ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher 9781474419048

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ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher

ReFocus: The American Directors Series Series Editors: Robert Singer and Gary D. Rhodes Editorial Board: Kelly Basilio, Donna Campbell, Claire Perkins, Christopher Sharrett, and Yannis Tzioumakis ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of neglected American directors, from the once-famous to the ignored, in direct relationship to American culture—its myths, values, and historical precepts. The series ignores no director who created a historical space—either in or out of the studio system—beginning from the origins of American cinema and up to the present. These directors produced film titles that appear in university film history and genre courses across international boundaries, and their work is often seen on television or available to download or purchase, but each suffers from a form of “canon envy”; directors such as these, among other important figures in the general history of American cinema, are underrepresented in the critical dialogue, yet each has created American narratives, works of film art, that warrant attention. ReFocus brings these American film directors to a new audience of scholars and general readers of both American and Film Studies. Available or forthcoming titles ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Sarah Kozloff ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves Edited by Matthew Carter and Andrew Patrick Nelson ReFocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling Edited by Frances Smith and Timothy Shary ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt Dawn Hall ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer ReFocus: The Films of William Castle Murray Leeder

www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refoc

ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer, 2017 © the chapters their several authors, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1903 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1904 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1905 5 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Notes on Contributors Introduction Robert Singer and Gary D. Rhodes Part 1  The Non-Westerns Part 1  Introduction   1. “I never did think he was crazy”: Mystery and Criminality in Boetticher’s Psychological Noirs Marlisa Santos

vii 1

13 15

  2. On Ethics and Style in Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) 28 Fredrik Gustafsson   3. Domestic Tension and Male Hysteria: The Killer is Loose (1956) 40 Tony Williams  4. The Killer is Loose (1956) and the Televisual Dissolution of Film Noir 55 Hugh S. Manon   5. Adventures on the Small Screen: Boetticher, Warner Bros., and Maverick David J. Hogan

75

  6. The Signifying Heel: Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)  102 Robert Singer

vi  c o nt e nts Part 2  The Westerns Part 2  Introduction   7. The Ranown Cycle: Budd Boetticher’s “New Look” Western Programmers in 1950s Hollywood Zoë Wallin and Karina Aveyard

119 120

  8. Framings, Motifs, and Floating Poker Games in Seven Men from Now (1956) 135 Steve Neale   9. The Ranown Style: Mapping Textual Echoes Lucy Fife Donaldson 10. You Were Married, But You Never Had a Wife: The Use of Space in the Westerns of Budd Boetticher Christopher Minz 11. Ideology and Boetticher’s Westerns from the Late 1950s John White

149

166 188

12. Outlaws Without a Cause: Generational Conflict in Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle Brooks E. Hefner

206

13. The Box in the Desert: Budd Boetticher, Breaking Bad, and the Twenty-first-century Western Robert Guffey

228

Index 241

Notes on Contributors

Karina Aveyard is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, appointed to au ­ niversity-funded position for three years in 2015 to conduct a research project on contemporary film viewing practices. She is on leave from her post as a Senior Lecturer at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Her book publications include The Lure of the Big Screen: Cinema in Rural Australia (2015) and Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-going, Exhibition and Reception (2013). Karina completed her PhD at Griffith University in 2012. Lucy Fife Donaldson is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Texture in Film (2014) and her research focuses on the materiality of film style and the body in popular film and television. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. Robert Guffey is a Lecturer in the Department of English at California State University—Long Beach. His latest book is Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security (2015), which Flavorwire has called, “By many miles, the weirdest and funniest book of 2015.” A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he has also written a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He has written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them The Believer, The Chiron Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Phantom Drift, Postscripts, and Video Watchdog Magazine.

viii  no t e s o n co ntributo rs Fredrik Gustafsson has a PhD in film studies from the University of St Andrews and is currently working at the Swedish Film Institute while also teaching film history at Örebro University. His primary research focus is 1940s cinema: Swedish, British and American. He writes regularly for La Furia Umana, and has also programmed a number of Ingmar Bergman and Hasse Ekman retrospectives around the world. He blogs at: fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com Brooks E. Hefner is an Associate Professor of English at James Madison University where he teaches American Literature, American Studies, and Film Studies. He received his PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2009 and has published widely on popular genres and media culture. This includes essays on the fiction of screenwriter and humorist Anita Loos (2010), the vernacular language of Jewish-American fiction writer Anzia Yezierska (2011), the links between race and cultural hierarchy in popular 1920s detective fiction (2012), the queer counterpublic of the 1970s blaxploitation film Blacula (2012), the influence of racial pseudoscience and criminal anthropology on H. P. Lovecraft and Dashiell Hammett (2014), and the complexities of auteur theory in Ray Milland’s films of the 1950s and 1960s (2014). His first book, The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism (forthcoming), examines the use of experimental slang across a host of popular genres in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s. David J. Hogan began his professional life, as a magazine writer, while in college in 1973. He became a Los Angeles-based film journalist and, later, an editor and executive in Chicago book publishing, specializing in film, general nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, military aviation, World War II, and vintage automobiles. He has worked with notables who include Walter Cronkite, Myrlie Evers-Williams, Herman Spertus, Tom Hayden, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Maureen O’Hara, and John S. D. Eisenhower. As a film historian, Hogan is engaged by the aesthetics and cultural significances of vintage horror and science fiction, comic shorts, and film noir. His first book about genre film was published in 1980; he is presently at work on his eighth. His essays have appeared in numerous multi-author books, including titles devoted to Edgar Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, movie expressionism, and neglected B movies. Hogan has three grown children, and lives with his wife Kim in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Hugh S. Manon is Associate Professor and Director of the Screen Studies Program at Clark University where he specializes in Lacanian theory, film noir, and glitch aesthetics. He has published in Cinema Journal, Film Criticism, Framework, International Journal of Žižek Studies, and numerous anthologies,

no te s on con tributors  ix including articles on Tod Browning, Edgar G. Ulmer, George Romero, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Michael Haneke’s Caché, and Stanley Kubrick’s films noir. His current work investigates Gothic film and literature as a means of theorizing the current fascination with audiovisual glitching, wherein the perfectibility of modern digital technology is haunted by forgotten analog impulses. Christopher Minz received an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University, and is currently a PhD student at Georgia State University in Moving Image Studies. His research focuses and interests are genre (especially the Western) and art cinema, formal aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and recently Porn Studies. He has presented papers at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Film and History, and the International Melodrama Conference on topics ranging from Melodrama and Horror in The Shining, Calm and Chaos in The Thin Red Line, and traumatic ellipses in Budd Boetticher’s Westerns. Steve Neale is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Genre and Hollywood (2000), co-author of Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters (2010), editor and contributor to “Un-American” Hollywood (2007), and contributor to Film Studies. He is currently editing Silent Features, a collection of essays on silent feature films, and is working on a book entitled Screening the Stage: Classical Hollywood Adaptations of Stage Plays and Musicals. Gary D. Rhodes currently serves as Postgraduate Director for Film Studies at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of Lugosi (1997), White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (2002), and The Perils of Moviegoing in America (2012), as well as the editor of such anthologies as Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row (2008) and The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (2012). Rhodes is also the writer–director of such documentary films as Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004). Currently he is at work on a history of the American horror film to 1915 and a biography of William Fox. Marlisa Santos is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Literature and Modern Languages at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Her research focuses on classic film studies and film noir. She is the editor of Verse, Voice, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema (2013) and the author of The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir (2010). She has also published numerous essays in peer-reviewed anthologies on various topics such as the James Bond franchise, American mafia cinema, and contemporary southern film, and on directors such as Martin Scorsese, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Joseph Lewis.

x  no t e s o n co ntributo rs Robert Singer is a Professor of English at Kingsborough, City University of New York (CUNY), and Professor of Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received a PhD from New York University in Comparative Literature. His areas of expertise include literary and film interrelations, interdisciplinary research in film history and aesthetics, and comparative studies. He co-edited The Brooklyn Film (2003), Zola and Film (2005), and he also co-authored the text, The History of Brooklyn’s Three Major Performing Arts Institutions (2003). He is currently working on a book on naturalism and film interrelations and is the ReFocus series co-editor for Edinburgh University Press. He has also written articles on the Faust myth for the Mellen Series in Comparative Literature, the Rodopi Perspectives in Modern Literature, and the Centennial Review, as well as articles on film studies for Film/Literature Quarterly, Harmonias, Griffithiana, Dedalus, Act 4, Teaching English in the Two Year College, and Postscript. Zoë Wallin is PhD candidate in the Department of Screen and Media at Flinders University in South Australia. Her current research considers the industrial operation of film cycles in the Hollywood studio system. John White teaches film and media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He is co-author of textbooks for AS and A2 Film Studies and, before his current academic career, worked as a journalist. He is co-editor of Fifty Key British Films (2008), Fifty Key American Films (2009), and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films (2014). He has recently completed chapters for three books to be published by Edinburgh University Press in their new ReFocus series considering the films of Budd Boetticher, Delmer Daves, and Fred Zinnemann. He is the author of Westerns (2011) and is currently working on a commissioned book on European Art Cinema. Tony Williams is Professor and Area Head of Film Studies in the Department of English of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His recent books include Postcolonialism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan (2015), The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, Second Edition (2015), Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an American Filmmaker, Second Edition (2014), Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, Second Edition (2014), and the edited anthology, George A. Romero: Interviews (2011). He is currently co-editing Hong Kong Neo Noir with Esther Yau for Edinburgh University Press. He has frequently contributed to Asian Cinema; Film International (print and Internet editions), Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, and various other journals.

For Diane Smith — R. S. and For Michael E. Lee — G. D. R

Introduction Robert Singer and Gary D. Rhodes

“What happened up there?” — Ben Stride (Randolph Scott) “Payte Bodeen. I killed him.” — Bill Masters (Lee Marvin) “Why?” — Stride “Why not?” — Masters Seven Men From Now (1956)

F

ew filmmakers have lived lives that have been as cinematic as Budd Boetticher’s. He was himself aware of the fact, so much so that, during his later years, he wrote an autobiographical script. Born in Chicago in 1916, Boetticher was an adopted child, one raised in a very unhappy household in Indiana. While in Mexico as a young man, Boetticher became entranced with bullfighting. His knowledge of the subject landed him his first break in Hollywood: technical advisor on Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand in 1941. A directorial career followed, though it was largely undistinguished until 1951. Thanks to the efforts of John Wayne, Boetticher returned to the subject of bullfighting in his breakthrough film, Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) with Robert Stack. It was also the first film in which he was credited as “Budd Boetticher,” rather than his real name, Oscar Boetticher, Jr. From there, Boetticher directed an array of films and television programs, most notably the “Ranown” series of Westerns starring Randolph Scott, the moniker resulting from the name of a production company Scott owned with producer Harry Joe Brown. Bucking the Hollywood system, he spent much of the 1960s in Mexico making a documentary film about bullfighter Carlos Arruza. The nomadic director spent years obsessively pursuing his subject, declining offers from Hollywood even though the project was fraught with problems. As a result, Boetticher suffered illness, divorce, bankruptcy, and

2  r o b e r t s inge r and gary d . rhodes

Figure I.1  Publicity still for Bullfighter and the Lady (1951).

even incarceration in jail and in an asylum. He gave no indication, however, that he would have changed his life even if had he been able.1 As Dr Storrow (John Archer) asks Sam (Noah Beery, Jr.) in Boetticher’s Decision at Sundown (1957), “What man knows how a life should really be lived?” Despite the many personal troubles he faced, Boetticher’s films—particularly the Ranown Westerns—have been extremely influential, his adherents ranging from Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah to Martin Scorsese and Anthony Sarris. Such acclaim has resulted in numerous retrospectives and restorations, as in the Bruce Ricker documentary Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That (2005) and Sony’s DVD boxed set The Films of Budd Boetticher (2008). Strangely, though, Boetticher’s films have received little attention in the field of Film Studies. Hitherto, the only monograph on Boetticher has been his autobiography, When in Disgrace (Fallbrook, 1989). Boetticher’s own words also constitute the key scholarly publications that do exist, as in the case of Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin’s The Directors Event: Interviews with Five American Film-Makers (Atheneum, 1970) and “Interview with Budd Boetticher with Drake Stutesman,” published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media in 2002.2 At the time of writing, there has been no book-length biography of Boetticher. Nor has there been a book-length study of Boetticher’s films.

in troduction   3 Boetticher’s six fabled “Ranown Westerns” deserve the accolades they have received: Seven Men from Now (1956), Decision at Sundown (1957), The Tall T (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), Comanche Station (1960). Together they form a corpus, one recognized as such by Boetticher himself.3 And they share more in common than having just starred the same chiseled actor in the same genre. Though by no means consistent, the group features recurrent talent behind the camera. Harry Joe Brown produced three of the six films.4 Charles Lang shot two of them and Charles Lawton, Jr. three, with the series marked visually by a repeated reliance on the frontier setting of Lonesome Pine, California.5 Their mise-en-scène achieves further realism given a consistent emphasis on naturalistic lighting, which is particularly apparent during nighttime sequences. However, the six Westerns cohere in large measure for the same reason that Boetticher became something of a link between the Westerns of John Ford and the Westerns of Sergio Leone. He infused the nineteenth century rural with a gritty realism not unlike that which various filmmakers (including Boetticher) had brought to the twentieth century urban in film noir. Randolph Scott’s characters constitute heroes with a sense of rugged individualism and dedicated purpose, made sometimes more authentic by Scott’s unshaven face.6 Nevertheless, they are often tainted with—to borrow lyrics from Seven Men From Now’s opening theme—“the stain of sin upon their hands.” Pride, vengeance, and self-deception: these are among the failings of Scott’s characters. They could be bounty hunters (as in Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station) or even a former sheriff voted out of his job (as in Seven Men from Now) but they are men who try to regain something that they have lost. Redemption is possible, even if not necessarily probable. In these films, acquaintances threaten to become enemies and enemies threaten to become friends. The townspeople are often despicable (as in Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone); in Buchanan Rides Alone, they impatiently clamor for hangings with such enthusiasm that they threaten vigilante action. City officials are corrupt, whether in the case of the sheriff and justice of the peace in Decision at Sundown or the sheriff and mayor in Buchanan Rides Alone. All six of the Ranown Westerns feature economical storytelling—a narrative “sparseness” and “terseness” as Martin Scorsese has termed it—but not so much that Boetticher is unable to linger on visual information that he finds important.7 For example, he constructs lengthy non-dialogue passages in The Tall T and Ride Lonesome. Similarly, no English dialogue is heard for the first eight minutes of Comanche Station. By contrast, Boetticher does not focus visually upon violence. However much danger percolates in his Westerns, it usually manifests out of our field

4  r o b e r t s inge r and gary d . rhodes of vision. Off-screen shootings occur in Seven Men from Now, The Tall T, and Buchanan Rides Alone, for example. The last film also features an offscreen beating. Rather than detract from the tense, foreboding moods that Boetticher worked to establish, the use of off-screen space serves to accentuate the brutality. Despite their brief running times, Boetticher easily modulates the mood of his films from the taut to the humorous, from the tragic to the lighthearted. After all the horrors of The Tall T, including the murder of her new husband, Doretta Mims (Maureen O’Sullivan) listens to Brennan (Scott) give his abrupt advice at the film’s conclusion: “Come on, now. It’s gonna be a nice day.” These film narratives regularly withhold important information about their characters and plots until key moments, thus accentuating their epic quality. It is some fifty minutes into Seven Men from Now before we learn that Stride (Randolph Scott) has twice put Masters (Lee Marvin) behind bars. It is some forty-eight minutes into Decision at Sundown before we learn that Mary had been Allison’s (Scott’s) wife, and another four minutes before we learned that she died by her own hand. And it is some sixty-one minutes into Ride Lonesome before we learn that Frank (Lee Van Cleef) hanged Brigade’s (Scott’s) wife. As Scorsese has noted, “What’s so good about the Boetticher and Scott pictures is that they develop slowly, casually, calmly intimately, and almost without realizing it you are caught in a web of this very complex relationship between these characters.”8 Perhaps more striking is Boetticher’s ability to convey epic narratives even while making the Old West seem austere and even confining. He imbues these films with a sense of claustrophobia, even when shooting in CinemaScope. Key examples include: the scenes inside the wagon during the rain in Seven Men from Now; inside the livery in Decision at Sundown; inside the prison in Buchanan Rides Alone; inside the station in Ride Lonesome; and inside Comanche Country in Comanche Station. Perhaps The Tall T best captures this drive towards entrapment given its Desperate Hours-like (1955) plotline. Put another way, the Boetticher Westerns exemplify what Scorsese has called the “sparseness” and “minimalism” of the Boetticher frames, a use of “negative space” that make the characters seem even smaller and more lonesome, something heightened—rather than undercut—by the use of widescreen.9 The limited attention paid to Boetticher has rightly concentrated on his Westerns but other films in his canon also illustrate the reasons his work needs to be investigated. Let us consider Boetticher’s aforementioned and rarely seen film Arruza (1972).10 As part of her interview with Boetticher, Drake Stutesman provided a succinct overview of this film: His penultimate film, Arruza, never released, tells the life of his [Boetticher’s] close friend, matador Carlos Arruza. For the sake of

in troduction   5 keeping the film, as Boetticher termed it, “pure,” Arruza has no dialogue and Arruza plays himself. In Arruza’s matador scenes, Boetticher took over the cinematography from Lucien Ballard . . . Financing the film himself, he turned down lucrative offers over these years and his Hollywood career virtually ended after this long hiatus.11 Arruza, a re-enacted, semi-expository documentary was released nearly six years after the death of its subject: the famous Mexican bullfighter, Carlos Arruza. This overlooked film fundamentally recreates the myths and extols the local history associated with Carlos Arruza, the legendary bullfighter and friend of the director. Essentially, Arruza examines the artistry of the kill, expressed and celebrated by an authoritative, male narrator’s voice, which guides the viewer through an ethically marked, heroic view of the life and near deaths of Carlos Arruza: the “great man” narrative of rugged individualism. It is our contention that Arruza may be simultaneously read as a metanarrative involving its director and the art of filmmaking, both blood sports. Carlos Arruza, the bullfighter, and Budd Boetticher, the filmmaker, artfully manipulate reality within the ring of the unforeseeable; majestic and combative strokes lead to the final, totalizing creative act, producing either death/failure or life/ cinematic art. Arruza features three requisite, interrelated sites in its compositional, documentary design. The film features Arruza’s home and the surrounding landscape, the city and its people, and the “corrida,” bullring. The landscape shots recall the loneliness of Boetticher’s Westerns; the area surrounding the Arruza home is as visually silent as a cowboy’s workplace, like a painter’s depiction of dried-out foliage, relentless light and heat, occasioned by the presence of bulls, horses, and citizens. Carlos Arruza is equally at home in this locale—as a father, husband, and landowner—as he is in the bullring where extended sequences of the documentary are shot. Arruza is a film about death and life, about “el corrida del toros” and the man who controls it, and all converge as public, sporting spectacles; in his film, Boetticher contrasts the unproblematic life of the man at home with the life of the man at work, revealing his inner code of conduct on two representative planes. A recurring shot sequence throughout Arruza involves wide and close-up shots of the family and the Mexican public’s laudatory shouting, clapping, and smiling—a veritable “adoration of the matador”—as individuals and groups, gazing upon the figure of Arruza, witness independence, courage, and the creative postures of masculinity. Boetticher captures these celebratory moments of manhood unreservedly, as the film has unbridled access to the pleasures of home juxtaposed with the violent, fierce world of the arena. One inferentially contemplates the re-reading of Arruza as a Boetticher home movie, as a film documenting the life—the success and struggles—of a man on the threshold

6  r o b e r t s inge r and gary d . rhodes of collaborative confrontation. Arruza is a film about blood, its loss or preservation, equally contemplating the lives of the wounded matador or conflicted director. However unremarkable and routine, if not horrific, the death of the bull is to the contemporary audience, as if working in counterpoint, Arruza documents a process of male individualism, which is physical, protracted, and often brutal, as a way of living, per diem. Like the extraordinary career the reader will discover in this ReFocus volume, Budd Boetticher merits this applied, classificatory status as much as this film’s protagonist. Toward the end of Arruza, the voiceover informs the audience about Arruza’s death. Boetticher’s camera cuts to an assemblage of statues of heroic matadors of the past framing the roof of the bullring preserved like gods and warriors on some building from Mediterranean antiquity. The narrator exclaims, “you turn him [Arruza] into an Angel,” and Carlos Arruza, now, a statue among statues, remains posed for the future, to be looked up at by later generations. His statue and Boetticher’s documentary are sites reserved for the cultivation of memory and “function archetypally,”12 to preserve Arruza’s mythic-male status. According to Paul Schrader, “Boetticher sees Arruza as an icon, an archetype, in the longstanding ritual of the bullfight.”13 In particular, Boetticher’s freeze-frame shot of Arruza posed in a moment of near-final glory in the ring reveals and blends myth with history. The next generation will peer at a statue, watch bullfighting footage as it is replayed on television or seen in Boetticher’s documentary. This is what remains, a study in the transition from individual to archetype, like Boetticher himself. This book seeks to examine a related transition, the individuality of each of Boetticher’s films and television programs, as well as the archetypal qualities present in the Ranown cycle. Here the goal is to bring Boetticher’s career into sharper focus, as it is our belief that all of his works have, in varying degrees, been underappreciated and underexamined. Part 1 of this anthology thus investigates Boetticher’s non-Ranown cinema. Marlisa Santos initiates the discussion by perceptively examining Boetticher’s psychological films noir, specifically Escape in the Fog (1945) and Behind Locked Doors (1948). While Boetticher himself was dismissive of his early work, Santos reveals in these films the “elemental precursors” of what became the director’s minimalist trademark. Fredrik Gustafsson follows with a study of Bullfighter and the Lady, revealing how Boetticher’s austere style intersects with the ethics of one of his greatest passions, bullfighting, an approach that allows Gustaffsson to link the film with Boetticher’s The Magnificent Matador (1955) and Arruza. From there, Tony Williams addresses issues of domestic tension and male hysteria in The Killer is Loose (1956), a film that exemplifies the maturity of Boetticher’s directorial skill. His investigation reveals important connections and insights between this film and the Ranown Westerns. In a separate essay, Hugh Manon explores The Killer is Loose in a very different context, that of

in troduction   7

Figure I.2  Publicity still for The Cimarron Kid (1952).

