Sleep, My Love: race and resentment in Hollywood
Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love threatens to become a mundane gothic ‘gaslighting’ melodrama – in the mould of Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Suspicion and, indeed, George Cukor’s Gaslight – with dreary references, as was common at the time, to Freudian psychology, but is, after 30 minutes, rescued by a couple of unexpected innovations and turned into something hugely interesting and entertaining.
The first twist is Sirk’s decision to highlight the differences between the egotistical, repressed and calculating Richard Courtland – played flawlessly by Don Ameche – and Bruce Elcott, the epitome of effortless American masculine charm, common sense and determination – played with great appeal by Robert Cummings – by having Bruce, who has fallen in love with Courtland’s wife, Alison (Claudette Colbert), take the object of his forbidden desire to his ‘brother’s’ wedding, his brother turns out to be Jimmie Lin, who is not his real brother but his ’honorary’ brother since Jimmy is Chinese.
The Chinese wedding, happy, graceful, full of culture and style, is a surprising early attempt by Hollywood to deal with questions of race, racial discrimination and stereotyping – which, of course, Hollywood did so much to perpetuate – that Sirk was to return to more famously in Imitation of Life.
The Chinese couple’s wholesome and joyous relationship contrasts with the destructive and harrowing American relationships in the film – between Richard and Alison, between Bruce and Alison and, especially, between Richard and Daphne, the ravishing glamour model played by Hazel Brooks, who he is madly in love and lust with – the poor man cannot keep his hands off her – to the extent that he devises an elaborate plot to do away with his wife, colluding with a seedy photographer Charles Vernay superbly portrayed by George Colouris, which involves convincing her that she is mad and adding hallucinatory drugs to her drinks in order to make her more suggestive to his malign suggestions.
The second surprise in the film is the intensity of the hatred Richard feels for his wife. Not only does he find her physically repulsive – he recoils from her touch – but he is also bursting with resentment that she is above him in station.
If he were to simply leave Alison for Daphne, Richard would lose his right to his wife’s wealth, which, indeed, is why Daphne, one of the most cynical, acerbic, ruthless – and attractive – characters in film noir, urges her lover to get on with it and kill his unsuspecting spouse so that they can be together and enjoy the spoils of their crime.
In one of the most startling scenes in the film, Daphne explains what she wants and what she expects from her besotted lover.
‘I want what she’s got,’ Daphne says. ‘I want all of it. I want her house, her name, her man, and I want them now, tonight.’
Douglas Sirk’s Lured: between a film noir and a whodunnit
There is no discernible or worthwhile philosophical, psychological or emotional truth in Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947), often labelled a film noir but aside from a couple of striking expressionist shots involving suspicious characters lurking in the shadows there is nothing to suggest any of the moodiness, doom, existential crisis normally associated with the genre.
Indeed, if the film is characterised by anything then it’s its light-heartedness and breeziness, as if Sirk can’t quite come up with anything dark and meaningful to say in the script he’s been given to work with. Having comedienne Lucille Ball in the female lead doesn’t help with trying to give the film an air of gravitas or darkness.
In fact, the best scenes are those that have some comic appeal, particularly those involving Boris Karloff, who plays a deranged ex-fashion designer who has lured Ball to his flat and dressed her up as if she’s about to appear in a fashion show, only for Karloff to pull back the stage curtain to reveal an audience consisting of a dolorous canine and a mannequin.
How Ball has ended up at Karloff’s tells us something about the plot of the film. She’s got there after a friend of hers at the nightclub they both work at as dancers has gone missing – and is presumed the latest victim of a serial killer stalking London. The ‘poet-killer’, as the murderer is known, taunts police by sending them Baudelaire-inspired poems on death and beauty announcing he’s about to strike again.
Inspector Harley Temple, played by Charles Coburn, enlists Ball as an undercover detective to answer lonely hearts ads in the newspapers in the hope that she will flush out the killer. The killer’s modus operandi is to use newspaper advertisements to lure potential victims. Karloff is one of several eccentrics she encounters via the ads before she gets closer to uncovering the homicidal maniac.
The film boasts a stellar cast – as well as Ball, Karloff and Coburn, the film features George Sanders and Cedric Hardwicke – and is set in London, though it’s a London of the Hollywood set and not the real thing, which is a shame, since we get no sense of post-war London and all the social, economic and psychological conditions of the time that would have made for a far more interesting film. Instead, we get the impression that Sirk is going through the motions, delivering less a film noir and more a far-fetched police procedural and whodunnit.
