mother. Martin pauses and then says, “But that don’t matter.” This is a crucial moment in the film. Ethan’s motive has had something to do with vengeance since the beginning, and he expects Martin to seek vengeance too. But Martin renounces vengeance. He is a man of peace, not a man of violence. When he shoots Indians at the river early in the film, he breaks down and cries and Old Mose takes his rifle to continue the shooting. Martin can look to a future with the Jorgensen family (Lars never carries a gun), whereas Ethan can only remain part of the wild and irrational land that has witnessed so much bloodshed.

The structure of THE SEARCHERS, beginning and ending with the same (or a similar) shot, gives the film a classic form. The plot is circular, taking the characters away from home and returning them to home at the end. This is the plot of THE ODYSSEY. The hero moves away from home, leaving a woman and family behind, and returns to make a life with that woman and family. In between the initial departure and the final return, the hero faces many challenges, even descending into the underworld where the encounter with death is most intense. The structure gives the film an overall frame, but it may also create some artificiality in the action. Why, for example, should Scar and his people return to the area of an earlier crime just at the end when Marty and Ethan return to interrupt the wedding? The hero in this case is ambiguous, in two senses: both Marty and Ethan are heroic, and Ethan’s heroism is anti-human.

What role does the Cavalry play in this film? The easy answer is that the film makes fun of the cavalry, especially in the person of Lieutenant Greenhill (Patrick Wayne). But our answer should be complicated by the very medium of film itself. Film differs from literature in significant ways, one of which has to do with the fact that we often (if not always) know the characters on the screen in a double sense. We know Ethan Edwards as a character who takes part in certain actions in the plot; in other words, we know Ethan as one of the actants in the diegesis. But our viewing is complicated because we also know that Ethan is John Wayne and John Wayne brings to the screen a whole range of meanings that are outside this film. The same is true of most of the “stars” who perform in films. In the recent film, MR AND MRS SMITH, we know the eponymous characters as characters, but we also know them as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Consequently we are seeing double when we watch actors (or some actors) on screen. And so we might know that Lieutenant Greenhill is also Patrick Wayne, son of John Wayne. And the actor young Greenhill most interacts with is Ward Bond, close friend of John Wayne off screen. We might extend this to the whole Ford company in this film, and we then add a dimension to our viewing of the film. But what has this to do with the cavalry? Well, Patrick Wayne plays a cavalry officer, a role his father John Wayne had played in three previous Ford films (and in at least one more to follow). And so the relationship of this film to other Wayne films and other cavalry films is evident. Here the tone is parodic; Ford and his actors are having fun with a theme they have used seriously in earlier films. But the fun is parodic rather than satiric. In other words, Ford continues to show sympathy for the cavalry, although he does so in a gently humourous manner. The humour cuts across yet another dimension of the cavalry in this film: they are murderous. In other words again, the ambiguity apparent in the hero Ethan is also apparent in the heroic Cavalry. Ambiguity is the watchword for this film. It is deeply ambiguous, bordering on tragedy. Ford is beginning to examine values he has held for many years and to see some of these values in a darker light than he had once done.

Oh, by the way, New Mexico became a state in 1912. It was proclaimed a territory (much larger than the later State of New Mexico) in 1850, 18 years before the action of the film.