8  r o b e r t s inge r and gary d . rhodes televisuality and the dissolution of film noir. He perceives the film as one that seeks to imitate and revise noir, thus becoming something of a “generic capstone” that “illuminates its obsession with the passing medium of newsprint, a longstanding cultural phenomenon whose appeal is rooted in delayed dissemination and readerly speculation, as opposed to television’s instantaneity and illusion of completeness.” The subject of television reappears in David J. Hogan’s chapter, “Adventures on the Small Screen,” which brings much-needed attention to the history and the artistic outcomes of Boetticher’s involvement with Warner Bros., the ABC television network, and the first three of episodes of Maverick. Here Hogan scrutinizes Boetticher’s work with the small-screen Western, one that operates so very differently from the Ranown films, both in terms of its scope (literally and figuratively) and its emphasis on comedy. Robert Singer concludes Part 1 of this book with his essay on The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), a project that, along with Comanche Station, largely ended Boetticher’s association with major Hollywood studio filmmaking. For Singer, the film offers a ruthless characterization of a gangster: the cinematic–historical Legs Diamond operates in an urban Western, one not dissimilar to the Ranown cycle. Part 2 of this book interrogates the Ranown Westerns for which Boetticher is certainly best remembered. Though tethered historically, aesthetically, and ideologically to at least some of his non-Westerns, the Ranown cycle nevertheless remains—as previously noted—a unique series of Westerns marked by a range of commonalities that cohere into a distinctive grouping. Karina Aveyard and Zoe Wallin inaugurate this section by providing a rigorous and compelling historical inquiry into the “new look” of the Ranown Westerns and how they attempted to compete with both television and higherquality cinema in order to appeal to viewers increasingly drawn to the top end of the film market while simultaneously retaining conventional generic elements. Moving from the historical, Steve Neale’s essay “Framings, Motifs, and Floating Poker Games in Seven Men from Now” examines the first of the Ranown Westerns by drawing attention to the staging, framing, acting, and editing present in three particular scenes. Then, as part of an ongoing effort to identify important aspects of the Ranown films as a codified group, Lucy Fife Donaldson emphasizes the textual as she focuses on the various “parallels, echoes and repetitions” apparent in them. Christopher Minz’s chapter “You Were Married, But You Never Had a Wife” rightly attempts to understand and clarify the use of space in the Ranown Westerns, specifically in how such formal capacities allowed Boetticher to express emotion and meaning. Surveying the same corpus of Westerns, John White provides an in-depth consideration of the ideology at work in them.

in troduction   9 In “Outlaws Without a Cause,” Brooks E. Hefner examines the particular issue of generational conflict as it arises in the Ranown films. Robert Guffey’s chapter “The Box in the Desert” concludes the conversation about Boetticher’s Western cycle by linking it to the modern age, revealing how the influence of the cycle can be identified in the twenty-first-century AMC television program Breaking Bad. We believe these thirteen chapters encompass a broad range of Boetticher’s key work both in and apart from the Western genre, offering fresh perspectives on each. Taken as a whole, they can be understood as a lengthy, and we hope, fertile conversation about a neglected auteur, a director responsible for simultaneously imbuing his films with individuality and yet also creating a sustained and coherent style, as well as repeatedly delving into similar ideological concerns and personal passions that can be perceived from his earliest work to his final projects. The complexity of Boetticher’s output suggests to all of us involved in this book that future studies of the director are urgently needed, ranging from a book-length biography of his life to further explorations of his cinematic oeuvre. As a result, we hope that this book fosters a discussion that will continue long after its publication. After all, as Boetticher himself said of Carlos Arruza, “No man is dead until the last man who remembers him is dead.”14

NOTES  1. Budd Boetticher, When In Disgrace (Santa Barbara, CA: Fallbrook Publishing, 1989).   2. Budd Boetticher, and Drake Stutesman, “Interview with Budd Boetticher with Drake Stutesman.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media Vol. 43, No. 1 (spring 2002), 18–39.   3. Boetticher also directed Westbound (1957), a Western with Randolph Scott, but he did not consider it part of the series of six Scott films mentioned in the text.  4. Brown produced Decision at Sundown, The Tall T, and Buchanan Rides Alone.  5. Lang shot Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone. Lawton shot The Tall T, Buchanan Rides Alone, and Ride Lonesome.   6. Here we would cite Decision at Sundown, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station.  7. Martin Scorsese on The Tall T. Special feature on the DVD of Ride Lonesome in The Films of Budd Boetticher boxed set (Sony, 2008).  8. Martin Scorsese on Ride Lonesome. Special feature on the DVD of Ride Lonesome in The Films of Budd Boetticher boxed set (Sony, 2008).  9. Martin Scorsese on Ride Lonesome. Special feature on the DVD of Ride Lonesome in The Films of Budd Boetticher boxed set (Sony, 2008). 10. As of 1 August 2015, Arruza can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Mt1Mf4tY6E0. 11. Stutesman 20.

10  r o b e r t singe r and gary d. rh odes 12. Paul Schrader, “Budd Boetticher: A Case Study in Criticism,” Cinema, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1970), 29. 13. Schrader 27. 14. Boetticher makes this comment within the running time of Arruza.

Part 1  Introduction

A

merican film director Budd Boetticher’s body of work extends well beyond the Westerns for which he is best known. In fact, Boetticher’s earliest and productive work was located in other industrial film genres. While he directed retakes for other films as early as 1942, Boetticher’s first accredited job as director was for One Mysterious Night (1944), a B movie at Columbia Pictures featuring the escapades of detective Boston Blackie (Chester Morris). This project was followed by a number of other crime movies, including The Missing Juror (1944), Escape in the Fog (1945), Assigned to Danger (1948), and Behind Locked Doors (1948). Boetticher’s directorial work also extended to a number of other established genres, including the documentary, in his 1945 short The Fleet that Came to Stay, the j.d. (juvenile delinquent) film, Youth on Trial (1945), the comedy, A Guy, a Gal and a Pal (1945), and the adventure film, Killer Shark (1950). In all these films, Boetticher’s on-screen credit reflects his true birth name: either “Oscar Boetticher, Jr.” or simply “Oscar Boetticher.” By 1951, his transition to the on-screen credit “Budd Boetticher” came with his transition to a director of critically noted films. The initial film was Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). It might be tempting to suggest that the transition of screen credits from Oscar Boetticher, Jr. to Budd Boetticher is somehow indicative of a transition from the director of derivative, industrial staples of non-Westerns to the celebrated auteur of Western masterpieces. While that would make a simple and perhaps compelling story, it would also be extremely unfair and critically unsound to neglect the entire Boetticher canon. Not only did Boetticher forge ahead as the yeoman-like director of episodes of a number of television programs, including seven episodes of Public Defender in 1954, and films, including Red Ball Express (1952), and both City

14  r o b e r t singe r and gary d. rh odes

Figure I.3  Publicity still for The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960).

Beneath the Sea and East of Sumatra (1953), he also created a small number of classics in film genres other than the Western for which he is well known, most notably The Killer is Loose (1956) and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). Moreover, Boetticher’s career did not culminate with a Western film; instead, it concludes with framing a personal obsession, which he prominently notes in his autobiography, one that took him back to the days of Bullfighter and the Lady. His last great achievement was the documentary Arruza (1972) which covered the exploits of the legendary Mexican bullfighter, Carlos Arruza, a man with whom Boetticher professionally identified. These critically significant non-Westerns are the focus of Part I of this book.

c h apter 1

“I never did think he was crazy”: Mystery and Criminality in Boetticher’s Psychological Noirs Marlisa Santos

N

o one was more dismissive of Budd Boetticher’s early films than Boetticher himself. He disparaged them on numerous occasions in interviews, from calling working on them “a learning experience . . . I faked it”1 and even going so far as to say, “They were terrible pictures.”2 And, indeed, what limited critical treatment of Boetticher’s work exists focuses on either his work with Westerns or bullfighting in cinema, rather than on his intriguing early forays into the war and mystery arenas. Two of the first ten films in Boetticher’s canon are particularly worthy of further study, Escape in the Fog (1945) and Behind Locked Doors (1948). Both arguably films noir, these economical—both clock in at just over an hour—but expressive pictures reveal the early elemental precursors of what would become Boetticher’s minimalist style and his interest in issues fundamental to the human condition, such as the negotiation between knowledge and mystery and the lines between the lawful and criminal. Escape in the Fog, in true noir fashion, begins with a dream, a measure of unreality that will frame the entirety of the narrative. Eileen Carr (Nina Foch), a former army nurse, awakens screaming from this dream in a secluded inn, where she is recovering from a bomb attack. The dream sequence, which parallels a later and “real” sequence in the film, is shrouded in dense fog. Reviews of Escape in the Fog will often comment that this proliferation of fog, though expertly used, is perhaps the only stylistic mark of note in the film. Indeed, Boetticher spares no use of the fog machine in these scenes, creating an obfuscated atmosphere of uncertainty and dread. In both scenes, Carr is walking on the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, where she meets a policeman who initially suspects that she is contemplating suicide, and cautions her about walking there alone: “You never can tell what’ll come outta the fog.”

16  m a r l i s a s anto s And this warning proves to be true, as Carr witnesses a car pulling up near her, men falling out of it struggling, and one of them getting shot, whereupon the dream ends. Mark Osteen notes: “noir dreams stage ruptures in identity and integration that are not just individual but collective.”3 Though it would appear no strange thing for Carr to have such a dream, given her shell-shocked condition, the reality of the dream breaks through Carr’s individual private existence because of her screams that make it public. This shift from private to public is even more apparent when she explains her situation the next morning to federal agent Barry Malcolm (William Wright), another guest at the inn, who tried to “save” her when she screamed, and, though Carr does not acknowledge (or perhaps realize) it at this point, he is the man who was getting attacked in her dream. The dimly lit and shadowed evening scene is contrasted with the bright sunny garden in which Carr and Malcolm chat. In the light of day, the confession by Carr that she “cracked up a little” after her service stint ended when her hospital boat was sunk by enemy bombs seems less dark than the dream would lead one to believe. The dream is not one of war trauma, however, but rather one that threatens existence back here at home. The “ruptures in identity and integration” of which Osteen speaks are commonly seen in returning veteran noirs; Carr reveals that her “nerves went to pieces” and, honorably discharged, she was sent home for “a rest.” This rest, however, will prove to be somewhat of a dream as well, as she finds herself embroiled in new war intrigue but this time on the home front and with enemy threats more furtive than the ones she has encountered. Malcolm is an Allied propaganda agent, conducting “psychological warfare”; he “doesn’t wear a uniform,” and rather fights with words, he says, “the right ones” that hit much harder than bullets. Malcolm, oddly, is at the inn for a rest, too, and also for “nerves.” This curious coincidence of both lead characters suffering war-inflicted psychological wounds, once introduced, is not mentioned or referred to again, and, while some of this narrative exclusion is probably due to the speedy production schedule whose efficiency had no room for “fleshing out characters or filling in plot holes,”4 these seemingly random circumstances serve to frame the story with uncertainty and doubt. A lingering sense of instability exists throughout the film: what ensues requires mental fortitude and it is questionable whether either character may be up to the task. With this stage set, the film’s central conflict quickly develops, essentially the difficulty of ascertaining knowledge, identity, and truth. Malcolm’s next assignment, posing as a German agent to deliver surveillance documents in Hong Kong, is a dangerous one that is undermined by German spy activity from the start. The German spies in San Francisco, where Malcom and Carr go when he receives his new assignment, operate from a clockmaker’s business, and they learn the details of Malcolm’s mission from a recording device in a long-case clock in the home of Malcolm’s undercover superior, Devon

m ys te ry an d crimin ality  17 (Otto Kruger). The butler makes a point of saying that the clock is very precious to him, having been “in his family for many, many years.” Time is a precious commodity in the spy business, and it is significant that each clock“maintenance” visit actually means the changing out of “spasmodic principle . . . stop-and-go” recording spools. Devon believes his time is being kept but actually time is being thwarted; even though there are gaps in the recording, the German spy-ring leader, Schiller (Konstantin Shayne) and his cronies can discover enough about Malcolm’s impending mission to attempt to keep him in San Francisco and steal the documents. Another layer of Malcolm’s difficulty is that, with the inception of this mission, he is cut off from contact with Devon and his other operators. His predicament is interestingly similar to depictions of Boetticher’s Western characters later in his career, according to Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin: “Boetticher’s characters, in order to maintain their individuality, remain constantly at odds with their world, which reveals itself treacherously.”5 Malcolm is thus now adrift in an environment even more dangerous than he expected, rootless and without verifiable identity. Carr herself has no particular direction or mission and is in some ways a blank slate because of her rootless, discharged veteran existence. But she is nevertheless also in danger, by association and by her desire to help Malcolm who, as he departs for his mission, is in a fake taxi driven by the German spies. Carr does not know this but, as the camera focuses on a close-up shot of her troubled face, her suspicions are evident and they are intensified when, in her troubled state, she tries to cross into the street and is almost run over by a car which, as a witness comments, “came out of the fog.” The car “was going too fast to get its number” another witness complains. Carr says, “It’s all right; accidents happen.” But the viewer suspects, as does Carr, that there are no real accidents and every seemingly mundane occurrence has sinister undertones; when the fog rolls in, literally or figuratively, nothing can be clearly identified or explained. It is perhaps this mood of chaos which fuels a chain of events that seems to have limited connectedness. For instance, there is no particular reason why Carr should feel that Malcolm is in inordinate danger but she is clearly troubled when she leaves him and nearly gets struck by the car. This event is never explained but, when she is knocked unconscious, there is a brief cut to surreal, foggy images from her dream, the most violent parts when Malcolm is attacked. And, immediately after this, Carr apparently feels compelled to visit Devon’s house to warn him that Malcolm is in grave danger. These abrupt transitions make the filmic experience a stream-of-­consciousness process, one that the viewer accepts without necessarily questioning why. It is a somewhat intuitive approach to the character and a narrative motivation that not only moves the plot along quickly but also infuses a haunting quality of imaginative prospect.

18  m a r l i s a s anto s Carr’s persistence in fulfilling her instinctual drives may seem lacking in logic but is ultimately the key to the film’s goal of thwarting the Axis conspiracy. When queried about his characters’ tenacity, and the tendency for vacillating characters to die early in his films, Boetticher revealed, “I hate insecurity. Although I never thought of it before, I probably don’t like those ­middle-of-the-road characters in my films, so I get rid of them.”6 Carr is nothing if not tenacious and single-minded. Not only does she survive, she also saves lives along the way. Despite the obvious risks—at the very least, of embarrassment—of approaching Devon, she marches right into his living room and tells him of her unshakable conviction that Malcolm is in terrible danger. Predictably, Devon politely dismisses her concerns, not even revealing, of course, that he knows Malcolm in the first place. Even were Carr to have had an honest conversation with Devon, with both parties being open about who they were, she would have had difficulty convincing him to act because of a dream she had. But she is doggedly determined and confident in her own certainty, as absurd as it may seem to others. “I’m not ill, I’m not insane, and I’m certainly not the victim of hallucinations,” she tells Devon. The failure of Devon to believe her story parallels the shifting values of knowledge and identity residing elsewhere in the film: Devon is part of a world where nothing and no one is as they seem. Her status as a woman and one—though it is not known to anyone but Malcolm—recovering from mental war trauma put her at a disadvantage as a messenger of truth. This quest for belief underscores the central sense of instability in the plot and creates an unnerving sense of imbalance inherent in the war struggle. It is hard enough to fight one’s enemies but even harder when the enemy cannot be discerned or masquerades as ally. As in the world of psychiatric care, authority of information is the key to sanity or “truth.” Carr finds herself on the outside of this sphere. Devon “can’t put much stock in a dream,” but this is all Carr has, her own internal truth irrespective of external affirmation. Now truly alone with her terrible fears, Carr seeks out the one place where she may be able to concretize what is only in her mind: the Golden Gate Bridge where her dream occurred. This, she tells Devon, is the only place she can go because he won’t help her and, when he asks her where, she says, “If I told you, you’d think I’m crazier than you do now.” And presumably, we know, even crazier, if he knew that she was shell-shocked. As it turns out, though, as illogical as her convictions are, they prove to be correct deductions: once on the bridge, she experiences her dream recreated in reality, complete with Malcolm nearly getting killed by Schiller’s thugs and is saved only by Carr’s screams that bring the police. The scene is shrouded in fog, as in her dream, but it becomes particularly thick, nearly obscuring all else in the shot, when Malcolm is trying to explain to the police about the need to recover the covert information packet which fell into the water during the struggle. What can

m ys te ry an d crimin ality  19 be seen, quite clearly thanks to a close-up cut, is Malcolm’s badge that reads “Federal Agent.” This scene, in nicely economical time, encapsulates central issues of authority of information and fluidity of identity. Malcolm is probably only saved because Carr follows a line of action completely unsupported by reason. Then, the density of the fog which obscures the characters in the scene corresponds to both the level of secrecy surrounding Malcolm’s mission but is inversely proportional to his need to make himself “transparent” to the police authorities to free himself and gain their help to recover the missing packet which is yet another layer of secret knowledge that must be transmitted into further hands. What seems particularly fascinating is Malcolm’s reaction to Carr appearing on the bridge: he says, “It’s incredible.” Carr admits that she cannot explain it but that a lot of people are given “a pre-sight, a premonition of things to come,” and she had such a “vision.” When he says, “it’s lucky for [him],” she responds, “I’m lucky I had that nightmare.” In an atmosphere in which determination of cause and veracity are life-and-death matters, this conversation is indeed “incredible.” And then the plot continues to race merrily along, suggesting that Boetticher is placing more weight on the conviction of the characters than on the logical steps needed to get there—and, in this case, mystery is not something to be feared, but perhaps embraced . . . if it gets the job done. Carr’s dream residuals continue to reap rewards for Malcolm and his ultimate goals. When the harbor patrol cannot find the document packet in the water, she recalls that, in her dream, a boat was passing under the bridge during the struggle; this is therefore another feasible path to follow on the trail to discovery. Carr, ever confident, asserts, “Everything I saw in my dream came true, didn’t it? . . . Well why not everything I heard too?” It is ironic that Carr’s dream knowledge represents truth, while the voice of a­ uthority— here, the port authority—misrepresents it. The port director insists that no boat passed under the bridge at that hour; the port director tries to placate them by suggesting that, “fog has a funny way of playing havoc with sound.” This assertion is a fabrication, however, meant to keep secret a Navy experiment with a radio-controlled ship. This experiment is unrelated to Malcom’s mission but signifies yet another layer of secrecy of information that ultimately could lead to the failure of a different covert mission, all supposedly serving the same cause. For all the authority that these offices represent, they are also found to be lacking, and even comical. No sooner than the port officers are congratulating themselves for keeping the Navy experiment a secret, even if it means stymieing a federal agent’s mission, their office telephone is used by Schiller’s henchman to make a false call to the police, impersonating the port director and asking for return of the packet which has been recovered. Ironically, the henchman tells the truth, that these are secret government documents which must be protected by any means necessary. Because of the