Shockproof: breaking society’s shackles
With Douglas Sirk directing and Sam Fuller writing the screenplay, you’d expect that Shockproof (1949) would be an explosive film noir full of interest – and it is.
Sirk, the German exile, who became best known for a series of 1950s proto-feminist melodramas – such as Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession – and Fuller, who went on to direct memorable and idiosyncratic Westerns and film noirs in the 1950s and 1960s – Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Run of the Arrow, Forty Guns – create a film of bewildering twists and turns, not so much in plotting but in character, as the protagonists are put through the mill as they try to find their best selves and overcome their pasts, their families and society.
Patricia Knight plays Jenny Marsh, a convicted murderer who’s just been released from prison after five years. Her parole officer is the upright Griff Marat, played by the magnificent Cornel Wilde, devoted to his job, to the rules, to helping people get back on the straight and narrow, and to his family: his recently widowed blind mother and his younger brother, both of whom idolise him.
Griff is immediately attracted to the beautiful ex-killer and does all he can to make her parole a success: finding her work and somewhere to stay, and when these are insufficient, bringing her to his home, making her a carer and companion for his mother.
All this love, attention, compassion, rather than ‘civilising’ Jenny makes her sick, suffocates her, as she longs for Harry Wesson, the slick, flamboyant gambler, the man she loved before prison and whose life of glamour, danger and independence she wishes to rejoin.
It is a stunning repudiation of bourgeois society and domesticity that shocks the viewer to the core. How could Jenny reject the pure love of the hardworking, honest, handsome, dependable Griff for the superficial fop Johnny? But she does, going so far as to run away and risk violating her parole and being sent back to jail.
Griff, however, refuses to give up on Jenny and rather than letting her go decides to confess his love to her and ask for her hand in marriage. It is a proposal as Jenny’s parole officer that puts Griff’s career and future prospects at risk.
Jenny is moved. It’s the first time a man has wanted her for a wife. Her mind is in turmoil. What kind of life does she want? Which man truly loves her? The one who is prepared to give up his life for her or the one who allowed her to go to prison for a crime committed on his behalf?
She chooses the former, to Harry’s consternation, who sets out to destroy the man who’s taken his lover from him by revealing to him she’s an unrepentant deceiver who’s taken Griff for a fool. Jenny shoots her ex-lover and so begins the second part of the film as Griff, rather than turn Jenny in, goes on the run with her.
The fugitive couple now engage in a gruelling cat and mouse game as they seek to avoid capture by the police and the certainty that Jenny will be sent back to prison for life for shooting Johnny.
Griff and Jenny’s love is put to the test. They are short of money, the people they encounter want to betray them rather than help them, they become paranoid and argue with each other. They live in squalor, they go hungry, move constantly, do backbreaking work just to survive. All the while, the net closes in on them…
Sign of the Pagan: Douglas Sirk, feminism and tyranny
When
one thinks of Douglas Sirk, the German-born film director who fled Nazi
Germany for the USA in 1937, it is usually his 1940s film noirs – Lured; Sleep, My Love; Shockproof – and even more so his 1950s melodramas – Magnificent Obsession; All that Heaven Allows; Imitation of Life; The Tarnished Angels,
dismissed at the time as ‘women’s films’ but, to more discerning
critics, hailed as masterpieces for their dissection of American
bourgeois life and studies of female and racial hypocrisy and repression
– we have in mind.
It’s strange, therefore, to see Sirk's name associated with a film like Sign of the Pagan, a sword and sandal epic that purports to tell the story of the threat to the divided Roman empire – with the Western part led by Valentinian III in Rome and the Eastern part by Theodosius II in Constantinople – posed by the barbarian Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun.
It’s strange, therefore, to see Sirk's name associated with a film like Sign of the Pagan, a sword and sandal epic that purports to tell the story of the threat to the divided Roman empire – with the Western part led by Valentinian III in Rome and the Eastern part by Theodosius II in Constantinople – posed by the barbarian Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun.
The film takes the line that both these competing emperors are too self-absorbed, caught up in petty palace politics and the luxuries and fripperies of being emperor, to recognise the dangers the barbarian warlord poses to the existence of civilisation.
