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.

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.

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.

Major Dundee: 'He is corrupt, but I will save him'

Sam Peckinpah is the most Homeric of American filmmakers. There’s a great line in the film when Dundee (Charlton Heston) says of ‘confederate renegade’ Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris): ‘He is corrupt; but I will save him.’