20  m a r l i s a s anto s false call, the police do not even believe Malcolm when he tries later to claim those documents. Michael Grost points out that there is a significant contrast between the high-tech atmosphere of the various law enforcement/military offices and the lair in which the Nazi spies meet, the ancient-seeming clock shop with timepieces lining the walls, what he calls “a surrealist variant on the information centers used by the good guys.”7 The modernity of technology clearly does not guarantee success, nor confidence in information or truth. Time is the looming enemy in the film and, despite these devices—clocks from the past or radios from the present/future—the transfer and validity of information and knowledge are constantly shifting and in question. Given Boetticher’s seemingly ambivalent attitude toward women in some of his later Westerns, it is worth noting that Escape in the Fog (and Behind Locked Doors, as we shall see) feature a female character in a key and important role. But there are mixed messages regarding female gender power in Escape in the Fog. As we have seen, Carr’s actions are instrumental in the safeguarding of Malcolm and his mission; also her dream precognition is not only never dismissed as “woman’s intuition” but is actually found to be a viable source of truth. There are scenes, however, such as the one in which Malcolm attempts to find information about the boat that might have inadvertently picked up the packet. Malcolm enters a telephone booth and begins to dial but stops to glance meaningfully at Carr standing outside the booth and then he shuts the door. If not for this glance at her, one might assume that it would be automatic for him to keep his call secret, given its purpose. At this point, it seems incredible that she would not be taken into his confidence, especially with so many lapses in security that have already occurred. But, at this moment, the implication is that Carr, despite her previous assistance, is still just another woman who would need to be sheltered from information. A similar dynamic occurs in the two scenes with Devon and his wife. In the scene in which Carr visits him, Devon briskly dismisses his wife from the room even before he knows the purpose of her visit; the wife amiably leaves, as if this is a common occurrence. Again, this may be because of the secretive nature of Devon’s work, some of which apparently occurs in the home. Ironically, however, it is the observation of Devon’s wife that leads to the discovery of the recording device in the clock: she realizes that it is running slow. Interestingly, this realization comes after an agitated Devon tells his wife that work issues which he cannot share with her bother him. Time—and information—are lagging, requiring the Allied forces to catch up with the actions of their Nazi counterparts. These actions have already led to the capture of Carr and then of Malcolm when he tries to rescue her. The trail of knowledge and information, once again, is found to be lacking: the information locating the packet which Malcolm has received is written on a piece of paper that he rips up. Carr (not knowing what it contains) asks him to give it to her to hold in her purse for “safety.”

m ys te ry an d crimin ality  21 When Carr, on her own initiative, answers Schiller’s newspaper advertisement intended to smoke out the location of the packet, she is captured and the scraps of paper revealing the packet’s destination are pieced together and used to lure Malcolm. Though Carr’s efforts do not always lead to success, they are based on conviction and the best reasonable action based on the information she has, which is usually incomplete, because of Malcolm’s unwillingness to reveal more to her. When they fail, as above, it is because of this lack of information. Therefore, she cannot provide the “safety” that Malcolm could have made use of. For all his inability to take control of his own mission and destiny, Malcolm is provided with a dramatic avenue through which he can save himself and Carr. Schiller and his cronies have locked them in an office above the Chinatown clock shop, having opened the gas jet in an effort to asphyxiate them; Malcolm is chained to a table and Carr is tied up in a chair. The walls, Schiller says, are soundproof and the window glass is unbreakable. Malcolm and Carr are thus isolated and essentially paralyzed. Malcolm cannot reach the jet to close it and cannot test Schiller’s claim that the window cannot be broken. This desperation leads to a dramatic result: he writes “Hail Japan” on a lens with Carr’s lipstick and projects it, using the flame of a lighter, on to the front window. Certainly, the bold move highlights the pro-Chinese/anti-Japanese sentiment at work in the film, because angry Chinese American passers-by break the window; this sentiment is noted, too, by the sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese dignitary at Devon’s house. More importantly to the narrative, Malcolm escapes and is able heroically to eliminate Schiller and recover the packet. The scene preceding this shootout, when Schiller and his henchman are discussing whether or not it is more advantageous to separate than to stick together, also features the slow and creeping infiltration of fog into the shots. Boetticher uses the fog at crucial moments in the film when uncertainty is at its highest and, at this point, when the German spies are most in danger and least connected to each other, the dense mist signifies their impending doom. So the ending of the film is a happy one but one eerily still enshrouded in fog, a bookend to the film’s dream opening. The final scene begins with Carr and Malcolm enjoying a loving moment on the bridge but Carr comments that, “the fog couldn’t be any thicker.” Malcolm responds, “Fog, what fog? I don’t see any fog.” He tells her that it’s rather “moonlight.” The fog evidently brings romance, as well as danger and doubt. It obscures reality in both cases, lending questionable truth and blurry information. Problems of mystery and criminality are equally seen in Behind Locked Doors but in a different arena that encourages them; instead of the machinery of governmental spy machines, the action takes place within the cogs of a mental institution. There are, interestingly, many parallels between these spheres, including secrecy, abuse of power, confinement, and shifting identities. Also

22  m a r l i s a s anto s of note is that the psychological ailments that linger in the background of Escape in the Fog are front and center in Behind Locked Doors. The film is one of many noirs that deal directly with psychiatric issues, some even featuring plots within psychiatric hospitals and asylums, such as Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) and The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak, 1948).8 The particular fascination with Boetticher’s psychiatric noir is that the protagonist, a private detective, is not actually suffering from a mental illness, only pretending to for the sake of solving a case. Like Escape in the Fog, the plot is driven by a strong female character. Kathy Lawrence (Lucille Bremer) is a reporter following a story about a corrupt judge who has gone missing to escape his crimes. She enlists the services of Ross Stewart (Richard Carlson) to help her. Though she happens to be his first client, he is so cocky as almost to be a parody of the usual P.I. character, flirting and bantering with Lawrence as she tries to convince him to take the case. Though he appears ready for anything, he balks at her proposition which is for him to masquerade as mentally unbalanced to gain admittance to the La Siesta sanitarium, where she suspects the judge is hiding out. Despite Stewart’s jokester façade, he seems serious about his work, and Boetticher uses some nicely atmospheric shots of him checking out her story by staking out the exterior of the sanatorium in the shadowy dead of night, when the judge’s girlfriend apparently comes to visit. He sees enough to agree to move forward with the case despite his initial reluctance of not wanting “to get locked up as a crazy person on a hunch.” This offhand remark encapsulates the simple, yet terrifying, scenario of being “undercover” which is similar to the spy game but, in a way, more dangerous in its potential permanence. This risk is the threat of the no-man’s-land destination of the asylum from which one may never escape. Once there, one ceases to be a complete human being because all aspects of one’s being are called into question. The label of mental illness becomes a barrier that one cannot overcome, turning the individual into a childlike victim, being completely dependent on the will of those running the asylum or advocates on the outside. It is the Roach Motel of the post-Freudian world: once checked in, you may never check out. This nightmare is seen in countless cinema depictions of psychiatric hospitals, with the particular masquerade of the undercover mental patient being more expansively and chillingly realized later in Samuel Fuller’s 1963 Shock Corridor. The ominous danger is only briefly hinted at within the bravado of Stewart’s persona; after he demonstrates his initial resistance to Lawrence’s plan, they almost comically plan his cover story, looking through a psychiatric book “to decide what kind of mental case” he is going to imitate, and deciding as well what his entire new personality will be: that of an unemployed salesman who is suffering from bipolar depression and is brought in for treatment by his wife. This new hollow identity is eerily similar to the identity that he sacrifices which is not much of an identity at all: Stewart has no relatives and tells

m ys te ry an d crimin ality  23 Lawrence at the outset that he is “practically unemployed” because she is his first client. He has, therefore, no solid identity to leave behind which makes his adoption of this false identity curiously easy but ultimately terrifying. Stewart is too busy flirting with Lawrence, however, demonstrating what she calls his “kissing fixation,” seemingly to grasp the risks at hand, and the implications of his essentially giving up his real self for a false, and endangered, one. Andrew Sarris argues: Whatever his action setting, be it the corrida, the covered wagon, or the urban underworld, Boetticher is no stranger to the nuances of machismo, that overweening masculine pride that proves both a style and a fatal flaw to his gun-wielding or cape-flourishing characters. Boetticher’s films strip away the outside world to concentrate on the deadly confrontation of male antagonists.9 Stewart is confident that he can crack this case, but does not realize that, once trapped in this different kind of underworld, he will be isolated and without his customary attributes and resources. Once admitted through the savvy maneuvers of Lawrence, he is emasculated from the start; aside from losing his freedom, he is stripped of individual possessions, including shoes, suspenders, and belt, and placed in a ward with other men who seem to be suffering from various levels of mental conditions but who are all less men than boys, trapped in a tyrannical system with illogical rules and enforcement by fear. Conditions at La Siesta are “a rotten disgrace” according to Stewart’s cynical roommate Purvis, and it becomes clear that the institution is more of a prison than a hospital, with inmates either doing chores or being abused by orderly guards, or both. Wheeler Winston Dixon comments that the film is “just one of many films that treat mental hospitals as little better than fraudulent enterprises designed to bilk patients out of their life savings,”10 but the atmosphere is much darker than that. Purvis tells Stewart, “You came here to be cured? You’re more likely to be killed.” Stewart hardly believed that he would be fighting for his own survival rather than trying to solve a mystery but what he is facing becomes clear all too quickly. La Siesta’s version of treatment for a patient suffering from terrifying nightmares is a slap across the face from Larson (Douglas Fowley), the head orderly, who yells, “Shut up, you screaming monkey!” When Stewart tries to defend the patient, Larson sneeringly advises him, “Don’t stick your nose into what’s none of your business.” This night scene is punctuated by deep-shadowed photography, with Larson’s arm and keys in clear silhouette, as symbolic of his magnified authority, closing and locking the door. Stewart keeps asking, “What kind of a joint is this?” and even the kinder orderly, Hopps (Ralf Harolde), tells him to “mind [his]

24  m a r l i s a s anto s own business and [he’ll] get along better.” When not being overtly abused, a patient might simply be confined forever in a state of institutional inertia. This appears to be the predicament of Purvis who tells Stewart that he has “asked a hundred times” to be released but “they” have convinced his wife that he is dangerous. The upside-down state of the “care” in the sanatorium calls into question who is more “dangerous,” the patients or the caregivers. Hopps says “the people on the outside aren’t much interested in us on the inside, inmates or attendants.” The asylum begins to emerge clearly as a microcosm of a sick society “on the outside,” one that imperils, not protects, in which one might at best be ignored and neglected rather than victimized and terrorized. This kind of terror is personified by Larson’s sadistic character which takes pleasure in controlling and even torturing the inmates. His ominous presence is continually reinforced by shots in which his oversized shadow is projected on to the ward walls, not only of his body, particularly his hands and arms, but especially his keys which reveal themselves to be both a literal and a symbolic weapon of his oppression. This is visible in the scene in which he terrorizes Stewart’s roommate in the middle of the night as well as in numerous scenes in which he goes up and down the stairs to the “locked ward.” This is the isolated, padded-wall repository for patients who are “too much trouble to cure,” though there is no evidence of any kind of therapy or treatment occurring in the sanatorium at all. The “locked ward” is also home to the mute “Champ” (played by Tor Johnson, of B-movie fame). Larson takes delight in torturing the punchy ex-fighter by knocking his ring of keys against the cell bars, a sound simulating a boxing bell which triggers the Champ to shadowbox around the room with an imaginary opponent. This torture is shown clearly in an anguished extreme close-up of the Champ’s face, signifying by extension the frustrated plight of the “inmates.” Moreover, the Champ is used as a weapon against other misbehaving inmates: the offender is simply put in the Champ’s cell and Larson rings the bell–keys to create a ready-made beating. These apparently repeated rituals are just one example of the implied parallels between the damaged personas inside—inmates and attendants alike, as Hopps characterizes—and the damaged society outside. Judge Finlay Drake (Herbert Heyes), who is indeed hiding out in La Siesta, has brought his external corruption inside, and there seems little difference between the two environments. He is holing up in a set of rooms upstairs in the locked ward as well, ironically ensconced with the other most dangerous inmates. The equally corrupt head of the institution, Dr Clifford Porter (Thomas Browne Henry) tells Larson, “I’ve told you a dozen times not to abuse the patients”; he seems, however, to have just as little control over Larson as he does over the judge himself, who has bullied his way into La Siesta, with Porter keeping him protected there because of past financial indiscretions that they shared. This morally bankrupt world prefigures those in Boetticher’s later Westerns. In comment-

m ys te ry an d crimin ality  25 ing on Boetticher’s “sophisticated savagery,” Dixon notes that his Westerns are, in a word, “‘hostile’—people treat each other with wary suspicion, the land itself is barren and cruel, and violence is everywhere.”11 One can certainly see the same kind of “cruel” atmosphere in this early Boetticher noir as well. Forget about the world at large showing compassion; here is a supposed seat of care and treatment, and it is shown to be the cruelest atmosphere of all. The more Stewart learns about the nature of his captive environment, the more he is unnerved by it. His confident swagger becomes transformed into agitated uncertainty, and he tells Lawrence during one of her visits, “This joint is really beginning to needle me.” He must carefully avoid, like the other patients, the wrath of Larson while still trying to solve his case. He has to resort to using the weaknesses of the patients to further his own ends, as when he gives matches to a firebug patient in the hopes that he will start a fire and literally smoke out the judge. And the real danger of La Siesta is driven home when Stewart is discovered by Larson and Porter to have a photograph of the judge and his real motive is found out. He is interrogated, imprisoned in the locked ward, and later treated to a session with the Champ; moreover, his one connection with the outside world is severed when, following this incident, Porter tells Lawrence that he was badly beaten by another inmate and cannot be seen. Porter and Drake realize that Stewart’s entire existence must be erased in order for theirs to be saved, and this would be chillingly easy in this kind of environment. A severe beating can lead to an unfortunate death; after all, as Drake says to Stewart, “Accidents are quite likely to happen in a mental sanitarium, my friend.” The gravity and desperation of Stewart’s predicament can be seen in the locked ward scenes which feature shot-reverse-shots of him and the Champ looking at each other from inside their cells; regardless of how he got there, Stewart is in the same boat as any other trapped, powerless, and victimized patient. And, when Stewart is later locked in with the Champ, the levels of gazing become more complex. Stewart and the Champ are now immediately in a single enclosed space looking at each other, one trying to escape the other. As this is happening, Larson and Porter are looking into the cell, hoping for the Champ to beat Stewart to oblivion. And in still another layer of spectatorship, Hopps is looking at Larson and Porter looking in on them. This scene brings to mind Laura Mulvey’s argument concerning voyeurism: [It] has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat.12

26  m a r l i s a s anto s On one level, the gazing of Larson and Porter is strictly to ascertain information about Stewart’s fate, information that he is not privy to and is not in control of. But the positioning of the scene and everything leading up to it bring the gazing to another level, that of pleasure in Stewart’s pain, the relishing of control over his actions. And, at yet another level is the gaze of Hopps who takes this incident as the impetus he finally needs to call the police and assert some kind of authority over his own existence. Though he is intervening with the external masculine authority of the law, the heretofore impotent Hopps has asserted a similar kind of androcentric control that Larson and Porter are trying to achieve with their actions. Perhaps the greatest irony of all in these layers of masculine attempts at control is that a formidable force in the dismantling of this sadistic framework is Lawrence herself who does not accept Porter’s explanation of Stewart’s condition. She takes the initiative to hide out in the back seat of Judge Drake’s girlfriend’s car, tie her up, take her coat and hat, and, with a gun, impersonate her way into the hospital in order to free Stewart. Had the police not arrived, she still would probably have rescued Stewart, hardly the outcome that Stewart would have imagined at the start of this adventure. Kathy Lawrence, like Eileen Carr, does not shy away from action or from following her instincts; when she can find no assistance from authority figures, like the state psychiatrist, on the outside, she barrels ahead under her own steam, based on her own convictions. Interestingly, Mulvey happens to quote Budd Boetticher in her seminal article, on the function and role of the female performer: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”13 One can, of course, argue that the female character as catalyst has its own significance beyond that of simple object but, nevertheless, in these early noirs, both lead female characters do drive the action beyond any symbolic role; they are active in saving both male leads, not existing as mere inspiration. Ultimately, the best efforts of both men and women in Boetticher’s early psychological noirs are found to suffer and triumph in equal measure. The narratives end on positive notes but, as with many noirs, it is difficult to dismiss the troublesome uncertainties that fueled the characters’ various struggles and foiled their search for reliable knowledge and truth. Jim Kitses argues: The moral of Boetticher’s films is thus a simple one: everyone loses. Life defeats charm, innocence is blasted. The world is finally a sad and funny place, life a tough, amusing game that can never be won but must be played. If Boetticher’s films can darken to near-tragedy, the pessimism is always held in check by an innate response to the absurdity of it all, the way in which we are forced to take up roles in a farce.14

m ys te ry an d crimin ality  27 This absurdity can be summed up in the humorous final line of Behind Locked Doors, spoken by Hopps in relation to Stewart’s real identity: “I never did think he was crazy!” All the anguish, desperation, and sadism are thus neatly tied into a cheeky quip; this is the genius of Boetticher, a sensibility that would make his distinctive mark on even bleaker settings and stories throughout his storied career.