Civilisation in this case is identified in the film as Christianity, which has by now – the mid-5th century – been established as the state religion in both parts of the empire, but is reviled by Attila for its message of peace and love.
The film also posits that if Valentinian and Theodosius are too weak and short-sighted to confront the dangers of Attila, then the more robust Markianos, the stout Roman soldier, has the answers.
Markianos’ commitment to fighting Attila and devotion to a pacifist religion confuses Attila, who begins to doubt his venture to conquer the Roman world and destroy Christianity. Prophecies of his own doom also unbalance his mind.
And it is perhaps Attila’s descent into madness, which is of Shakespearean proportions, that provides us with Sirk’s interest in the story. We also note that Attila’s ultimate betrayal and killing are carried out by two women – it is his brow beaten daughter Kubra that betrays her father to the Roman enemy and it is the Huns’ brutalised concubine, Ildico – and not Markianos, as you’d expect – who delivers the final blow of the knife that ends the life of the savage tyrant. The fact that it is women who are given the role and satisfaction of bringing down tyranny perhaps points us to Sirk’s overtly feminist films to be made in the near future and alerts us to his interest in making this otherwise uninspiring historical drama.
The Glory Brigade: when Greek warrior meets American fighter
The Glory Brigade (1953) is an interesting if overlooked and obscure film purporting to be a Hollywood tribute to the Greek Expeditionary Force that took part in the UN mission to defend South Korea against North Korean invasion in the first years of the 1950s.
The Greek Expeditionary Force to Korea became known as the ‘Spartan Brigade’ and such was the good fighting reputation and devotion to the cause it demonstrated that the unit of 900 men was awarded the US Presidential Unit citation.
Seizing on the the widespread praise and interest the Greek soldiers garnered in the US press, Hollywood decided that a film depicting the brigade’s exploits would be appropriate.
Twentieth Century Fox undertook the production, no doubt inspired by the legendary head of the studio, Spyros Skouras, and the result is a good and more complex film than one would have expected, not only interested in recreating the brutal hell of the Korean War but also in dealing with issues such as American exceptionalism and racism – the Greek troops are initially disparaged by the Americans they are asked to fight with, who don’t want to trust their lives to foreigners they regard as inherently cowardly; but also the immigrant experience – the detachment of US engineers assigned to work with the Greeks is led by a Greek-American, Lt. Sam Pryor (superbly played by Victor Mature), whose attitude to his Greek colleagues goes from exaggerated admiration to loathing and rejection before he finds a more moderate and realistic way to deal with his heritage.
Unusually, the film depicts the Greek soldiers and their commanders as smart, disciplined and naturally brave while it is the American soldier, expressing individualism, cynicism and gung-hoism who is criticised and depicted as a threat to the military mission.
This is in contrast to any number of war films – The Guns of Navarone, The Angry Hills, Ill Met by Moonlight, They Who Dare – that portray Greek fighters as valiant but flawed by an excess of emotion. In The Glory Brigade, it is the American warrior who is shown as enthral to his emotions, irrational and impetuous.
Shoot Out: civilisation versus barbarism, women and children versus men
Shoot Out (1971) is a fine, overlooked Western directed by Henry Hathaway with Gregory Peck playing Clay Lomax, an ageing outlaw who’s just been released from a seven-year stretch in the pen for bank robbery and begins a journey to track down the partner who betrayed him, Sam Foley (played by James Gregory), who shot and left Lomax for dead and scarpered with the loot, which he used to set himself up as a successful businessman.
In the course of tracking down Foley, Lomax has thrust on him 7-year-old Decky Ortega, who may or may not be his daughter from a fling he had just before being imprisoned and whose mother has died leaving the little girl an orphan.
Meanwhile, Foley, aware that Lomax has been released from jail and in all likelihood will be coming after him seeking revenge, hires three young thugs – or ‘punks’ as Lomax calls them – to follow Lomax and report to him when he approaches Gunhill, the town he now lives in.
The trajectory of the story revolves around the increasing bond that develops between Lomax and his possible-daughter and the extent to which this new-found paternal purpose in his life will deter Lomax from killing Foley and, therefore, returning to jail, if he hasn’t ended up on the gallows. Lomax knows that doing what he’s been dreaming of doing, day in day out, for seven years, will satisfy his thirst for revenge but will also inevitably lead to the destruction of his life and destitution of the girl, who he now loves and may be his offspring.