NOTES  1. Budd Boetticher, When in Disgrace (Santa Barbara: Fallbrook Publishing, 1989).   2. Sean Axmaker, “Ride Lonesome: The Career of Budd Boetticher,” Senses of Cinema 38 (February 2006).  3. Mark Osteen, Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 20.   4. Paul Mavis, “Escape in the Fog,” review, www.dvdtalk.com, July 3, 2012.   5. Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event: Interviews with Five American Film-Makers (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 41.   6. Ibid., p. 52.   7. Michael Grost, “The Films of Budd Boetticher,” http://mikegrost.com/boettich.htm.   8. For an extended discussion of psychiatry in film noir, see Marlisa Santos, The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010).  9. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 125. 10. Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), p. 30. 11. Ibid., p. 65. 12. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (autumn 1975), p. 7. 13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. James Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 184.

ch apter 2

On Ethics and Style in Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) Fredrik Gustafsson

O

ne of the many ways in which scholars neatly try to simplify film history is to call American cinema “classical cinema” (or “classical narration”), at least in its pre-1967 era, and compare it with, for example, “art cinema.” This, however, is unsatisfying. In the alleged classical era tens of thousands of films were made in Hollywood in a great variety of styles, themes and ideas, and yet they are all summarized as “classical,” a generalization that hides the true diversity and scope of American cinema. There are films that are baroque, films that are opaque, films that are decadent, films that are absurd, surreal, and quite a few that would have been called, had they been European, “modernist.” Of course, such a discussion is meaningless without a proper definition of “classical” and so, in the context of this article, “classical cinema” is to be understood as a kind of cinema that has a linear narrative, unambiguous cause and effect, an unobtrusive visual style and that is not ironic.1 As should already be clear, many Hollywood films and filmmakers do not adhere to such a definition. Howard Hawks, Joseph H. Lewis, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger and Frank Borzage, among others, make ample use of ambiguity, open endings, reflexivity, irony, techniques that draws attention to itself, and unreliable narration (when what is shown is not always to be trusted) in their films. Though they are seldom as radical as, for example, Jean-Luc Godard or Nagisa Oshima, and they do not use those techniques all the time, these filmmakers are much more complex than the conventional definition of “classical cinema” suggests. Similarly, many who are called “art cinema” directors, such as François Truffaut, Vittorio De Sica and Claude Chabrol, have more in common with the Hollywood filmmakers listed above than with the radicalism of Godard. Where does this leave Budd Boetticher? His films do have a linear narra-

o n et hi c s and s tyle in bullfighter bullf igh ter and an d the th e lady   29 tive, unambiguous cause and effect, an unobtrusive visual style and they are not obviously ironic so, in that respect, it could be argued that he is a director who actually does make films in the style of authentic “classical” American cinema. But, at the same time, Boetticher is one of the most austere filmmakers of those who worked in Hollywood; his precise, economical style is sometimes more reminiscent of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu or Robert Bresson than any of his American contemporaries. In Boetticher’s films, there is rarely any stylistic excess or flamboyance, the actors underplay and are often expressionless, and there is nothing that could be described as showing off. To some this might be regarded as a consequence of his films’ comparatively small budgets although there is actually no obvious correlation between a small budget and an austere style. Filmmakers such as Edgar G. Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis and Samuel Fuller made films on equally small, or even smaller, budgets than Boetticher yet their style of filming was very different from his, and much more expressionistic and flamboyant. So Boetticher’s style of filmmaking should be regarded as a conscious choice; that he prefers this straightforward and low-key style is, after all, a style that is congenial with the themes of his films. The thing that really matters in his best films is the behavior of the characters, their moral code and grace under pressure, and these characters do not talk much and do not try to show off, nor do they become overtly emotional. (Those who try to show off are usually punished.) With his recurring themes of stoicism and grace it should not come as a surprise that Boetticher had a keen interest in bullfighting, and that he made several films on the subject. The first of these is Bullfighter and the Lady (1951),2 a key development in Boetticher’s career, the first full-length A-film that he made, as well as his first film about bullfighting. This chapter will argue that Bullfighter and the Lady is an important film and show how several of Boetticher’s themes and motifs— his style of filmmaking—are fully formed here. It will also argue that there are links to both the transcendental style of filmmaking that Paul Schrader writes about, and to Taoism, the Chinese philosophical system, or way of life. But first a brief background to the making of Bullfighter and the Lady. Boetticher was born in 1906 as Oscar Boetticher, Jr. and it was under this name that he made his first films in Hollywood, beginning in 1942. They comprised a collection of low-budget films, mostly thrillers, and one Western, The Wolf Hunters (1949). Some of these films show a lot of promise but the seriousness and quality of Bullfighter and the Lady are definitely a change of pace. It was two hours long whereas the earlier films were about one hour each. Bullfighter and the Lady came about because of Boetticher’s interest in bullfighting. Before he began making films of his own, he had been technical advisor for the bullfighting scenes in Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941), and he had spent a lot of time in Mexico looking at bullfights and even training to become a bullfighter himself. Bullfighter and the Lady is a

30  f r e d r i k gus taf s s o n result of this and, as a sign of its importance to Boetticher, Bullfighter and the Lady was the first film that he made under the name Budd, instead of Oscar. It is fair to say that it was with this film that Boetticher appeared as a mature artist. Unfortunately Bullfighter and the Lady was re-edited and released in a bungled version, only eighty-seven minutes long. John Wayne’s Batjac production company produced the film, but Wayne was unhappy with the finished film and wanted it recut. John Ford was asked to do that, and it was he who was responsible for the eighty-seven minutes’ cut. As Ford told it: “I like Budd very much. The picture was too long and he asked me to come in and help him cut it, so I did.”3 What Ford cut out was most of the parts that were not specifically about bullfighting, so a love affair and scenes of family life and male bonding were removed; the result was more bullfighter and less lady and Boetticher has shown some ambivalence as to his feelings about this.4 There is a restored version, however, 124 minutes long, with all of the footage that Boetticher intended. It was released in 1986 and this chapter is about that full version.

T he S to r y o f Bullfighter and the Lady The film is set in Mexico, where it was shot on location, and Boetticher based the film on his own experiences of bullfighting. Bullfighting is, of course, a very controversial activity today as it was then. Bullfighting is regularly criticized by animal rights activists; in Britain, they wanted the film to be banned, and bullfighting is illegal in many parts of the world. Even in Spain it is banned in some regions, such as Catalonia and the Canary Islands.5 It is a brutal event where the bulls are made to suffer for the satisfaction of the matadors and the spectators. This is not something the film discusses; whether it is justifiable to injure and kill bulls is a question that is never raised. This makes a difference from other bullfighting films from this time, such as Blood and Sand. Bullfighter and the Lady is concerned only about the humans, not the animals. It begins with a seven-minute-long sequence at an arena, or bullring, in Mexico City, where three Americans watch the great matador Manolo Estrada (Gilbert Roland) perform. The Americans are Johnny Regan (Robert Stack) and the married couple Lisbeth and Barney Flood (Virginia Grey and John Hubbard), and they are very much taken by what they see, especially Johnny. Afterwards, when they are having dinner at a restaurant, the matador Manolo, with his friends and family, appear and sit down at another table. Johnny gets himself invited over to their table and he tells Manolo how impressed and enchanted he was by the bullfighting. First Manolo and the others at the table are uncomfortable, even resentful, but Johnny refuses to leave and eventually he and Manolo make a deal: Johnny will teach Manolo how to be better at skeet

o n et hi c s and s tyle in bullfighter bullf igh ter and an d the th e lady   31 shooting and Manolo will teach Johnny how to fight bulls. Also at the table is Anita de la Vega (Joy Page), and Johnny immediately falls for her. During the time that he is taught bullfighting he courts her, and eventually they fall in love. Johnny proves to be very capable with the cape and the bulls but he is stubborn and arrogant, and this affects both his bullfighting and his courtship. When he is practicing he takes unnecessary chances, as well as in the bullring, but he has talent. The crowd eventually accepts Johnny, yet another arrogant act leads to the death of Manolo and Johnny becomes a pariah. Johnny’s arrogance and pride affect his relationship with Anita and lead him to hit a friend of hers because he felt he was being mocked. He was wrong; nobody was mocking him and, given that they spoke in Spanish, a language Johnny barely understands, and that he was at a distance from them, his violent intervention is even more uncalled for. So she asks him to leave, and says she will never speak to him again. It is often said that American cinema is about individuals and individualism but this is not necessarily the case. It could be said that American cinema is just as much about families and community. Think of John Ford, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Henry King and many others. But Boetticher really is interested in the individual, and he is so focused on him that time and space around the central character sometimes seem to disappear. There is little feeling for community or history in Boetticher’s films. This is to some extent the case with Bullfighter and the Lady as well. Manolo has a family and is very devoted to his wife Chelo (Katy Jurado) but the film is about Johnny, a lone man, with no past or future, only a present. In some ways he is similar to Alden Pyle, the main protagonist in Graham Greene’s novel from 1955, The Quiet American (played by Audie Murphy in an adaptation from 1958, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The story focuses on a naive and arrogant American who unhesitatingly plunges into a foreign country and a foreign culture, foolishly believing that he knows what to do, and how to do it but, instead, he wreaks havoc all around him, causing tragedy because of this stubborn arrogance. This is already clear the first time Johnny meets Manolo and his entourage. He forces himself upon them, and they are annoyed and dismissive. Eventually, Manolo is won over and the two men become very close. Though Manolo constantly has to restrain Johnny and tell him off, their friendship is so strong that it sometimes borders on the homoerotic; during a few scenes it looks like they are about to kiss. They never do, of course: that would make it a radically different film from that which it already is but it is typical for Boetticher to show this kind of attraction between men. The homoerotic element might be plausibly located in several other films of his, such as The Tall T (1957) and Comanche Station (1960). But the relationship between Manolo and Johnny does not end well and the last twenty minutes of the

32  f r e d r i k gus taf s s o n film is one long ritual in which Johnny, in an act of humility, tries to redeem himself.

S t y le a nd Et h i c s One of the questions the film asks is “Why do men fight bulls?” But there is no answer given to this question because each man fights for his own reasons. Some fight for glory, some for money, some for honor, some for women and some for reasons unknown to them. Johnny does not really know what it is that makes him want to fight. There are some suggestions that he is doing it because he wants to win over Anita, who is clearly impressed and inspired by bullfighters, but, even though that might be part of why he initially starts his training session, that soon becomes unimportant. It is about the “kick,” the thrill he gets from being alone with the bull. It is an existential experience, not a logical, romantic or intellectual reason, and being close to death is part of it. After the title sequence, the film opens with a shot of a door, the door through which the bull is released into the bullring. When the bull comes out, the voice-over says: “This is death.” There are many deaths in the film, and it is constantly mentioned in the dialogue how dangerous bullfighting is and how many matadors have been killed. In one scene Johnny looks at a photo of a famous bullfighter and asks, “Was this man killed too?” It appears that Johnny’s face is aglow, as if thrilled by the fact that these men died and that he could die as well. As indicated, the style of the film is restrained. It is focused and without any tricks, other than the occasional POV (point-of-view) shot from the bull’s perspective (which does not really work). But, despite this approach, there is a certain majestic quality to the film. Long shots of the arenas in which the bullfighting takes place, sometimes when they are empty, sometimes when they are filled with people, recur in the film. These shots are central to spatially establishing that majestic feeling. Also, the use of screen silence is important as are the long ritual sequences. The film begins with a sequence of real bullfighters in a bullring, one after another, waving their capes in front of the bulls. The sequence is mostly silent but interrupted by the sudden roar of the crowd with rhythmic intervals. The film embodies a strong sense of reverence for the scenery, the bullfighting and the bullfighters, and this reverence impacts on all aspects of the film; it has a strong sense of gravitas. There is a strong correlation between the film and the bullfighting. There are also a directness and a purity in the film. These aesthetic aspects of the film, and of Boetticher’s films in general, make it possible to invoke the presence of Taoism (or Daoism, as it is sometimes spelled), and the Chinese concept of wu wei, discussed at length in

o n et hi c s and s tyle in bullfighter bullf igh ter and an d the th e lady   33 the writings of Lao Tzu who lived in China around 600 bc; Wu wei means (approximately,) “without doing” or “spontaneous action.” In practice, this means that one should strive to eliminate everything that is not essential to perform the task at hand, and that one should be completely absorbed in what one is doing; it should come naturally and unconsciously, and it should be done with the utmost humility. Or, as Ray Billington puts it, wu wei “means behaving intuitively, even unintentionally: expressing one’s real feelings based on the real self, rather than on any kind of projected image that one may create for oneself.”6 Another definition is given by Chuang Tzu, a philosopher who lived some two hundred years after Lao Tzu, and who describes wu wei like this: “I practice with my mind, not with my eyes. I ignore my sense and follow my spirit . . . However, when I come to a difficult part and I can see that it will be difficult, I take care and pay due regard. I look carefully and I move with caution.”7 This is very much the case for the bullfighter when he is alone with the bull in the ring. It is just an act of pure doing, with no pretense or emotion. In one scene, Anita says to Johnny, “Being good is not what is important. But today you really felt it.” At least, this is how it is presented in the film which, in all likelihood, is a romantic vision of bullfighting. The film celebrates beauty and honor and is not compromised by such things as pettiness, infighting, jealousy, resentment or any other trivial human emotion. There are such things in the film but they are kept out of the bullring. Wu wei is one component of p’u, the ultimate goal of Taoism, which is when all contradictions has been solved and everything is pure and natural, a person has become somebody who is free from all “passions and desires,”8 and this can sometimes be seen in the end of Boetticher’s films, most clearly in Ride Lonesome (1959) but also, to some extent, in Bullfighter and the Lady. Ride Lonesome ends with the protagonist, played by Randolph Scott, putting an end to his wanderings as he sets fire to a tree, a tree that has become a symbol of his past and all the pain that comes with it. By burning down the tree, his past is erased and he can begin life again, reborn. In Bullfighter and the Lady, after the last bullfight, Johnny says that it was not he who was in the bullring but the spirit of the dead Manolo; it was Manolo who guided his hand. Then he says that he will never fight again: he, too, has cleared the past and come out on the other side, a sort of catharsis. In that sense, Johnny can be said to have reached p’u. There is also another connection to be made in order to get to the heart of what Boetticher’s films are often about, and that is Paul Schrader’s concept of transcendental style. In the book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Schrader argues for a kind of filmmaking that makes the viewers aware of the Holy, of the Transcendent. He describes this kind of style as being austere, non-obvious and detached, that does not try to invoke science, politics or sociology to explain what is happening in the films or to flag its meaning for

34  f r e d r i k gus taf s s o n the viewers, and he believes Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson are p ­ articularly good examples of this style. Schrader writes that the “[t]ranscendental style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality; realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism.”9 This is not exactly what Boetticher does; his films are more “realistic” than this. There is still an affinity between Boetticher and the transcendental style, however, and another quote from Schrader references this when he talks about how the transcendental style is “non-expressive” in terms of cinematography, acting, editing, and music.10 He means that transcendental style aims to “strip life of all expressions” and that “[g]iven a selection of inflections, the choice is monotone; a choice of sounds, the choice is silence; a selection of actions, the choice is stillness.”11 This can be seen in Boetticher’s films, in some more clearly than in others, and Schrader does actually mention Boetticher as a filmmaker who sometimes approaches the transcendental style, though he never spells out precisely how and why. But Schrader suggests that Boetticher’s Seven Men From Now (1956) is a “transcendental film, which yields to psychological realism,”12 and the same can be said about Bullfighter and the Lady. It is not that Boetticher makes religious films, like Bresson, or Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette (1943) or John Ford’s The Fugitive (1947), but that, by his very style, Boetticher makes the viewer aware of a higher quality of being, an ethical dimension. It is expressed not in words but in the way characters stand or move and the way that they are filmed. The most consistent example is Randolph Scott, who played the lead in seven of Boetticher’s films in the second half of the 1950s,13 but it can be found elsewhere too, as in Bullfighter and the Lady. Only here it seems that it is primarily in the bullring where these qualities can be found, this moral righteousness, and not in the outside world. But there are a few scenes outside the bullring that also have this transcendental sense, such as the scene when Manolo dies in a barren room, attended by a doctor, with Johnny standing in the background, leaning against a wall. There is no dialogue, no music, and very few expressed emotions. Here, Boetticher has achieved “non-­ expression.” In a similar vein, in an article from 1957 about Boetticher’s Seven Men From Now, André Bazin argues that: “[e]motion is born from the most abstract connections and from the most concrete of beauty. Realism, so imperative in historical and psychological Westerns, has no . . . meaning here”14 and this, too, is close to what Schrader is talking about. Another similar argument is made by Jim Kitses when he writes how Boetticher sometimes “achieves a formal rigour and philosophical nuance that recall the most unlikely of parallels, the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Certainly, a common factor is the evocation of a sadly ephemeral life in a world, beautiful in itself, that remains apart and unchanging.”15 There is definitely such an interesting layer to Boetticher’s films and, by frequently choosing to make films about one character, a quiet

o n et hi c s and s tyle in bullfighter bullf igh ter and an d the th e lady   35 man, it becomes easier for him to keep this focus. But this has led to questions about the role of women in his films.

G end e r R o l e s In Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she directly references Boetticher’s gendered sensibilities: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”16 Mulvey cites this quote as proof of a general rule for all of mainstream cinema but that is an exaggeration. There are any number of films in which women play important and essential parts, not least in comedies and in melodramas. It is, however, useful as a description of the role of women in Boetticher’s Westerns because they are almost always about a man who is seeking revenge from the men who are responsible for the death of his wife. The same theme is also to be found in Boetticher’s thriller The Killer is Loose (1956). But Bullfighter and the Lady is different. While it is a film about males, and male friendship, the women are very much a part of it. There are three women in particular, Chelo Estrada, Anita de la Vega, and Lisbeth Flood. Lisbeth has only a small role but the other two are essential. Manolo and Chelo have an agreement that he will soon quit bullfighting because it is so dangerous, and she watches over him when he is performing. At one point, Manolo is injured and does not fight; he just watches the other bullfighters perform. For this he is taunted by a drunken spectator who accuses him of being a coward. Manolo ignores him but, finally, he cannot take it anymore so he asks Chelo for permission to fight. She acquiesces and Manolo goes out into the ring and performs, completely silencing the drunken man, but Manolo continues to ignore him, refusing even to acknowledge him. When Manolo is done and retreats behind the barrier, Chelo walks across the bullring and confronts the man, saying that she would have killed him if Manolo had been hurt. The man does not say anything in response; he just quietly accepts her anger. Later in the film, she again intervenes, this time by trying to make sure Johnny and Anita become a couple. But it is at the end of the film that her power is given its clearest manifestation. The bullfighting community regards Johnny as responsible for Manolo’s death, and he is being shunned by the other bullfighters. But, outside the bullring, Chelo approaches him, kisses him on the cheek and gives him Manolo’s cape. She has, in this way, absolved him of guilt and shown the world her forgiveness. Anita’s role is more passive, but still important. She is quiet and proud which are also seen as part of her allure, and she shows clearly from the

36  f r e d r i k gus taf s s o n b­ eginning how she resents Johnny’s insensitivity and arrogance. But she, like Chelo, is the bearer of the film’s conscious. When she kisses Johnny in the very last scene, like Chelo in the earlier scene, it symbolizes that he has atoned for his sins and is finally a man worthy of love and respect. So ends Bullfighter and the Lady. Boetticher’s next film would be a Western with Audie Murphy, The Cimarron Kid (1952), and his first film in color. Boetticher’s next film was Bronco Buster (1952) about two rodeo riders. At least according to its synopsis, it seems to be very close to Bullfighter and the Lady, only set in the United States instead of Mexico, and shot in Technicolor. Later in his career, Boetticher would make a few more films about bullfighters.

T he L a t e r Bul l f i gh t e r F i l ms Bullfighting had long been something Boetticher was passionate about; it predates his filmmaking career, and he directed four films on the subject, including Bullfighter and the Lady. The second is a fiction film, The Magnificent Matador (1955), and the third is a documentary, Arruza (1972), about the bullfighter Carlos Arruza whom Boetticher had known. The fourth is My Kingdom For . . . (1985) which is a type of documentary with Boetticher, his wife Mary, Robert Stack, the star of Bullfighter and the Lady, and Stack’s wife Rosemarie, and Carlos Arruza’s son, Carlos Arruza, Jr., also in the film. The star of The Magnificent Matador is Anthony Quinn who had played a smaller part in Blood and Sand for which Boetticher worked as technical advisor. The Magnificent Matador, like Bullfighter and the Lady, was produced in Mexico, and Carlos Arruza was technical advisor. This time the story is less centered on bullfighting and more on love and family issues between Luis Santos, a Mexican matador played by Quinn, Karen Harrison, an American woman played by Maureen O’Hara, and Rafael, the matador’s illegitimate son played by Manuel Rojas. On the day before an important bullfight, Luis disappears and ends up in hiding at Karen’s place. The people of Mexico, and even Karen, believe Santos to be a coward who has become too afraid to fight the bulls. In the end, it is revealed that he was not afraid for his own sake but for his son, Rafael, as they were supposed to have fought together in the bullring, and he did not want to be part of an event in which his son might be killed. The Magnificent Matador is less focused and accomplished than Bullfighter and the Lady but it features the similar themes of fear, death, and honor. In the opening scene, a man says “All toreros are afraid the night before a fight. The trick is to live with the fear and still face the bull with dignity.” This is something that Luis failed to do, at least in the eyes of the world. During the production of The Magnificent Matador, Boetticher began

o n et hi c s and s tyle in bullfighter bullf igh ter and an d the th e lady   37 working on the documentary about Carlos Arruza. Boetticher provided several reason why he produced Arruza: I had made Bullfighter and the Lady with Bob Stack and Gilbert Roland, and I loved Tony Quinn in The Magnificent Matador. But, having been so close to bullfighting, I hated the idea that Bob Stack or Tony Quinn or Gilbert Roland shakes his cape, goes “Hé, hé,” and then you cut to a long-shot, and Tony Velásquez or some other double makes the pass.17 He had been working on the film for several years, through the second half of the 1950s, until Arruza’s death in a car accident in 1966, and the film primarily consisted of shots of Arruza in the bullring or at home at his ranch. The film had financial problems and, like Bullfighter and the Lady, it was recut by another filmmaker, in this case John Sturges, although Boetticher claims his version finally prevailed.18 In addition to the aforementioned titles, My Kingdom For . . . is about Boetticher’s career as a filmmaker, about his passion for bullfighting, and it was the last work created by Boetticher as a filmmaker.

C o nc l u s i o n Boetticher is known today as a filmmaker of Westerns but it is perhaps more accurate to say that he was a maker of moral chamber plays that are set in a Western milieu and that there is not much of a difference between his films, regardless of whether they are set in a Mexican bullring or in a canyon out West. This does not mean that his other films are Westerns in disguise; what it means is that it is not the setting that matters to his films but the moral drama that is played out in their particular settings. This is also one of the reasons why it is not far-fetched to compare him with Ozu and Bresson, as some scholars have, and why Boetticher is a good example of the complexities and nuances that are hidden beneath the catch-all phrase “classical Hollywood cinema.” The characters in Boetticher’s films are living embodiments of his ethical beliefs and, by watching them act, we can come to understand these beliefs and their importance. The Czech writer and statesman Václav Havel has spoken about how one should be “living in truth” or, in his exact words, the importance for a person of discovering “once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.”19 That seems to be something Boetticher also believes or can sympathize with. But, unlike the characters often played by Randolph Scott in Boetticher’s later Westerns, Johnny, in Bullfighter and the Lady is not a fully formed moral being at the beginning of the film; instead,

38  f r e d r i k gus taf s s o n the film ­examines his progression from arrogance to humility. It is important to note that many of Boetticher’s films are Westerns featuring such characters dealing with themes of honor and truth; it is not just a genre convention. On the contrary, Westerns have always had a penchant for ambivalent and unsavory characters. In the films of Anthony Mann for example the “heroes” are usually flawed and compromised, just as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) is consumed by hatred and racism. In addition, the importance of Boetticher’s characters is not that they are virtuous but how they are, and the way this is filmed; this is one connection with the transcendental style of filmmaking. To some extent, Boetticher’s cinema embodies the Taoist concept of wu wei—the belief in spontaneous action—of acting and being in a state of complete naturalness and honesty. His films, beginning with Bullfighter and the Lady, show the importance of humility, grace and righteousness, in plain, focused and direct images and sequences in which ethics are emphasized, and the action and the plot are subservient to these ethical rules. These rules, and the scenes in which they are manifest, transcend all that superficially happens in the films. This is not a transcendental style that aims to reveal religious truths or the holy, as it is in the films Schrader discusses, but Schrader’s point is still valid. Boetticher’s film style aims to bring forward a heightened ethical dimension. Boetticher’s cinema is a cinema of ethics.

NOTES   1. David Bordwell has similarly argued that the “classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. In the course of this struggle, the characters enter into conflict with others or with external circumstances. The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem and a clear achievement or nonachievement of the goals. The principal casual agency is thus the character, a discriminated individual endowed with a consistent batch of traits, qualities, and behaviors.” See David Bordwell, Narration of Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 157.   2. There is no use of the word ‘The’ in front of word ‘Bullfighter’, at least not in the title sequence of the film.  3. Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1967), p. 136.  4. Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 395–6.   5. Ashifa Kassam, “Young Matadors in Spain Bullish on Bullfighting,” USA Today, July 11, 2013, accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ world/2013/07/10/spain-bullfighting/2327089/.  6. Ray Billington, Understanding Eastern Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 92.  7. Chuang Tzu, The Tao of Nature, trans. Martin Palmer, Elizabeth Breuilly and Jay Ramsay (London: Penguin, 2010), pp. 13–14.   8. Billington, p. 93

o n et hi c s and s tyle in bullfighter bullf igh ter and an d the th e lady   39  9. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style of Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 10. 10. Ibid., p. 11. 11. Ibid., p. 39. 12. Ibid., p. 10. 13. An exception is Decision at Sundown (1957), where Scott’s character is showing the other side of his otherwise impeccable gravitas. His character, Bart Allison, is an alcoholic so consumed with hatred that he has lost his sense of right and wrong, and even his sense of self. 14. André Bazin, “An Exemplary Western,” in Cahiers du Cinéma The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1985), p. 171. 15. John Kitses, Horizons West: Directing The Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 185. 16. Laura Mulvey, ”Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 841. 17. Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event Interviews With Five American ­ Film-makers (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 58. 18. Sherman and Rubin, pp. 63–4. 19. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Václav Havel Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 55.

ch apter 3

Domestic Tension and Male Hysteria: The Killer is Loose (1956) Tony Williams

F

ilmed a year before the first unofficial entry to the Ranown cycle, Seven Men from Now (1956), The Killer is Loose (1955) has received little, if any, detailed criticism. This has much to do with past critical attention being almost exclusively devoted to the celebrated series of Westerns Boetticher made with Randolph Scott as well as evaluations of his last Hollywood movie The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) as a “last hurrah” before a sad decline. Boetticher’s contemporary auteur status currently relies upon the recognition of the Ranown cycle as the peak of his career, owing little to what went before or came after. The earlier films of Boetticher’s career received little attention and were mostly regarded as impersonal studio assignments before the director’s talent would flower in his collaboration with Harry Joe Brown and Randolph Scott. The Cahiers du Cinéma saying of an auteur never making a bad film and a metteur en scène director being incapable of directing a bad film had its blind spots as we all know. Critical attention generally either treated the earlier films in a brief introductory paragraph, before concentrating on the “real business” of analyzing the acknowledged masterpieces, or making excessive, unsubstantiated claims for the importance of some earlier works according to that overenthusiastic sentence of “The cinema is Nicholas Ray” quoted by many who felt no need to show how Ray’s films earned that title. The key goal of this “ReFocus” series of books, however, is to look again at the well-known work of past masters as well as providing important perspectives on those who have been previously ignored. In terms of refocus on past masters, it is important to see what associations some early films have to their more accomplished successors. It is in this spirit that I intend to look at a relatively neglected 1955 Budd Boetticher film that is as far removed from the genre the director is usually associated with.

do m e s tic te ns io n an d male h ysteria  41 I first saw it about the time of its general release in one of those now sadly absent small cinemas in Swansea, South Wales, as the bottom half of a double feature. It was either the Elysium in High Street, which turned into a bingo parlor before the building’s eventual demise, or the Rialto, now demolished at the bottom of Wind Street, an area currently notorious for rowdy, youthful booze-drinking inside and outside the numerous clubs and pubs. But nearly sixty years ago, in that age of entertainment innocence, one still had the magic of cinema showing films, at ridiculously cheap prices compared to now, that provided viewers with some hours of escape from a sterile culture (as Terence Davies has often testified in his interviews and films) more often than not from a classical Hollywood studio system that Robin Wood has accurately compared to the theater of Shakespeare’s day. It was a time in which a profuse number of low-budget films could be exhibited, films that were either in the realm of well-crafted entertainment or ones that contained implicit potential to regard them as much more than apprentice works of an artisan who would soon become recognized as a great artist, as Budd Boetticher eventually did in his lifetime. Before finally seeing The Killer is Loose again on VHS some forty years later, memories of Wendell Corey’s bespectacled killer staring coldly at Rhonda Fleming after his sentence in court and seated later at the kitchen table of the Flanders household remained in my mind. As John Ford once said, if a few minutes of a film remain in a viewer’s mind as a memory of what they once saw, then the director’s job is accomplished. This is even more so if a particular scene has reverberations beyond its initial context that connect it to other key aspects of a director’s work. The casting of Wendell Corey in The Killer is Loose is what makes it memorable, especially as it appears to be his most dangerous and psychotic role of this Hollywood career. Corey, usually cast as an ambiguous heroic figure: as in The Furies (1950) though taking a subordinate position to Barbara Stanwyck; as the long-suffering husband in Harriet Craig (1950); as a district attorney bored with domestic and family life tempted by femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck in The File on Thelma Jordan (1950) who emerges as if in answer to his frustrations concerning his wife’s father being really responsible for his status; as the prison warden in the dreary Carbine Williams (1952); and as the skeptical Lieutenant Doyle in Rear Window (1954) who, at one point, shares the voyeuristic fascinations of the James Stewart character; often had an underused talent for playing off-beat sinister roles, a talent that was often little recognized in American cinema. His first Hollywood role as the covertly gay associate of John Hodiak in Desert Fury (1947) and his performance as Hollywood executive fixer Smiley Coy with concealed connections to organized crime in The Big Knife (1955) are two such examples. In this light, his role in The Killer is Loose not only reveals a director’s intuitive awareness of certain features in an actor’s persona that could be brought to the surface in an explicit manner but also features very relevant to

42  t o ny william s the construction of the Scott persona in future Westerns the director would make. Looking again at The Killer is Loose for this anthology presented a challenge. Though knowing the Ranown cycle fairly well and seeing a European-derived, grainy, transferred, VHS, bootleg copy of A Time for Dying (1969) at a longclosed rental store (another reminder of the ephemeral status of a different type of entertainment locale) led me to realize that I had not seen all of Boetticher’s early work except for Horizons West (1950). That film appeared as formulaic entertainment redeemed by the always excellent acting of Robert Ryan and the presence of supporting actors Raymond Burr, John McIntire, James Arness, and Dennis Weaver who would move on to bigger things in television. Robert Ryan’s Dan Hammond, however, is very much an “Overreacher” as Jim Kitses defines Mann and characters in his Westerns. The only difference he has with Corey’s character in The Killer is Loose is that he manages to achieve more than his contemporary successor before his eventual demise. Perhaps I should have attempted to see more films but other contributions to this anthology will shed further light on earlier neglected works. The Killer is Loose, however, had a particular attraction for me. As well as being Boetticher’s only definite film noir (apart from some early, low-budget routine programmers he later dismissed), and containing some perceptive anticipations of elements that would occur in the Ranown Westerns, the seemingly impersonal nature of The Killer is Loose takes on more distinctive meanings in the light of later work, and only a few generations separate the Western from the crime film. Blake Lucas insightfully notes several associations with the later Boetticher Westerns in one of the few reviews of The Killer is Loose but one far too brief in terms of exploring its deep implications. While Jim Kitses briefly refers to it as a “taut thriller,” Lucas notes key parallels with later films:1 The Killer is Loose immediately precedes the cycle of Westerns, which are followed by the director’s only other significant contribution to the urban crime genre, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. Both of these urban subjects confirm Boetticher’s insightful treatment of violence and relate to the Westerns in interesting ways. The charmingly pathological Legs Diamond is a logical and imaginative extension of the gregarious, colorful protagonists of the Westerns. Poole, on the other hand, is a thematic forerunner of the Randolph Scott hero, who typically seeks revenge for his wife’s death. This coincidence is noteworthy because the unique characterization of Poole is the most outstanding quality of The Killer is Loose.2 Despite differences, there are also some very revealing similarities between The Killer is Loose and the Westerns though Poole’s character repre-

do m e s tic te ns io n an d male h ysteria  43 sents the most menacing performance Corey ever delivered throughout his career. The last sentence explains why I remember Wendell Corey and the character he plays rather than the other bland representatives of conformist Eisenhowerera characters portrayed by Joseph Cotton, Rhonda Fleming, Michael Pate, Virginia Christine and Alan Hale, Jr. (who would go on to play Skipper in Gilligan’s Island, a later series I never watched but deliberately skipped). Apart from Corey, the above-mentioned forgettable characters fit into the dehumanizing materialist landscape of 1950s America, a landscape that is not entirely without its contradictions, as I will show. These representatives of normality parallel the type of boring, non-threatening suburban scientists typified by Richard Carlson and King Donovan in The Magnetic Monster (1953), as far removed from the intellectual Commie suspect J. Robert Oppenheimer as one can imagine. It is not accidental that Carlson played the Commie-hunter Philbrook in the 1950s television series I Led Three Lives whose 1950s real-life persona was later found to have a history of mental problems. These normal characters also parallel those dull townspeople in most Hollywood Westerns who either provide mostly background scenery for the more interesting hero and villains to debate moral issues or suffice as disposable objects for the inevitable gunfight that often follows the Hollywood Western form of morality discourse. Who remembers stationmaster Pa and his whiny kid in The Tall T (1957) after Richard Boone has murdered them and thrown them down the well after the film becomes more interesting? As a film noir, The Killer is Loose initially appears to have little connection with the Western but we must remember Robin Wood’s axiom concerning the unity of different Hollywood genres in exploring the same set of ideological problems within Western society as well as recent work on directors such as Anthony Mann that reveal important associations between the areas of noir and Westerns that we neglect at our peril.3 Initially, Randolph Scott may seem the epitome of self-assured, Western masculinity which we associate with his many roles in the genre as well as other stars such as John Wayne, James Stewart, and others. We must also remember, however, that the 1950s was an era of masculine cinematic crisis that called into question the normative male ideal associated with this conformist hero, and many films reflected this, as the Mann–Stewart Westerns, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Man of the West (1958) and the role of Kyle Hadley in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1957) all show in one way or another. Despite the official ideological project of Cold War conformism that strictly defined male and female roles in terms of marriage, family, and “In God We Trust,” many cracks appeared below the surface as well as many dissenting voices that would take issue with such monolithic ideals in one way or another. Though The Killer is Loose is one solitary distinctive noir for Boetticher, as

44  t o ny william s opposed to the several in the work of Anthony Mann, that led to the Western, it is by no means negligible and has the same direct relationship to the Ranown corpus as Mann’s noirs do to his Westerns. Corey’s Leon Poole not only represents a crucial link to Bart Allison in Decision at Sundown, perhaps the most psychotic character and mentally disturbed hero in the whole of Boetticher’s Westerns, but also exhibits classic signs of male hysteria derived from the loss of a marital relationship that is not as perfect as it appears on the surface, a trait linking him with some later Scott characters. Photographed by Lucien Ballard and scripted by Harold Medford from a Saturday Evening Post story, the film opens with a street sign as the camera tilts down to a man wearing dark glasses who looks at his watch. As he crosses the street, the camera pans left revealing a Public and Credit Loan Office in the background. The shot changes to show another man opposite watching him, with the Loan sign again clearly occupying a key position in the frame that reveals the business and industrial landscape of Los Angeles now changed from its Californian garden origins to a bleak, industrial, civilized, barren, urban wilderness, as Blake Lucas notices, using “relatively naturalistic décor and lighting.”4 The natural landscape wilderness of frontier America may have been envisaged as becoming a garden, according to writers such as Henry Nash Smith, but the dreary nature of the settings of this film, both interior and exterior, makes it plain that civilization has brought no benefits to this environment but only a dreary, monotonous form of existence.5 In many ways, the environment anticipates the nature of civilized Shinbone seen in exterior shots in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The scene then changes to the interior of a bank with Leon Poole (Wendell Corey) attending to the needs of a female customer who joins the ranks of those fortunate citizens in becoming “another new home owner,” as opposed to those less fortunate, like Poole, who still live in apartments and perform the role of teller, a role normally undertaken by female workers. If the locomotive represented the machine in the garden in the opening and closing shots of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, then the Bank and Savings and Loans offices occupy the role of a dehumanizing economic machine in the opening scene of The Killer is Loose, a machine that exists to serve only those who have benefited from post-war prosperity and the Eisenhower-era American Dream.6 Presumably, Poole still occupies a subordinate, rather than a managerial, position eleven years after leaving the army and has not attained a status that allows him to purchase his own home like Detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotton) and his former army sergeant Otto Flanders (John Larch). The latter suddenly appears as a customer who immediately recognizes a subordinate whom he mercilessly humiliated during the Pacific campaign of World War II, giving him the nickname “Foggy,” something he continually refers to in a manner that is clearly not accidental, while dredging up memories of Poole’s

do m e s tic te ns io n an d male h ysteria  45 torment, deliberately designed to demean him, made in front of local people at the time. Because Poole is myopic and needs spectacles, Flanders probably ignored the fact that humidity would steam up the glasses of somebody who really needed a more appropriate rear-echelon assignment rather than being used as a whipping boy for the amusement of a merciless NCO who probably had much in common with Sergeant Hartman of Full Metal Jacket (1987). During a sudden bank robbery, however, when Poole exhibits unexpected qualities of heroism by taking on a robber and being knocked out, the abrasive Flanders changes his opinion. “You know something, Foggy. I gotta stop kidding you. I take it all back.” It is noticeable that Flanders still calls him Foggy, thus continuing the type of humiliation that has dogged Poole for most of his life. During the subsequent police investigation, Detective Sergeant Sam Wagner (whose police rank parallels that of Flanders during the war) begins to suspect that the robbery is an inside job. Accompanied by fellow policemen, Chris Gillespie (Michael Pate) and hearty uniformed cop Denny (played by Alan Hale, Jr. with the same type of cheerful, status quo, good-natured “all’s right with the world,” “hail fellow, well met” attitude seen in the 1955 musical Young at Heart and who eventually marries Dorothy Malone in an Eisenhower-era narrative representing a fate worse than death for the actress!), Sam institutes surveillance on Poole who falls into a trap when he phones the bank robbers, beginning his conversation with the sentence, “How’s the Building and Loan Business?” This slip of the tongue not only gives him away to the listening officers but also suggests that the motive for involvement in the robbery, something never made explicit in the screenplay, is probably because of Poole’s desire to own his own home like a typical middle-class husband of the time, and that his failure in not achieving this form of the American Dream has much to do with his motivations. We later learn that Poole has kept his involvement a secret from his wife until the night of the police raid and that he presumably went outside the law as an act of desperation to prove his masculinity and success as a breadwinner in the most material manner possible. “She didn’t know about it, the hold-up, not until tonight. Even when I told her she wanted to go with me.” His words, spoken to the dead body of his wife, are, suggestively, “I’ll take care of you.” They have more to do with his previous motivations than grief over her demise. Before she is accidentally shot by Wagner, Mrs Poole appears in the shadows of their apartment before brief shots of her dead body are filmed in high-key naturalistic lighting. This noir shadow imagery suggests the dark side of normal marital relationships which are really dominated by forces beyond the control of a supposedly average happy couple, forces that are both economic in nature in terms of the material ideology of the American family and its repressed, paranoid, dark side caused by tensions that ­intuitively