The theme of domesticity versus the outlaw life is one of the most common in the Western and can also be expressed as the conflict that takes place on the frontier between civilisation and barbarism. Often, this conflict is expressed in the civilised values held by women and children – virtues of love, compassion, forgiveness – versus the barbarian ones held by men, values of violence, solitariness, hatred and revenge.
In Shoot Out, this contrast in values is emphasised not just by Lomax’s relationship with his young ‘daughter’ but also finds expression when, as he approaches Gunhill and his target, Lomax takes shelter from the torrential rain for the night with a beautiful widowed farm-owner and her young boy. In the best scene of the film, Juliana Farrell (played by Patricia Quinn) describes her crushing loneliness, how she needs alcohol to dull the pain and virtually begs Lomax (and his daughter) to stay with her and her son so that they can form a family.
It is an offer that Lomax is willing to consider, but as his thirst for revenge is ameliorated by the civilising influence of women and children, the threat of male violence, in the form of the three punks sent out to track him, threatens to ruin this final opportunity presented to him to lead a purposeful life, in communion with others and society rather than in opposition to them.
Meanwhile, Foley, aware that Lomax has been released from jail and in all likelihood will be coming after him seeking revenge, hires three young thugs – or ‘punks’ as Lomax calls them – to follow Lomax and report to him when he approaches Gunhill, the town he now lives in.
The trajectory of the story revolves around the increasing bond that develops between Lomax and his possible-daughter and the extent to which this new-found paternal purpose in his life will deter Lomax from killing Foley and, therefore, returning to jail, if he hasn’t ended up on the gallows. Lomax knows that doing what he’s been dreaming of doing, day in day out, for seven years, will satisfy his thirst for revenge but will also inevitably lead to the destruction of his life and destitution of the girl, who he now loves and may be his offspring.
The theme of domesticity versus the outlaw life is one of the most common in the Western and can also be expressed as the conflict that takes place on the frontier between civilisation and barbarism. Often, this conflict is expressed in the civilised values held by women and children – virtues of love, compassion, forgiveness – versus the barbarian ones held by men, values of violence, solitariness, hatred and revenge.
In Shoot Out, this contrast in values is emphasised not just by Lomax’s relationship with his young ‘daughter’ but also finds expression when, as he approaches Gunhill and his target, Lomax takes shelter from the torrential rain for the night with a beautiful widowed farm-owner and her young boy. In the best scene of the film, Juliana Farrell (played by Patricia Quinn) describes her crushing loneliness, how she needs alcohol to dull the pain and virtually begs Lomax (and his daughter) to stay with her and her son so that they can form a family.
It is an offer that Lomax is willing to consider, but as his thirst for revenge is ameliorated by the civilising influence of women and children, the threat of male violence, in the form of the three punks sent out to track him, threatens to ruin this final opportunity presented to him to lead a purposeful life, in communion with others and society rather than in opposition to them.
Only the Valiant: the marionette officer under duress
One of the most recognisable types in the Western is that of the marionette West Point officer whose inflexible devotion to orders, rules and the army alienates the men under his command and, indeed, puts military objectives in jeopardy.
Thus, in Only the Valiant (1951) Gregory Peck plays Captain Richard Lance, a senior officer leading the Fifth Cavalry fighting Apaches in New Mexico Territory. His decisions – on how to treat the enemy, on promotions, on discipline – have created so many malcontents that one is led to think that we are about to watch Murder on the Orient Express, with hatred providing any number of men with the motivation to kill him.
Matters come to a head when it’s suspected that Lance has, at the last minute, backed out of a dangerous mission and sent a popular junior officer out in his place not because he was ordered to do so by senior command but out of selfish interest – Lt Bill Holloway is a love rival. The fact that Holloway is brutally killed and his mutilated body returned to Fifth Cavalry HQ intensifies the enmity felt towards Lance, not only by his men but also by the woman both he and Holloway were courting, who now repudiates Lance.
Undeterred, Lance, not interested in his personal travails but only the military issues at hand, comes up with a plan to thwart the belligerent Apaches, now threatening to overrun the Fifth Cavalry. His mission involves taking a handful of men to trap the Apaches in a narrow pass and delay them until promised reinforcement can arrive.