46  t o ny william s recognized the frustration of many in not realizing the affluent benefits of the American Dream. We later learn that Mrs Poole was overprotective of her husband, giving him maternal types of assurance and comfort rather than helping him deal with his history of male humiliation from childhood in more mature and realistic ways. She may possibly be an early version of the Gail Russell character in Seven Men from Now who is fully aware of her husband’s flaws but turns a blind eye to them. Again, these are suggestive interpretations that are not confirmed by anything in the screenplay. But “what lies beneath” often provides more significant clues than anything in the manifest nature of the screenplay, as the psychiatrist’s explanation at the conclusion of Psycho (1960) shows. Like Ben Stride in Seven Men from Now, however, Poole is also responsible for the death of his wife. While Stride refuses to take on the role of breadwinner, Poole does this but uses criminal means to achieve a status he regards as legitimate in contemporary society. Yet, in both cases, an innocent victim gets caught in the crossfire. But, if Stride blames himself, Poole refuses to take responsibility for misleading the police into believing his wife was not present. “Don’t you see how wrong it was to do that?” Here he evokes the weak-­ husband figure of John Greer in Seven Men from Now who is engaged in a criminal enterprise, unknown to his wife, to substitute for his insecure masculinity. Like Willard Mims in The Tall T, Poole engages in denial and refuses to bear any responsibility for the tragedy he has indirectly caused. He addresses these words to Wagner and the sequence ends with the camera tracking in to a mid close-up of Poole. When receiving a ten-year sentence from the judge, Poole gazes intently at Lila Wagner who becomes uncomfortable at being the object of his intense observation. Despite Wagner’s comment, “It could have been worse, Poole,” the convicted man replies, “It was worse. Someday Wagner, I’m going to settle with you for it.” During this scene, the threatening figure of Poole anticipates those villains in later films, such as Pate Bodeen (John Larch) in Seven Men from Now and Frank (Lee Van Cleef) in Ride Lonesome. Both kill the hero’s wife and set him on the vengeance trail. While the killing of Stride’s wife may have been an unforeseen accident during the Wells Fargo robbery, that of Brigade’s wife was cold, calculating and premeditated. Of the two villains, Poole resembles Tate Kimbrough of Decision at Sundown although he is more directly responsible for the death of a wife than the latter. Both Pate and Frank, however, represent later variants of Poole’s view of scapegoating someone for revenge, and the Scott character is indirectly responsible in one way or another for the death of a wife in both films. In Decision at Sundown, Bart Allison has constantly refused to recognize the real nature of his wife, both during her life and afterwards. In Ride Lonesome, Frank has broken out of jail, kidnapped Brigade’s wife, and hung her on the hanging tree while Brigade waits in vain in

do m e s tic te ns io n an d male h ysteria  47 the town square of Santa Cruz for the traditional gunfight in “a man’s gotta do what a man’s got to do” tradition. His enactment of that later line, “There are some things a man can’t ride around,” however, results in his not being at the side of his wife when she most needed him. In Seven Men from Now, the hero’s inability to swallow his pride after losing an election for sheriff, refusing the subordinate position of deputy results in her death during a robbery when she has taken on the male role of breadwinner. For all we know, the killing of his wife by Pate may have been as accidental as that of Poole’s wife in The Killer is Loose. Like Allison in Decision at Sundown, who witnesses the murder of Sam by one of Kimbrough’s men, Brigade also discovers that the traditional code of settling accounts has been broken when Frank chose not to face him in the a gunfight many years ago. The rules of the bullring do not apply in an outside world where anything goes. Despite marked differences between the characters of Wagner and Poole, both are linked by their involvement in problematic marital relationships that may either have been over-idealized, as in the case of Poole whose trauma over the loss of his wife parallels that of Bart Allison, or Sam Wagner whose wife constantly insists that he leave the police force (as did Brigade’s own wife in Ride Lonesome) before disaster ensues. Though images of the “good wife” appear in the Ranown Westerns, especially in Comanche Station (1960) with the unseen figure of Cory’s missing wife and Mrs Lowe, who will eventually be returned to her husband, Boetticher’s films also contains echoes of unidyllic marital relationships. Ironically, several “villains” in the Ranown cycle, such as Usher (Richard Boone) in The Tall T, Tate Kimbrough in Decision at Sundown, Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts) in Ride Lonesome, and Ben Lane (Claude Akins) in Comanche Station, are tempted by the lure of marriage and domesticity but few (except for Boone) will ever achieve it. Assigned to the State Honor Farm after two years, Poole seizes the opportunity to escape by killing a prison guard who notices the rapid change in the rural economy during the past five years where lettuce has now taken over from lima beans. The situation parallels the opening scenes in Horizons West (1952) that note the differences between pre-Civil War Austin and its Reconstruction-era capitalist transformation. But, unlike Ryan’s character in the earlier film, changing times and the necessity to adapt to different circumstances evoke no response in Poole who commits murder rather than gaining the imminent parole he may have been entitled to as a trustee. Like Allison, he is obsessed with his quest for vengeance even though he is indirectly responsible for his wife’s murder. In the meantime, Lila quickly discerns that the phone call Sam receives from his colleagues involves Poole’s threat, “They called you to warn you,” and continues obvious repetitive domestic warfare to make Sam give up his profession despite the fact that he is now in a relatively safe desk job. “If you loved me as much as I loved you, you’d give up police

48  t o ny william s work.” Lila wishes Sam to have a sensible office nine-to-five job with somebody else taking over responsibility. But, like Brigade, Sam cannot delegate responsibility to others and joins his colleagues to hunt down Poole. By this time Poole has committed another murder, taking a farmer’s work clothes and truck along with the family dog to give him an appearance of normality representing a rural America now quickly retreating before post-war urbanization. Removing his spectacles seen in circulated wanted posters, he nearly crashes into a police car at a barrier before realizing his error and driving away. In the meantime, Sam learns about Poole’s early threats against Lila and the fact that he is also targeted. “He’ll still take you if he can’t reach her but she’s his number one target.” Sam not only learns that Poole has not slept for almost thirty hours but reveals to his colleagues his wife’s “campaign” against police work. He is thus caught between two lines of fire, the dangerous physical threat of Poole and Lila’s constant attempts at emotional blackmail to make him give up his profession. Also, unlike the Ranown wives (with the exception of Nancy of Comanche Station who has already given birth to a son), Lila is pregnant and expecting her first child. Wearing a man’s raincoat and clad in the incongruous dungarees of a farmer, which make him resemble a little child more than the adult who once wore formal attire, Poole visits the house of his old nemesis Otto Flanders, disturbing his wife Grace (Dee J. Thompson) with fatigued reminiscences of his constant verbal humiliation by her husband in the Pacific campaign, making pathetic pleading requests, like a child wanting to be fed, and threatening to kill her should she call the police. Poole’s dominant tone towards Grace, however, ironically reproduces the caring attitude she once revealed to his deceased wife. “I don’t want to hurt you, Mrs Flanders. I don’t even want to frighten you.” During this scene, Poole’s sense of masculinity is breaking down and his character oscillates between that of a whining female and a dependent child. Under the circumstances, his wish to avenge the death of his wife is pathological and aberrant. While this scene continues, another one occurs between Sam and his wife at the home of his colleague, Chris Gillespie (Michael Pate), where he has taken Lila for safekeeping. After attempting further emotional blackmail on her husband, she delivers him an ultimatum over choosing her or continuing the hunt for Poole, something he refuses to respond to. During these two sequences a television set is on in both locations. While Poole watches news about his manhunt in the Flanders kitchen area, Mrs Gillespie (Virginia Christine) attempts to discipline her son about correct posture and placement before this materialist domestic icon of the 1950s, an attempt that is clearly unsuccessful. One wonders whether the late Mrs Poole had also attempted to make a man out of her husband but, like the deceased Mrs Allison of Decision at Sundown, we can only guess what occurred during their marital relationship. Tension rules in both domestic environments with

do m e s tic te ns io n an d male h ysteria  49

Figure 3.1  Original 1956 promotional still for The Killer is Loose. “Foggy” Poole terrorizes Grace and Otto Flanders in their nice suburban kitchen.

Boetticher implicitly suggesting that the conformist Eisenhower-era ideology of marriage and family is not entirely utopian for those caught within its confines. Home and family (whether present or potential) involve constraint and conflict at different levels whether it be Poole being overprotective towards his recently deceased and supposedly devoted wife, Sam dealing with his pregnant wife’s concerns about his profession, or Mrs Gillespie ruling the domestic hearths by upholding the status quo either by disciplining her son or trying to rally Lila round the flag of being a good cop’s wife by informing her “As far as Poole is concerned, Sam is just a consolation prize. He really wants you.” This sends Lila back to Sam although it will have the effect of disrupting the carefully planned police assassination plan outside Sam’s home. Before this happens, Otto arrives home to find Poole with his wife. Poole then reveals his past life of humiliation that began well before the abuse he suffered from his former sergeant during World War II, “back when I was a kid” and the comfort he once had from a wife who “never laughed at me, not once.” He announces his plan to kill Lila. Rather than dealing with the situation in a professional manner, especially as the sweaty and unshaven Poole is now suffering from lack of sleep, Otto mistakenly retreats into his former wartime macho attitude.” Don’t you know me from the old days? Don’t you think I

50  t o ny william s could take you if I had to?” This provokes his death, something that Poole felt he had no other choice about as he says over the body of Mrs Flanders who has fainted. “What else could I do?” The film now moves to its closing scene. Appropriating Mrs Flanders’s plaid feminine raincoat with hood and wearing her equally feminine rubber boots, the unshaven Poole appears as one of the most bizarre creations in the films of Budd Boetticher, let alone the world of film noir in a sequence shot in night-for-night cinematography. As he walks along the darkened streets of an American suburbia, familiar to viewers from television sitcoms such as The Burns and Allen Show (1950–58), Father Knows Best (1954–63), and The Life of Riley (1953–58), designed to reassure viewers concerning the material normality of the American Dream, Poole represents a monster from the horror film, a “return of the repressed” emblem of what lies beneath the ideologically imposed representations of strict gender roles, marriage, and family. Like Allison in the opening sequence of Decision at Sundown, Poole is unshaven but, unlike a typical Western and American action-film era, he wears glasses and is clad in feminine attire. What makes him even more grotesque is the female raincoat he wears with hood over his head, trousers rolled up, and dainty rubber boots. He walks along a suburban street following Lila who is torn between a decision either to return home and confirm Poole’s suspicions as to her identity or continue walking so that Poole can perish in the police crossfire. Poole’s appearance in the final sequence erases all traces of defined masculinity from his persona, making him resemble the abject figure from the work of Julia Kristeva and the “monstrous feminine” of Barbara Creed.7 Over identifying himself with a deceased wife, whose memory may have been more one of fantasy than reality, he returns in the guise of a dark monstrous maternal avenger before he is shot down in a hail of bullets. Though his ostensible target is Lila, Sam is also fair game as “compensation,” suggesting the bisexual nature of his revenge that takes two forms: the wife and future mother who will be a sacrificial surrogate for the wife he has lost as well as his inability to realize that acceptable image of a male figure symbolizing the American ideal of hard-core masculinity that had humiliated him since childhood. Before the film ends, Poole has killed one sergeant (Flanders) and he also aims to kill another one. Despite the fact that their status has changed, with Flanders now a civilian and Sam a desk-bound police lieutenant, their original institutional roles evoke bitter memories of his South Pacific humiliation before whites and locals. Poole is a monster created by America in the pre-war, wartime, and post-war situations which he has inhabited and been victimized by. At the last moment, after seemingly walking on and becoming that model of a “good cop’s wife” that Mary Gillespie had berated her over, she turns and is about to run to the door before falling down, leaving Poole an easy target for the police. The film ends with an overhead-camera shot as the residents

do m e s tic te ns io n an d male h ysteria  51 of suburbia rush to look at Poole’s dead body and the reunited couple retreat inside their home to live out their version of the American Dream. Boetticher was probably not conscious of such associations because he always regarded himself as a craftsman and not a self-conscious artist. In fact, he looked on directing the film as an opportunity to prove that he could still make a film on a limited schedule and low budget with the script already written and stars cast. He denied ever having a personal vision when directing films, affirming instead an instinctive approach.8 These associations are definitely present, however, and, as Freud shows, instincts do have a particular type of rationale. They would not only occur faintly in his celebrated series of Westerns but also in his personal life as his revealing autobiography, When in Disgrace, shows: a raw catalogue of personal decline very much at odds with the images that appear in his Westerns. This revealing account shows, however, that rapid decline, whether personal, marital, or professional, is always possible outside the world of the bullring with its carefully prescribed codes of conduct making victory and individual heroism possible within than dangerous, but limited, arena. It is a nightmare vision but so also is the concluding sequence of The Killer is Loose with Wendell Corey’s Poole breaking all acceptable boundaries of male representation and traditional generic villain in a manner combining Kristeva’s abject with a unique film noir representation of the “monstrous feminine.” The boundaries of masculinity are not really as firm as they are supposedly felt to be, and repressed forces are always waiting to take control. Furthermore, Poole is a victim of those oppressive homosocial practices that have dominated American society since the Age of Jackson, as David Greven has analyzed in his perceptive research on American literature and how it relates to Hollywood cinema. Unlike many archetypal characters in nineteenth-century American literature, Poole cannot retreat into his own form of individuality and become a man beyond desire but has suffered victimization by aggressive military homosocial practices in wartime on the receiving ends of verbal humiliation that undermines what little security he feels over his gender role as a male. Being part of the “lonely crowd” in the post-war era, he has entered into a marriage that provided no refuge for his tortured soul, and eventually becomes the victim of a gender implosion where warring forces of institutionally imposed masculinity and repressed forces of femininity collide, making him an Eisenhower-era version of the “monstrous feminine.”9 In his excellent study of American-genre cinema, Greven also notes the dangers of male overinvestment in the figure of a woman who represents the maternal role for the male. After losing his wife, Poole becomes not just a killer but a monstrous figure transgressing fixed gender boundaries fusing male and female characteristics paralleling the manner in which the alien creature in The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) fuses the bodies of the three astronauts it has penetrated during the rocket’s ascent above the Earth. In Poole’s case,

52  t o ny william s his final physical decline, the culmination of his psychical victimization by all the institutions of American society, and the homosocial forces of finance, law enforcement, and the military, lead to the eruption of repressed femininity in a grotesque form. Poole has looked on his wife as more of a maternal figure than equal partner. Quoting Freud, Greven points out that “The . . . man’s longing for maternal love cannot absolve an inescapable fact: what awaits him is the silent Goddess of Death (who) will take him in her arms”10 Though Poole’s thoughts are of vengeance, his actions are wholly motivated by the Death Instinct. He has already killed two people, when he could have easily gained parole, and intuitively knows that should he succeed in his actions, death will be the only result if he is caught, whether by police fire or by the electric chair. The Killer is Loose also has implicit associations with the later Ranown cycle in several ways. Like Anthony Mann’s Westerns, they contain noir traits but ones deeply embedded within the surface of the narrative and the different visual style employed. Despite popular interpretations of the Scott character in these films as a noble hero, deep down he is a very troubled man, more often than not suffering from the traumatic consequences of a previous marital relationship. In Seven Men from Now (1956), Ben Stride pursues the title characters who have killed his wife in a Wells Fargo holdup. As the film unfolds, we learn that he was a former sheriff whose twelve-year tenure came to an end when he lost an election to a newcomer who employed typical politician tactics, such as kissing babies. Too proud to accept the position of deputy sheriff, his wife had to become the breadwinner by working as a clerk in a Wells Fargo office, leading to her death in the robbery. Male pride and stubbornness resulted in this situation and both Poole and Stride indirectly cause the deaths of their loved ones. As Stride says, “A man ought to be able to take care of his woman.” Despite the fact of the implied happy ending at the culmination of Seven Men from Now, there is no real guarantee that any new relationship between Stride and the newly widowed Annie Greer will succeed where previous ones have failed. Likewise, the one married couple we see in The Tall T (1957) is an absurd one, the Mimms, with the wife blinding herself to the defects of her husband as Annie does in Seven Men from Now. Though Pat Brennan looks forward to a “new day” beginning in the romantic conclusion of The Tall T, there is no guarantee that the next one will not be as bad as the one which saw many deaths as well as his professional masculine humiliation of failing to ride the bull at Ten-Forty’s ranch. In Decision at Sundown (1957), it is the bereaved husband who is in denial over the true character of his wife and pursues a vendetta that is both absurd and psychotic. As Jim Kitses cogently remarks, “an earlier, less mature version of the hero has become virtually unbalanced, a dark and tragic figure in Mann style.”11 In the opening shot, Scott appears with several days’ growth of beard, paralleling Poole’s appearance in the final part of The Killer is Loose. When Allison’s

do m e s tic te ns io n an d male h ysteria  53 unarmed partner is shot in the back, he breaks down in a manner indicative of a matador in a bullring when the rules of the game are breached. Though dangerous, the bullfight has its own set of rules and procedures, elements that are absent from the Western and Boetticher’s only foray into the world of film noir. In Ride Lonesome, Brigade is another isolated figure out to avenge the death of his wife when he was absent. Ironically, he threatens to dispose of Billy John (James Best) in the same way that Frank (Lee Van Cleef) had murdered his wife. The final shot of the film, showing Brigade standing before the hanging tree that he has now set on fire, does not suggest any cathartic resolution for the hero but a grim future colored by traumatic memories of the past. Frank’s death is perfunctory and filmed in such a manner as to suggest its redundancy in terms of the darker elements of this narrative. The memory of the past will haunt him for ever. Finally, in Comanche Station, “the abduction of Cody’s wife by the Indians is ten years old; yet the character persists ‘all the time alone, all the time in Comanche country’. In these works, the closest to the original structure of Seven Men from Now, the character is now absurd.”12 When Cody returns the long lost wife to her husband, he discovers that the husband is blind, a metaphorical parallel to his own condition that prevents him recognizing the grim reality of his own plight and moving on rather than continuing on a repetition-compulsive knightly quest that can never be resolved. In its manner, The Killer is Loose provides significant insights into the later celebrated Westerns revealing that André Bazin may be mistaken in regarding the Western as “the American genre par excellence” unless we remember the role of another unique national genre whose style and meaning convey important dark undercurrents within the American Dream and its allied narratives, namely film noir. The Killer is Loose reveals that more than one connection exist between different genres that appear separate but which in reality have much in common.

NOTES  1. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 173.   2. Blake Lucas, “The Killer is Loose,” Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, eds Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, Robert Porfirio (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2010), p. 162   3. Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Film Comment 13.1 (1977): 46–51; Susan White and Homer Pettey, “Anthony Mann,” Film Noir: The Directors, eds Alain Silver and James Ursini (Milwaukee, WI: Limelight Editions, 2012), pp. 278–91.   4. Lucas, op. cit.   5. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1950).

54  t o ny william s  6. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: New York University Presss, 1964).   7. See Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993); and David Greven, Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir and Modern Horror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 57, 83, 97, 120, 134.  8. “Budd Boetticher,” Film Noir Reader 3, eds Robert Porfirio, Alain Silver, and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 2002), pp. 233–4.   9. See David Greven, Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). I express a deep gratitude to the many insights contained in this work and regret that I do not have time to elaborate on how his findings could significantly affect our understanding of both Boetticher’s work in general and the Ranown cycle specifically. 10. See Greven, Representations of Femininity, p. 23. 11. Kitses, p. 178. 12. Ibid., p. 178.

c h apter 4

The Killer is Loose (1956) and the Televisual Dissolution of Film Noir Hugh S. Manon

In t r o d u ct i o n : A F o ggy N o t i o n

I

f one factor sets apart Budd Boetticher’s 1956 film The Killer is Loose from the classic films noirs it both imitates and seeks to revise, it is the film’s overt concern with televisuality. Not only does a television set appear prominently in the film’s tense home-invasion scene, but the final duel between the police and Leon “Foggy” Poole (Wendell Corey) plays out as though the investigators were watching him on a television screen—distant and detached, but nonetheless clearly visible—as his attempt at revenge unfolds in simultaneous real time. The Killer is Loose should be understood as a revisionist film noir, one of a handful of late noirs that explicitly foreground televisuality as a kind of epistemological crisis. In the film, television is both a material technology and a way of seeing, with various scenarios conveying ambivalence about new technology while inviting viewers to grapple with the question of how much knowledge is too much. At the same time, the film can be understood as a generic capstone, a film that reflects back on classic noir and, in distinct ways, illuminates its obsession with the passing medium of newsprint, a longstanding cultural phenomenon whose appeal is rooted in delayed dissemination and readerly speculation as opposed to television’s instantaneity and illusion of completeness. Like numerous films noirs before it, The Killer is Loose provides a tantalizingly perverse inside view of a lone operator as he plans and executes a complex crime—one which the general public fails to discern as its happening. In this way, the film recapitulates an underappreciated, but deeply ingrained, intertextuality in the narratives of classic noir: the fetishization of one medium, newsprint, by another, cinema. It is precisely this popular fixation on the

56  hu g h s . m ano n vagaries of newsprint culture that The Killer is Loose simultaneously honors and ushers out via its equally adamant invocation of the emerging technology of television. In this context, the film’s antagonist—whose nearsightedness earns him the nickname “Foggy”—is a pure metaphor. Though Poole’s sanity is called into question by various characters, the real issue is not whether Poole is psychotic. Instead, the primary question must be: what does his myopic view of the world represent? The answer is that “Foggy” Poole represents culture’s increasing marginalization of isolating, opaque, non-televisual ways of seeing in the era of late noir. Poole is a misfit because his cloudy ­perception—indeed, his very being—is disconnected from other spaces in ways that children of the 1960s find nostalgic and children of the 2000s find virtually incomprehensible. Poole is not unhinged; he is unplugged. At times, his mannerisms are appropriately those of a “nerd” or “square,” to borrow two mid-1950s slang terms conspicuously absent from the film. In other instances, his behavior is that of a rural farmer, a pre-electronic isolate who uses primitive tools and wants his dinner served on time. His prominent spectacles and plodding gait only serve to reaffirm Poole’s (and noir’s) retrenched opposition to a 1950s American culture that increasingly seeks to traverse space rapidly and to behold the outside world instantaneously and without obstacles. Boetticher’s directorial approach follows suit, underscoring the narrative’s simultaneous fixation on past and passing modes of criminal detection, as well as its concern with cutting-edge surveillance technologies that verge on a fantasy of perfect, immediate, televisual transparency. In the film, spaces are: (1) already under surveillance; (2) tenuously connected to the outside via television, telephone and/or radio; or (3) disconnected in a way that feels strangely unnatural and even psychotic. It is especially this third space—the space of uncommunicative disconnection—that makes Boetticher’s approach so remarkable. When we are alone with Poole, what we see is anything but “foggy.” The film’s mise-en-scène is open, airy and in sharp, deep focus, as if to emphasize all the distant things Poole cannot see. In such scenes, Boetticher confronts the essential paradox of the televisual era: that an excess of visual access can be anxiety provoking in its fullness, with culture’s desire to see more and more suddenly saturated by a view that reveals far too much. Boetticher’s film stands as an insightful, perhaps even revelatory, enunciation of the most apt historical context for film noir: the gradual displacement of newsprint by television in 1940s and 1950s American culture. In psychoanalytic terms, this shift in dominant media entails a displacement of the lackfueled speculative fantasy that newsprint inspires, by the anxiety-inspiring simultaneity and overabundance embodied in television. Boetticher’s very late film noir is both an acknowledgment that culture is on the verge of seeing too much and a belated attempt to linger for just a little longer in the half-light of film noir’s newsprint-obsessed milieu. In this context, The Killer is Loose

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   57 may productively be viewed as a meditation on media and, like the many films noirs that precede it, represents a longing for a condition in which the average citizen saw less, heard less, and knew less of the whole truth. This chapter is divided into three sections or phases, corresponding roughly with the film’s three-act structure, with each phase becoming less “foggy” than the one before it: (1) a first phase in which the viewers see things entirely incorrectly—the scene at the building and loan in which Poole acts as a battered would-be hero but, unknown to us, is the heist gang’s “inside man”; (2) a second, more lucid phase in which the viewer sees things correctly but the police and the general public fail to recognize the escaped Poole as he passes by in various disguises; (3) a third phase of excessive clarity in which the viewer sees too much, witnessing a tense police stakeout from every possible angle and is left to wonder why the police fail to make a move and, moreover, why Poole fails to notice that he is being watched. The film centers each of these phases on the appearance of various mid-century communications technologies, delivering scenes that overtly focus on the delivery of knowledge via telephone, radio, newsprint and television, with newsprint ultimately figuring as film noir’s particular fetish. In pitting the innate spatiotemporal limitations of print-based news circulation against the seemingly limitless and immediate access of television, The Killer is Loose depicts a noir world in which televisuality fails at virtually every opportunity. In both its narrative and its form, the film is pointedly anti-televisual, and as a walking metaphor for this perverse technological recalcitrance stands the film’s myopic antagonist, Leon “Foggy” Poole.

Ph a s e O ne : M o r e T h a n M e e t s t h e Ey e As the expository first act of The Killer is Loose commences, we witness a typical day at a modern Los Angeles building and loan office but one that will be suddenly disrupted by a well-orchestrated holdup. We first encounter the members of the heist gang on the street in front of the office. Shot in broad daylight and without music or dialogue, the opening sequence—which allegedly inspired the opening of À bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)— involves a series of surreptitious glances from one shady-looking character to another.1 Beginning with a shot of street signs, the camera establishes that this is a real-world location: the corner of Roxbury Drive and Pico Boulevard. Panning down, we see a man in a grey suit and sunglasses. He looks at his watch, crosses the street and lights a cigarette. A second man, wearing a dark suit and carrying a satchel, sees the first light his cigarette—a pre-arranged signal—and rises from the phone booth where he is sitting. The man with the satchel glances down the street at two other accomplices in a Cadillac sedan

58  hu g h s . m ano n and touches the brim of his hat. The men in the sedan take notice; the driver checks his revolver and pulls the car forward. All the men converge ominously on the building and loan. The purpose of Boetticher’s opening scene is twofold. The viewer is made to recognize that a plan has been carefully orchestrated by this modern-day group of gangsters and, at the same time, is supposed to notice that all this is happening without anyone noticing. The street is full of activity, with numerous passers-by going about their business, yet the actions of the heist gang are so subtle that they escape perception. This theme of public obliviousness continues as we enter the building and loan. Leon Poole is stationed at the teller line, dealing with an apologetic female customer who has missed a loan payment. Following this transaction, a man steps forward, looks curiously at the teller, and then grins and chides Poole for not recognizing him as his former army sergeant, Otto Flanders (John Larch), a character who will become important later in the film. It is at this point that Poole’s nickname of “Foggy” is first introduced, and it is clear from Poole’s sheepish tone that he does not enjoy being called this. A macho bully type, Flanders jokingly recalls Poole’s ineptness as a soldier during their time in the South Pacific, when a second teller calls for Poole’s attention: “Mr. Poole, that isn’t anybody from the bank truck, is it?” Poole turns away from the counter and, for the first time, we see his large spectacles prominently on screen; Poole’s brow is sweaty; he appears nervous from the exchange with Flanders. In a long shot of the back of the room, we see the man with the satchel from the earlier scene, along with a male employee who is retrieving bundles of cash from a small safe. When the manager enters from the back room and tries to sound an alarm, the holdup man draws his revolver; his accomplice, also with a gun, appears at the door. Just as the two are about to exit, in a surprise move, Poole charges heroically at the gangsters. He is summarily knocked unconscious with a revolver, and the men flee the building with the cash and go off in the Cadillac. The irony of the situation is not lost on Flanders. When Poole regains consciousness, Flanders says, “You know something, Foggy? I’ve got to stop kidding you. I take it all back.” The opening sequence of The Killer is Loose is fairly conventional for a crime thriller and would be unworthy of any detailed explication if not for a crucial bit of information that is scrupulously withheld from the viewer until the end of act one: Poole is part of the heist gang. He is the so-called “inside man,” and the blow he takes to the back of the head is the linchpin of the heist gang’s deceptive simulacrum. In effect, everything we have witnessed and automatically presumed to be true about the safe heist has been fundamentally erroneous. Such an arrangement, in which we do not know that we do not know, establishes a tone of skepticism in the film, as if any perceivable event might not be what it appears. This sense of unsuspected criminality, operating

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   59

Figure 4.1  Original 1956 promotional still for The Killer is Loose. Leon “Foggy” Poole regains consciousness and is consoled by his former army sergeant, Otto Flanders.

right under our noses, lies at the very center of film noir’s aura, and is developed in the police procedural details that dominate the remainder of act one. Set in the office of the manager of the building and loan, the scene following the holdup introduces two of the film’s interrelated major themes: the precariousness of the bonds of marriage and the pervasiveness of modern technological connectivity. The employees of the building and loan are questioned by police detective Chris Gillespie (Michael Pate), a uniformed officer named Denny (Alan Hale, Jr.) and the film’s protagonist, detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotton). When Poole enters the room, Sam asks him if he was able to reach his wife by phone concerning the incident. Poole responds, “Yes, I’m afraid she might have heard about it on the radio or something. She worries a lot.” In a rare comical moment, the newly married Sam finds the fact that Poole’s wife worries about him after five years of marriage “very discouraging.” But, while this short exchange of dialogue establishes a tidy parallel between the two married men—a parallel that will later fuel Poole’s psychotic obsession to kill Sam’s wife—the exchange also initiates the film’s thoroughgoing preoccupation with modern communications media. When Poole says “radio or something,” we need to be clear that the word he does not speak—and the one on everyone’s lips in 1956—is television, the medium of connectivity par excellence. What may surprise us, however, is the stance that The Killer is Loose seems to take in light of America’s honeymoon with this new technology.

60  hu g h s . m ano n Far from accepting the rise of television as innately good, the film depicts the material presence of television in average homes but does so as a means to posit a televisual epistemology—a new way of seeing and knowing—that is defined by anxiety rather than by calm satisfaction. The film’s first act comes to a climax in a scene whose plot and mise-en-scène could properly be termed anti-televisual. A sophisticated wiretap operation leads Sam and the police to an apartment on 20th Street where an unidentified member of the heist gang resides. When they arrive, a uniformed officer named Mac (John Beradino) informs the detectives that the suspect was leaving the building “bags packed and everything” when the police first arrived. “He took one look, ducked back inside.” When the detectives proceed upstairs and check the suspect’s apartment door, it is locked; the occupant has barricaded himself inside. When they try to ram the door, Gillespie is shot in the right arm, the bullet having pierced the door. The police fire back and the door opens. They rush in, drop to the floor, and a shadowy figure darts into the room from the left. More shots are fired, and the figure—evidently a woman—falls over a chair and collapses. Gillespie turns on the lights and we see that the crazed gunman is Poole. He stands in the corner, in shock at having witnessed the slaughter of his beloved wife Doris who is dead on the floor before he can reach her. Sam, deeply upset, explains his actions to Poole: “It was an accident. We didn’t know it was her. We couldn’t see.” This point of no return in the narrative, based as it is on shots fired through a closed door, can be understood as the culmination of a minor motif in classic-era film noir. In more than a few classic noirs, we are presented with a character who commits murder by shooting a bullet through a door, calling attention to the boundary separating the known from the supposed. In This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942), the film’s hardboiled demeanor is established early on by a fatal shot through a door courtesy of hit man Philip Raven (Alan Ladd). In Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944), an enemy agent is killed by his sister when she shoots him through a closed door. The room is dark and, for several seconds, all we see is a tiny white spot in the midst of an inky black screen. In Born to Kill (Robert Wise, 1947), the climax comes when Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney) kills Helen Trent (Claire Trevor) with a shot through her bedroom door, a moment foreshadowed by the insane jealous rage that comes over Sam any time a door is closed, locking him out. At the very end of The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952) police detective Walter Brown saves the life of a key grand jury witness by way of a skillfully triangulated shot through the locked door of a Pullman railroad car. Moreover, we need to consider the quintessential B-noir Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) as incorporating a variation on this theme. The film’s famous climax involves a telephone cord that is stretched under an apartment door and into the next room. When violently pulled by protagonist Al Roberts (Tom Neal), the phone cord inadvertently strangles drunken Vera (Ann Savage),

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   61 ironically killing the castrating femme fatale with the very material of placeto-place connectivity. While such scenarios pointedly satisfy the Production Code’s requirement that brutal killing not be shown in detail, the repetition of the through-the-door murder in these films nonetheless underscores film noir’s repudiation of the televisual impulse to see across space. In the scene at Poole’s apartment, The Killer is Loose follows suit, basing the entirety of the film’s conflict on a momentary anti-televisual misperception. By the end of the film’s first act, the viewer has gained a strong sense of the motivations of the film’s three primary characters: Detective Sam Wagner is newly married and now responsible for the death of an innocent woman; Lila Wagner (Rhonda Fleming), Sam’s wife, is worried that her husband’s single-minded commitment to police work is going to get him killed; and Leon “Foggy” Poole is in a state of extreme psychological distress following the killing of his wife. As Poole is being led out of the courtroom after his sentencing, he explicitly threatens retribution. The moment is chilling as Poole, staring blankly at Lila, says, “Someday, Wagner, I’m going to settle with you for it. I’m certainly going to settle with you for it.” At this point, the film leaps forward in time—from 1951 to late 1954—and, during this period, two things happen: first, in narrative terms, “Foggy” Poole becomes increasingly obsessed with the desire to kill Lila, and plans his escape; and second, both in the story world and in real life, American culture comes to embrace television, both as a commodity and as a new way of seeing. It is into this context of newfound televisuality that the myopic Poole returns when he violently escapes from the prison farm. The world he re-enters has changed; it is a world accustomed to seeing more, to seeing what it used to miss, and represents the strangely delayed arrival of television in the United States, along with some of the ways in which television’s slow adoption corresponds with the historical trajectory of film noir.

In t e r m i s s i o n : A B r i e f H i s t o r y of t h e Pa r t Arri v a l o f T e l e v i s i o n Published in the June 13, 1953 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, the novella from which The Killer Is Loose was adapted differs from the film in two major ways: (1) unlike the film, the novella makes no substantial reference to television (it is mentioned only once in passing); and (2) the killer antagonist of the novella is not nicknamed “Foggy.”2 Television’s prominent role in the film version is thus purely an invention of the screenwriter, Harold Medford, and the filmmakers, including director Budd Boetticher. Not only is televisual technology indispensable to the film’s narrative but “fogginess,” understood here as the inability to see distant things clearly, becomes the film’s dominant

62  hu g h s . m ano n conceit. The question then arises: what does this concept of fogginess tell us about noir? The answer becomes evident only when we consider the historical trajectory of film noir—for which The Killer is Loose serves as a kind of reflexive homage—as corresponding precisely with the protracted inception of television in America. Television alone is capable of removing the fogginess of past media, the film wants to say, but this newfound clarity comes at the expense of something else: imaginary speculation based on a lack of knowledge in the present moment. As an example of the mid-century discourse surrounding the televisual collapse of space, consider the following voice-over from the RCA promotional film entitled The Story of Television (1956). Released in the same year as The Killer is Loose, the short recounts early pre-war experiments in television and their seemingly boundless potential: New eyes, new vision for the world. A man could sit at home, yet his eyes could scan the countryside. A bright new era dawning. A new dimension in communications. Distance reduced to microwaves. Walls, barriers, mountains erased. Television: the ultimate triumph in man’s search for sight beyond the range of the human eye.3 Such a passage can be understood in two different ways: either as representing a genuinely unbridled optimism about television; or, as a palliative, protesting too much in order to assuage public anxiety about this new technology. In the 1940s and early 1950s, anxiety about the coming of television is neither a question of seeing too little nor (as today) a question of being deceived by what television shows us. Instead, the problem bears on the possibility of seeing too much: the psychologically unsettling prospect of knowing the absolute simultaneous real truth of what is going on in our absence. Although experimental television transmissions in America date back as far as the Philo T. Farnsworth experiments of 1927, the popular recognition of television as a viable technology does not occur until the late 1930s.4 Signaled by RCA’s broadcast of the first televised presidential address at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and by the hoopla surrounding the RCA television exhibit (including cards handed out to visitors certifying that the bearer “has been televised”), television seemed to be just around the corner.5 With the FCC’s (Federal Communications Commission) final approval of NTSC (National Television System Committee) broadcast standards, commercial television’s official start date was slated for August 1941.6 Accordingly, then, one may plausibly accept the year 1941 as the beginning of television’s part arrival—the approximate date of commencement for television as a popular idea—since it is only much later that television arrives in material fact, and as social and cultural practice. Amazingly, given the premium put on “newness” under consumer capital-

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   63 ism, it was not until the early to mid-1950s that television became an element of daily life for the majority of Americans, as well as an expected object in the sphere of the domestic. The reasons for this delay have less to do with wartime production and rationing, however, than with the Federal Communications Commission’s hesitation on a number of fronts, resulting in the imposition of the so-called “television freeze,” a suspension of new station licensing from September 1948 to April 1952. Though William Boddy suggests that the term “freeze” is something of a misnomer, because at least two of the major networks (NBC and CBS) actually benefited from the so-called “freeze,” there can be no question that the television industry grew little during wartime, and that its post-war growth was nowhere near as vigorous as expected.7 In 1946 only 100,000 receivers were in operation, most of them in New York City, and, by December 1947, this number had increased to only 185,000.8 The May 1948 issue of Fortune magazine boosts this figure to 300,000 in an article entitled “Television, Boom!” and, in doing so, underscores the fact that, however promising, television was far from a nationwide phenomenon: [I]t is probable that 90 per cent of the citizenry has not yet seen a television program. By April there were only about 300,000 television receivers in being, three-fourths of them in the eastern network cities and at least half of them in the New York area alone. This compares with 66 million radio sets in 37 million U.S. homes, virtually saturation. R.C.A. advertises that tele is already within the reach of 40 million Americans. This is highly theoretical. The generally accepted figure is that each tele set has an average of five viewers, which would bring the regular audience to around 1,500,000. Several million other people see programs infrequently in taverns, clubs, stores, and the homes of friends.9 Three separate aspects of this quotation are significant: first, the way in which television is (correctly) positioned in its destiny to achieve market saturation despite its very tentative beginnings; second, the emphasis placed upon television’s uneven development, allowing urban access but nothing outside the “eastern network cities”; and third, the notion that television is, in 1948, accessible but infrequently so, available in public (“in taverns, clubs, stores,” etc.) but not in private. In terms of the history of television, the mid to late 1940s can be understood as the era of the prediction, the forecast, and the prophecy; in other words, this is not the era of arrival—the Fortune article’s predicted “Boom!”—but, instead, the era of anxious anticipation. But if 1941 is roughly the arrival year of the “idea of television,” at what date can we say that American television has made the transition from idea to inception, from prediction to practice? This latter point of distinction is much less clear since, beginning around 1952, with the lifting of the “freeze” and

64  hu g h s . m ano n other legislative events, the mass purchase of television sets increasingly begins to avalanche. Allowing for a certain margin of error, Sterling and Kittross cite a number of statistics that make 1954 or 1955 a reasonable, or at least less arbitrary, date to cite as the year television has arrived. By far, the largest yearly increase in new commercial television stations occurs between 1953 and 1954, from 126 stations to 411, an astounding figure, and more than quadruple the increase of the next highest one-year period.10 The year 1954 also represents the first year when television sets were present in more than half of all American households, with television receiver ownership rising to 64.5 percent in 1955, compared to 0.02 percent in 1946 and only 9 percent in 1950. As a metonym for this transition, NBC’s live 1955 broadcast of Mary Martin in Peter Pan reached an unprecedented seventy million viewers, a moment subsequently recognized as “the largest audience for any single event in history up to that time,” not to mention serving as an impetus for consumers, both before and after the wellpublicized broadcast, to go out and buy new sets.11 Though it is always possible to take exception to specific date parameters, anyone concerned with film noir will immediately recognize what I am calling the span of television’s part arrival—1941 to 1955—as the period most frequently ascribed to the film noir cycle: from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. What should we make of this uncanny correspondence between the rise and fall of film noir and the strange part arrival of television? And, moreover, what is to be gained by correlating the timespan during which “Foggy” Poole is incarcerated with the post-freeze period in which television rapidly becomes a fully fledged national phenomenon? This suggests that, during this protracted interval in which television has arrived conceptually but not in practice, tremendous anxiety is being generated around questions of visuality, concerns not only about seeing and being seen but about seeing too much and too soon. It is this anxiety which noir’s retrenchment in the legacy of newsprint seeks to ward off. Released in 1956, The Killer is Loose has the benefit of being able to look back on the rise and decline of film noir, lucidly acknowledging, via its association of television with anxiety, what noir had really been concerned with all along.