With his plan approved, Lance chooses the men most hostile towards him for the assignment, the men, who at every opportunity have expressed the desire to kill him. Why has he chosen them to go on this perilous mission? The men believe it is because Lance has an overwhelming desire to die on the battlefield and be declared a hero and wants to take them, his foes, with him. But Lance insists he’s selected them to hold off the Indians because their discontent makes them a liability to the bigger objective of defending Fifth Cavalry HQ.
The tension in the film is which version is true: is Lance an inflexible marionette with a death wish or is he a man whose dedication to mission and the rules are the best way to get the job done?
While the film interrogates this subject it remains interesting and novel, but where it fails is in its horrific attitude towards Indians – the film was made just at a time where Westerns, in the aftermath of World War Two, were becoming more conscious of the negative way Native Americans were being portrayed – the joyful massacre by Gatling gun at the end of the film is particularly hard for the modern viewer to take; while Peck, too harshly, regarded the role of Lance as one of the worst of his career.
Matters come to a head when it’s suspected that Lance has, at the last minute, backed out of a dangerous mission and sent a popular junior officer out in his place not because he was ordered to do so by senior command but out of selfish interest – Lt Bill Holloway is a love rival. The fact that Holloway is brutally killed and his mutilated body returned to Fifth Cavalry HQ intensifies the enmity felt towards Lance, not only by his men but also by the woman both he and Holloway were courting, who now repudiates Lance.
Undeterred, Lance, not interested in his personal travails but only the military issues at hand, comes up with a plan to thwart the belligerent Apaches, now threatening to overrun the Fifth Cavalry. His mission involves taking a handful of men to trap the Apaches in a narrow pass and delay them until promised reinforcement can arrive.
With his plan approved, Lance chooses the men most hostile towards him for the assignment, the men, who at every opportunity have expressed the desire to kill him. Why has he chosen them to go on this perilous mission? The men believe it is because Lance has an overwhelming desire to die on the battlefield and be declared a hero and wants to take them, his foes, with him. But Lance insists he’s selected them to hold off the Indians because their discontent makes them a liability to the bigger objective of defending Fifth Cavalry HQ.
The tension in the film is which version is true: is Lance an inflexible marionette with a death wish or is he a man whose dedication to mission and the rules are the best way to get the job done?
While the film interrogates this subject it remains interesting and novel, but where it fails is in its horrific attitude towards Indians – the film was made just at a time where Westerns, in the aftermath of World War Two, were becoming more conscious of the negative way Native Americans were being portrayed – the joyful massacre by Gatling gun at the end of the film is particularly hard for the modern viewer to take; while Peck, too harshly, regarded the role of Lance as one of the worst of his career.
The Gunfighter: the futility and tragedy of trying to escape a violent past
The Gunfighter (1950) is an excellent Western, made even more interesting because at the height of the genre’s popularity it began to question the myths it was propagating and started a theme of the ageing man of violence, who’s not so quick on the draw anymore, tired of brutality, haunted by the men he’s killed and whose reputation is such that he is now not only the object of unwelcome curiosity and obsequiousness but also the target of young toughs who want to prove themselves against the most famous gunslinger in the West and, in doing so, seize his mantle.
Gregory Peck plays Jimmy Ringo, based on the famous outlaw Johnny Ringo, who’s reached the stage of his life where he wants to give up his tempestuous past and settle down. He tracks down the woman he loved before he embarked on outlawdom and wants to persuade her that he’s a changed man and now wants to be a family man.
As he waits, holed up in the town saloon, for her to make her mind up, the local population becomes increasingly agitated by having such a famous visitor in their midst, the town’s children, in awe of his exploits, want to catch a glimpse of the legendary man; the local businessmen see a chance to make money; the women’s temperance leaders notice an opportunity to express their moral outrage; while the town’s young loudmouth talks himself into taking on the notorious fighter.
While all this uproar is taking place, a trio of brothers are closing in on Jimmy wanting revenge for the killing of a family member. It seems that Ringo’s dream of a new life, a peaceful life, with his past behind him, is going to elude him.
Henry King directed the film from a screenplay by William Sellers and William Bowers, based on an idea from Andre de Toth. De Toth, as both screenwriter and director, is responsible for some of the finest Westerns – Man in the Saddle, Carson City, Springfield Rifle, The Stranger Wore a Gun, Day of the Outlaw – while the film is also referenced in the Bob Dylan song, Brownsville Girl:
Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that
Kid down and string him up by the neck
Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath
Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square
I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death
Indeed, Gregory Peck quoted Brownsville Girl in 1997 when presenting Dylan with the The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
Peck said in his speech: ‘Dylan was singing about a picture that I made called The Gunfighter about the lone man in town with people comin' in to kill him and everybody wants him out of town before the shooting starts. When I met Bob, years later, I told him that meant a lot to me and the best way I could sum him up is to say Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin' starts. Thank you, Mr. Dylan, for rocking the country... and the ages.’
As he waits, holed up in the town saloon, for her to make her mind up, the local population becomes increasingly agitated by having such a famous visitor in their midst, the town’s children, in awe of his exploits, want to catch a glimpse of the legendary man; the local businessmen see a chance to make money; the women’s temperance leaders notice an opportunity to express their moral outrage; while the town’s young loudmouth talks himself into taking on the notorious fighter.
While all this uproar is taking place, a trio of brothers are closing in on Jimmy wanting revenge for the killing of a family member. It seems that Ringo’s dream of a new life, a peaceful life, with his past behind him, is going to elude him.
Henry King directed the film from a screenplay by William Sellers and William Bowers, based on an idea from Andre de Toth. De Toth, as both screenwriter and director, is responsible for some of the finest Westerns – Man in the Saddle, Carson City, Springfield Rifle, The Stranger Wore a Gun, Day of the Outlaw – while the film is also referenced in the Bob Dylan song, Brownsville Girl:
Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that
Kid down and string him up by the neck
Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
As the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath
Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square
I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death
Indeed, Gregory Peck quoted Brownsville Girl in 1997 when presenting Dylan with the The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
Peck said in his speech: ‘Dylan was singing about a picture that I made called The Gunfighter about the lone man in town with people comin' in to kill him and everybody wants him out of town before the shooting starts. When I met Bob, years later, I told him that meant a lot to me and the best way I could sum him up is to say Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin' starts. Thank you, Mr. Dylan, for rocking the country... and the ages.’
The Bravados: revenge, Homer and Christianity
Revenge is a ubiquitous theme in Westerns. In frontier societies that have not yet acquired all the accoutrements of civilisation, such as the rule of law, the question of what is justice and, more importantly, how is to be achieved is inescapable. Indeed, it is what gives Westerns their Homeric flavour, makes them such an attractive genre for film-makers interested and inspired by the classical world and particularly the philosophy of The Odyssey and The Iliad.
But what of those makers of Westerns of a more Christian persuasion? While revenge is justified in the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – by the time we get to the New Testament, revenge is disparaged and Christians are advised not to seek it but to ‘turn the other cheek’.
The Christian edict eschewing revenge is problematic for Westerns, which are notorious for their ridiculing of religion, their assertion that it has no place in this world of violence, hostile landscapes, honour, shame and so on. The man who turns the other cheek in the West is a fool, a weakling, who would soon be dead.
An exception to the anti-religious bias of the Western is The Bravados (1958), which tries to temper the urge for revenge with a Christian perspective.
Gregory Peck plays Jim Douglass, a remorseless man on a mission, which is to see the men who raped and murdered his wife pay with their lives for their atrocity. He spends six months tracking them down and just when it seems his obsessive task has a been accomplished, with the four outlaws set to hang for an unrelated crime, the criminals stage a bloody escape.
Douglass now leads a posse hunting the fugitives, though, as one by one he finds them, it becomes clear that, vicious killers though they are, they may not have been responsible for the violation and killing of his wife. Is Douglass’s revenge still justified? And what has the pursuit of it turned him into? In tracking them down, has he not taken on their brutal characteristics? And what will their deaths actually achieve? They won’t restore the world before his wife’s murder. He will still have to live with the knowledge of her barbaric treatment.
It is these questions that place Westerns somewhere in the middle of the full-blooded Homeric concepts of revenge – where there is no time for questions of the psychological impact on the avenger or the long-term consequences of vengeance – and the Christian view of love your enemy, of empathy and forgiveness.
By all means, pursue revenge, Westerns tell us, but the original evil you have been subjected to will not be overcome, you and your life will not return to how it used to be. Your nightmares will not end.
Back to The Bravados, Henry King – a pioneer of Hollywood cinema – was more renowned for directing historical and romantic films, even if the three Westerns he directed, Jesse James, The Bravados and The Gunfighter are all classics of the genre. The dose of Catholicism he wants to inject into The Bravados is grating and can’t be reconciled with the Homeric affirmation of revenge or the Western’s more nuanced stance on the subject, which he seems to have embraced before his Christianity intervened. Still, when the film doesn’t get bogged down in overt theology, the depiction of the brutal landscape of the Texas-Mexico border is breathtaking and Peck’s performance is outstanding, and this is generally an excellent and interesting piece of work, which even has an ending that brings to mind the equivocal and troubling ending of Taxi Driver, rebuking and mocking society for its love of violence and those who perpetrate it.
But what of those makers of Westerns of a more Christian persuasion? While revenge is justified in the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – by the time we get to the New Testament, revenge is disparaged and Christians are advised not to seek it but to ‘turn the other cheek’.
The Christian edict eschewing revenge is problematic for Westerns, which are notorious for their ridiculing of religion, their assertion that it has no place in this world of violence, hostile landscapes, honour, shame and so on. The man who turns the other cheek in the West is a fool, a weakling, who would soon be dead.
An exception to the anti-religious bias of the Western is The Bravados (1958), which tries to temper the urge for revenge with a Christian perspective.
Gregory Peck plays Jim Douglass, a remorseless man on a mission, which is to see the men who raped and murdered his wife pay with their lives for their atrocity. He spends six months tracking them down and just when it seems his obsessive task has a been accomplished, with the four outlaws set to hang for an unrelated crime, the criminals stage a bloody escape.
Douglass now leads a posse hunting the fugitives, though, as one by one he finds them, it becomes clear that, vicious killers though they are, they may not have been responsible for the violation and killing of his wife. Is Douglass’s revenge still justified? And what has the pursuit of it turned him into? In tracking them down, has he not taken on their brutal characteristics? And what will their deaths actually achieve? They won’t restore the world before his wife’s murder. He will still have to live with the knowledge of her barbaric treatment.
It is these questions that place Westerns somewhere in the middle of the full-blooded Homeric concepts of revenge – where there is no time for questions of the psychological impact on the avenger or the long-term consequences of vengeance – and the Christian view of love your enemy, of empathy and forgiveness.
By all means, pursue revenge, Westerns tell us, but the original evil you have been subjected to will not be overcome, you and your life will not return to how it used to be. Your nightmares will not end.
Back to The Bravados, Henry King – a pioneer of Hollywood cinema – was more renowned for directing historical and romantic films, even if the three Westerns he directed, Jesse James, The Bravados and The Gunfighter are all classics of the genre. The dose of Catholicism he wants to inject into The Bravados is grating and can’t be reconciled with the Homeric affirmation of revenge or the Western’s more nuanced stance on the subject, which he seems to have embraced before his Christianity intervened. Still, when the film doesn’t get bogged down in overt theology, the depiction of the brutal landscape of the Texas-Mexico border is breathtaking and Peck’s performance is outstanding, and this is generally an excellent and interesting piece of work, which even has an ending that brings to mind the equivocal and troubling ending of Taxi Driver, rebuking and mocking society for its love of violence and those who perpetrate it.
Yellow Sky: rapine, hubris and redemption
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(Shakespeare: The Tempest)
Yellow Sky (1948) is an utterly brutal Western, which asserts that, when it is not mitigated, human nature – or at least how it is expressed in the context of the American West – is nothing but greed, violence, jealousy, fear and suspicion.
A gang of bank robbers in their desperate effort to outrun a posse are forced to enter the desert – the film is shot in Death Valley – where, on the verge of death, they fight over the last few drops of water, the beating sun and their weakening bodies turning them insane, until they see a town, Yellow Sky, which although isn’t a mirage turns out to be a ghost town, deserted, its shops, hotels and bars abandoned and collapsed.
This one last cruel trick seems to have sealed their fate, which is to die of thirst and exhaustion. Only for a beautiful young woman to appear out of nowhere, whose motivation in directing them to water is not to save them, however, but to drive them out from Yellow Sky as soon as possible. But why the ferocity in her determination to get rid of them? Is it simply the fear of a lone woman being confronted by several smelly, brutish, leering men who’ve appeared out of nowhere? Or is she hiding something? What is such a beautiful woman doing in such a godforsaken place?
The outlaws discover that the woman is in Yellow Sky with her grandfather who they surmise is a gold prospector. Dreams of wealth and sexual gratification now overwhelm the men, even as they fall out as to who is going to rape the woman first and whether they should take all the old man’s gold or split the treasure with him. The men’s morality is put to the test. How evil are they? After an adult life of robbing and murder, taking what they want without remorse, is there any residue of conscience left in them that will prompt them to spare the woman from rape and let the old man keep some of his hard-earned wealth?
William Wellman directed this masterpiece, Gregory Peck is Stretch Dawson, the conflicted leader of the gang, Richard Widmark, his ruthless no. 2 (or alter ego, if you prefer) and Anne Baxter plays Constance May, the object of the outlaws’ desire. The taut script and spartan dialogue full of bitterness and irony was written by Lamar Trotti and based on WR Burnett’s novel, Stretch Dawson. Indeed, Yellow Sky bears all the hallmarks of Burnett’s numerous novels and screenplays, Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, This Gun for Hire, The Asphalt Jungle – avarice, rapacity, hubris, the thin veneer of civilisation:
‘The worst police force in the world is better than no police force… Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours, and nobody would be safe, neither on the street, nor in his place of business, nor in his home. There wouldn’t be an easy moment for women or children. We’d be back in the jungle…’ (The Asphalt Jungle).
Yellow Sky’s template is Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Anne Baxter’s character as Miranda and Grandpa as Prospero.
In the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Tony Howard explains the relationship between The Tempest and Yellow Sky:
‘William Wellman’s Yellow Sky turned The Tempest into a harsh post-war Western where a gang of criminals (bankrobbers replacing aristocrats) stumble on an isolated old man and a girl. The elemental metaphors are reversed. Shakespeare’s sea gives way to thirst: fleeing across a desert, on the brink of death they discover no magic island but a ghost town where a prospector and his granddaughter guard water and gold. Wellman focuses on the girl, who is constantly threatened by rape but protects herself with tough talk and a rifle, and on the Caliban question: can any of these degenerates be redeemed?’
This one last cruel trick seems to have sealed their fate, which is to die of thirst and exhaustion. Only for a beautiful young woman to appear out of nowhere, whose motivation in directing them to water is not to save them, however, but to drive them out from Yellow Sky as soon as possible. But why the ferocity in her determination to get rid of them? Is it simply the fear of a lone woman being confronted by several smelly, brutish, leering men who’ve appeared out of nowhere? Or is she hiding something? What is such a beautiful woman doing in such a godforsaken place?
The outlaws discover that the woman is in Yellow Sky with her grandfather who they surmise is a gold prospector. Dreams of wealth and sexual gratification now overwhelm the men, even as they fall out as to who is going to rape the woman first and whether they should take all the old man’s gold or split the treasure with him. The men’s morality is put to the test. How evil are they? After an adult life of robbing and murder, taking what they want without remorse, is there any residue of conscience left in them that will prompt them to spare the woman from rape and let the old man keep some of his hard-earned wealth?
William Wellman directed this masterpiece, Gregory Peck is Stretch Dawson, the conflicted leader of the gang, Richard Widmark, his ruthless no. 2 (or alter ego, if you prefer) and Anne Baxter plays Constance May, the object of the outlaws’ desire. The taut script and spartan dialogue full of bitterness and irony was written by Lamar Trotti and based on WR Burnett’s novel, Stretch Dawson. Indeed, Yellow Sky bears all the hallmarks of Burnett’s numerous novels and screenplays, Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, This Gun for Hire, The Asphalt Jungle – avarice, rapacity, hubris, the thin veneer of civilisation:
‘The worst police force in the world is better than no police force… Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours, and nobody would be safe, neither on the street, nor in his place of business, nor in his home. There wouldn’t be an easy moment for women or children. We’d be back in the jungle…’ (The Asphalt Jungle).
Yellow Sky’s template is Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Anne Baxter’s character as Miranda and Grandpa as Prospero.
In the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Tony Howard explains the relationship between The Tempest and Yellow Sky:
‘William Wellman’s Yellow Sky turned The Tempest into a harsh post-war Western where a gang of criminals (bankrobbers replacing aristocrats) stumble on an isolated old man and a girl. The elemental metaphors are reversed. Shakespeare’s sea gives way to thirst: fleeing across a desert, on the brink of death they discover no magic island but a ghost town where a prospector and his granddaughter guard water and gold. Wellman focuses on the girl, who is constantly threatened by rape but protects herself with tough talk and a rifle, and on the Caliban question: can any of these degenerates be redeemed?’
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