P has e T wo : W i t n e ssi n g T o m or r ow’ s News In what must be considered the most incisive existing analysis of The Killer is Loose, Edward Dimendberg rightly argues that the film “explores [the] new cultural reality of television and its attendant spatial logic.”12 But, whereas Dimendberg provocatively reads the film in terms of urban architecture and a tendency toward spatial disorientation; Boetticher’s late noir may also be read as exploring the new cultural reality of television in relation to the old

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   65 cultural reality of newsprint. Indeed, the film’s spatial logic is defined at least as much by print-based news, and the circulatory logic it entails, as by the logic of television. At times, the film seems to struggle to contain these two mostly oppositional media epistemologies. This tendency is most pronounced in the film’s second act, in which Poole escapes from prison and initiates a remarkable series of missed encounters by donning the most tenuous of disguises. At such moments of tenuously maintained public obliviousness, Poole becomes an icon for deceptive criminality as viewed through the lens of headline news: he is seen, but not identified, only to be recognized too late, after the headlines have had time to circulate. Whereas television delivers an ongoing, simultaneous flow of information, the circulatory mechanisms of newsprint necessarily entail a delayed recognition, and it is this delay—a failure to see the truth until the encounter has passed—that epitomizes “Foggy” Poole’s all-too-easy traversal of suburban Los Angeles. Not only is Poole myopic but, in turn, the public seems blind to his presence, repeatedly failing to identify him as a threat, or in any way at all.13 The film’s second act begins with Poole deciding, seemingly on the spur of the moment, to take advantage of an offer by the guards at the State Honor farm, at which Poole is a parole-ready trustee. One guard (Stanley Adams) needs help unloading a truck full of lettuce crates and offers to let Poole assist, rewarding the well-behaved prisoner with a trip to town and a change of scenery. Poole pleasantly accepts but, once the truck is on its way, Poole kills the guard in a moment of striking brutality by plunging a sharpened hoe blade into his neck. He kicks the guard’s body out of the truck face down, into a dirty irrigation ditch, and then takes the wheel. Proceeding to a nearby farm, Poole summarily kills the farmer (off-screen) with a sickle, absconding with his truck, clothes, and dog. At this point begins the film’s series of oblivious missed encounters, moments at which we recognize a failure by the police and the general public to see a deception that is taking place squarely in front of them. The film’s first oblivious encounter occurs when Poole successfully breaches a police roadblock. Poole is driving a small pickup truck and is dressed in the dead farmer’s dirty work clothes and cap, with his dog on the bench seat next to him. In staging this encounter, Boetticher made the interesting choice not to position a microphone inside the truck. Consequently, as the police check the driver’s license and ask some questions, they, like us, hear only the indecipherable mumblings of a hick farmer who wants to sell them some lettuce. The officers summarily send the man on his way and, after narrowly missing a police cruiser (Poole has removed his glasses), the scene ends with a cut back to police headquarters. Some time has passed and the police chief (Arthur Space) is outraged that the troopers at the checkpoint failed to arrest Poole who was, after all, “right in front of” them. As in the many films noirs

66  hu g h s . m ano n which precede it, the viewer’s knowledge of the actual truth, when compared to that of the unsuspecting characters on-screen, conveys a sense of paradox, the idea that any scene that seems “just normal” may be a simulacrum, a carefully engineered mimesis of normality. In retrospect, the officers’ experience with this provincial farmer mirrors the viewers’ earlier experience when Poole was hit over the head by the holdup man: both encounters entail a perfect non-­recognition of what lies under the surface. Yet it is precisely this nonrecognition that the film ultimately wants us to recognize. The second oblivious encounter of act two takes place when Poole, again sans glasses, purchases a cheap rain slicker at a street-front clothier’s shop. In subsequent scenes, the garment will function both as protection from the rain and as a disguise. Just as Poole leaves the shop, a second man enters to purchase a dress shirt. He obliviously passes by Poole, never looking up from his newspaper whose headline comes prominently into view as he nears the camera: “KILLER POOLE ELUDES ROADBLOCK.” In this image—an ironic missed encounter approximated in one of the film’s promotional stills (Figure 4.2)—The Killer is Loose delivers a provocative variation on one of film noir’s foundational tropes: the notion that the headlines are always wrong. This nostalgia for a newsprint-based engagement with the world around us, in which criminals pass by unnoticed in our daily travels, is precisely the fantasy that noir wants to convey, reasserting the pleasures of armchair speculation as a defense against televisual realization. In other classical Hollywood genres, headlines appear only sporadically on-screen, usually for reasons of narrative economy and/or budget, or simply to signify newsworthiness and hype. In film noir, two aspects of the use of news headlines are distinctive. First, headlines appear on-screen in virtually every film, reminding the viewer of the ontological difference between reading words and watching motion pictures, and thus delivering a perverse homage to a medium that, by all accounts, will soon be rendered obsolete by television. Second, when a news headline fills the screen in noir, it always denotes a news-reading public that fails to receive “the whole story,” the truth behind what they read. That is, when the noir viewer reads a headline, it decodes instantly as false news, information undercut by the behind-the-scenes activities the viewer has already witnessed. No extant scholarly work notes this repetition which I view as a kind of generic admonition to noir’s ideal viewer: Don’t believe the headlines! In treating headlines as misrepresentations, while lending credence to gossipy theories about so-called “perfect crimes,” noir valorizes the individual’s right to speculate, just as they have been doing with news headlines all along (the Lizzie Borden murders, Snyder-Gray case, and Lindbergh kidnapping are touchstones in this regard). The Killer is Loose, however, takes the motif of the misrepresentative headline in an even more aggressive direction: the news-reading everyman is so consumed by the head-

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   67

Figure 4.2  Original 1956 promotional still for The Killer is Loose. Unlike the stark juxtaposition we see in the still, the actual scene from the film has Poole leaving the shop just before the newspaper-reading customer walks in.

lines that he fails to see in an even minimally televisual way. His own real life has intersected with the news story and the killer is right in front of him. The film’s third oblivious encounter is more abstract and layered than the first two but equally essential to the film’s anti-televisual agenda. The scene is a home invasion, taking its cues from earlier films noirs such as He Ran All the Way (John Berry, 1951), Beware, My Lovely (Harry Horner, 1952), and The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955), in which various fugitives, gangsters and psychopaths invade nice neighborhood homes. The scene at the Flanders residence is the fulcrum of the film’s plot, and is actor Wendell Corey’s tour de force performance, with Poole’s bleak psychology amply evident. Pushing past Grace Flanders (Dee J. Thompson) and into her kitchen, Poole threatens the homemaker’s life if she tries to escape or signal the neighbors. He announces his identity by saying to her: “Don’t you read the newspapers— today’s paper—turn on your television set or listen to the radio?” After he finished the meal, Grace nervously prepares for him, Poole settles in to watching a television report of the “decoy” investigation in the wrong part of town, a simulacrum staged by the police just for him. When Otto walks in with the newspaper, excited to tell his wife about the intrigue involving his former army mate Poole, the story is already on the television. “Oh, you’ve got it on!” Otto exclaims. “They haven’t caught him?

68  hu g h s . m ano n Where’s this going on, Grace?” Oblivious both to Poole’s presence behind a wall partition and to his wife’s visible distress, Otto initially fails to recognize what is right in front of him: the news story of the day has teleported into his own kitchen. The scene may seem clichéd and somewhat tame by modern standards but, for mid-1950s audiences, this level of domestic anxiety must have been extremely tense, perhaps comparable to the terrifying home invasion scenario that unfolds in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997). Following Poole’s orders, Grace remains silent, with her face tellingly framed by crystal decanters and fragile glass knick-knacks on a shelf. It is only when Otto looks up at a wall mirror—whose rounded corners notably mimic the shape of a television screen—that a disturbing clarity sets in: Poole is right here, seated at the kitchen table pointing a .357 magnum at Grace. “Turn it off, Otto,” Poole says matter of factly, an emblematic statement that underscores his status as a retrogressive, anti-televisual primitive, especially in contrast to the Flanders with their nice modern kitchen and new television. Regarding the film’s various references to television, Edward Dimendberg makes a crucial assertion: “In contrast with the stereotypical depiction of the suburban home as a sanctuary and isolationist refuge, The Killer Is Loose presents it as infiltrated by violence and trauma, a breakdown of television’s proleptic force to ward off anxiety by allowing spectators to maintain their distance from its sources.”14 Dimendberg’s view depends on an understanding of the concept of anxiety in specifically psychoanalytic terms. In psychoanalysis, anxiety is not the same as fear. Rather, anxiety involves an uncanny “too-muchness,” a surplus of what we think we want, a troubling nearness of the object/ cause of desire. In the context of newsprint, television can be viewed as delivering exactly this sort of excess: an anxiety-provoking suffusion of knowledge about what is going on next door, or across town, in the simultaneous present. Poole’s sudden appearance—seemingly out of nowhere and in an unremarkable suburban home—perfectly epitomizes the televisual aspect of noir anxiety. In the neo-Freudian account of the human subject offered by Jacques Lacan, anxiety figures not as lack (that is, the object of desire is missing) but, instead, as a state in which lack itself is lacking. The crucial text for understanding the psychoanalytic notion of anxiety is, of course, Lacan’s Seminar X: On Anxiety: Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap. [. . .] The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while . . .15

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   69 Drawing upon this Lacanian conception of anxiety as a lack of lack itself, as well as more recent work by Slavoj Žižek, during the period from 1941 to 1955 American culture undergoes such a perturbation, anticipating on the horizon, but not yet realizing, a state in which seeing across boundaries, in the simultaneous present, will supplant the fantasy-inspiring gaps upon which newsprint has thrived for centuries. Television’s pledge, articulated by way of the very media it is positioned to eradicate, equates precisely with what Žižek calls the “overproximity of the object-cause of desire.”16 Television’s most resounding implication, prevalent throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, is that very soon, for the first time ever, it will be possible to be in two places at once. Albeit highly metaphorical, this phrase perfectly encapsulates the seemingly impossible, yet technologically imminent possibility of a here-and-there double vision.17 The Killer Is Loose renders this anxiety literal by teleporting the killer Poole into the kitchen of a couple who would otherwise be watching news accounts of his manhunt on television. Strategically assuming his former role as Poole’s domineering sergeant, Flanders riles Poole by making it clear who is the stronger man physically. “Turn your head,” Flanders says, “or take your eyes off me for one second. That’s all I’d need.” Poole’s response to this challenge is a horrific close-range gunshot in which Flanders is killed and the milk bottle he is holding explodes all over his suit. Grace Flanders collapses unconscious to the floor. The aftermath is a classic crime scene, the kind seen on the front page of newspapers and in detective magazines of the 1940s and 1950s: bodies strewn on the floor in awkward positions, milk and shards of glass everywhere, emptied plates on the kitchen table, and so on. Taken together, these sketchy bits of evidence will help to convey the killer’s motives to police and the news-reading public. The scene concludes when Foggy grabs Grace’s pocketbook and plaid raincoat and exits. For all the film’s complex surveillance, high-tech circulation of information to the public, and deceptive manipulation of the media, Poole’s entire gambit comes down to a change of raincoats and a plodding walk down the Wagners’ street to kill Lila.

Ph a s e T hr e e — S t a ki n g O ut T e l ev isu a l An x iet y The material practice of television viewership—actual viewers interacting with actual television sets—constitutes a running gag in a number of late films noirs, poking fun at a new medium, television, from the point of view of an old one, newsprint. In Cause for Alarm (Tay Garnett, 1951), a husband frames a suburban housewife for his own death. Expressing concern about the unseen husband, a young neighbor boy delivers a gift for him—a little plastic toy television. In The Glass Web (Jack Arnold, 1953), the detail-obsessed

70  hu g h s . m ano n researcher for a television show called “Crime of the Week” himself commits a murder, and his scheme is revealed when the televised recreation of that murder is “too perfect.” Suddenly (Lewis Allen, 1954) involves a home invasion in which three hired gunmen attempt to assassinate the United States president from the vantage point of a normal-seeming house across from a train station; one gunman is electrocuted when one of his captives, a television repair man, deliberately short-circuits the television set to which the sniper rifle is anchored. In each of these cases, television is both exploited as a form of cultural currency and invoked ironically in the context of an unseen, very private criminal conspiracy. The Killer is Loose contains a similar “inside joke”: Detective Gillespie’s young son Bobby (uncredited) is scolded by his mother for sitting too close to the television and for having it on too loud. He is watching the coverage of the Poole manhunt when this happens. The message seems to be that, while the older generation of the Wagners and the Gillespies are just now coming to terms with television, the younger generation is already getting too much of it, an anxiety metaphorically condensed in the image of Bobby’s forward-leaning overproximity to the screen. The scene with Bobby forms a bridge to act three, in which Sam Wagner actuates his strategy to trap Poole via his own non-knowledge of the cops’ knowledge of Poole’s real motive, to kill Lila. Having fabricated a false news story about an active police search in another part of town, Sam anticipates that Poole will take the bait and seek out Lila at her home. The key to this ruse is that the street on which the Wagners live must appear undisturbed by any police presence. Sam makes the case to his superiors: “Now suppose . . . suppose instead of a cops’ convention out there, everything’s normal. Me coming to work and going home; at least he’ll know I’m there. He’ll know he can settle for me if he can’t find Lila.” From a policing standpoint, this is a classically noir approach: the police set out to defeat an ingeniously deceptive criminal by staging a simulacrum of their own, one in which everything appears normal. Sam will serve as the bait, “playing straight,” and Chris Gillespie will “run the stakeout for him—call the signals and so on” via telephone and radio. This theme of engineered normalcy is most evident in a radio exchange in which a great deal of dialogue is focused on the innocuous passing by of a teenage neighbor of the Wagners. Denny and Detective Betz (William Hudson) apprise Sam and Chris of what they see. denny (on radio): Hold it boys. I’ve got somebody. Walking fast. Tall. Lean. It’s a teenager. Check him out. betz (on radio, to Sam): Check. He’s cutting across on your side. He’s about sixteen. He’s got a dog with him. sam (tensely): What kind of a dog? betz: Sam—this is just a dog.

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   71 chris (on radio, to Sam): Turning in two doors down from you. sam: That’s the Flanagan kid. chris: We got a report on that Holly Road address. Guy’s name is Otto Flanders—used to know Poole from the army. Now, we figure that Poole could be there. A dozen of the boys should be covering it by now. Just sit tight, and maybe we can turn this neighborhood of yours back to the kids and the dogs. The upshot of this paranoid exchange is that Poole’s unknown whereabouts have upset the normally one-to-one relationship between perception and how things really are. With the arrival of the undetectable noir criminal, we get a world in which everything must be suspected precisely because nothing appears suspicious. In place of a brash, machine gun-wielding gangster, we get an average-looking resident out for a stroll. In place of a visible police presence, we get hidden surveillance from all angles, coordinated via radio and telephone. The most intense scene in Los Angeles has been made to look utterly banal in the eyes of any passer-by. This is film noir’s iconic scene of unsuspicion, a scene that average citizens do not encounter as a present trouble spot but will surely talk about the next day once the morning newspaper has arrived. Tomorrow, the noir crime will be news but, in the simultaneous present, what one sees is a big nothing. When Poole finally arrives on the scene, he walks down the Wagners’ street at great length, while the police watch him in a non-interventional (that is, passive and observational) manner that uncannily recapitulates the way one watches television. Two elements must be stressed in this regard: first, the police view everything from across the street and report back via radio to Sam who, despite being in charge, remains a passive observer in his own living room; and second, despite the fact that the police (some of whom are in uniform) are ostensibly never more than 100 feet away from the action, and not well concealed in the shadows of various homes’ garages, none of the many people who walk down the street ever notices that the police are watching. The scene is handled masterfully by Boetticher, and in a way that makes a clear point: if a police manhunt has become a spectacle one watches, rather than an activity in which one physically intervenes, then television has surely arrived in full. The results of this new way of seeing are unsettling, and even terrifying. If the film’s generic status would best be described as a noir police procedural, it is remarkable how little astute detective work the cops perform in the film’s closing minutes. Officer Denny notes a figure approaching: “Woman. Tall. Plaid raincoat. Check her out.” This is Poole, now disguised as a woman, wearing Grace Flanders’s raincoat and with his pants’ legs pulled up. Yet, to the viewer, the stalker is so obviously Poole that we wonder why the police

72  hu g h s . m ano n cannot see what is right in front of their eyes. What should we make of this failure to recognize the obvious? And, moreover, what of Poole’s failure to see the police? In an earlier scene involving a police briefing, it is stated that Poole “can’t see across the street” without his glasses but, in the third act, he wears them at all times. In failing to notice that he is being scrutinized by a whole host of interested viewers across the way, in a structural sense, Poole fails to see that he is “on television.” Premising his deceptive act on the epistemological boundaries of a dying medium, he plays the gambit of headline news and, in doing so, loses the battle to televisual simultaneity. The very idea that he could be viewed televisually—that he could be seen across space in simultaneous time—never occurs to Foggy. This is precisely why the film’s once-tense climax tends to be laugh inducing, even a bit surreal, for today’s viewers. We wish Foggy would turn to face the houses across from him, suddenly becoming aware of the numerous law-enforcement officers whose gazes are trained on his every move but, instead, he just plods along as if no one could possibly recognize him or his murderous plan until the next day’s early edition.

C o ncl u s i o n : “ 3 1 5 2 ” Following the gun battle that ends the film’s climactic sequence—with Poole expectedly dying in a hail of bullets and Lila narrowly escaping his wrath—the film delivers a brief denouement in the form of a high-angle shot of the Wagners’ suburban front yard. As the camera cranes upward, it conveys the film’s very last signifying elements: Poole lying in a crumpled “crime scene style” death pose on the lawn, police of various ranks descending on the yard from all directions, and Lila and Sam embracing as they turn and enter their home. But the shot contains one other notable element as well: the house number “3152” plainly visible next to the Wagners’ front door. The appearance of this actual west Los Angeles house number is a residue of the shot-on-location approach evident in many of the film’s exterior scenes.18 As such, the iconography of this extended shot—with a dead body situated under an address number—will probably escape most twenty-first-century viewers, whose frame of reference does not include the tendency in mid-century newspaper and tabloid photographs luridly to diagram “the exact spot” where the killing took place. Such surplus address numbers and place names are everywhere in film noir, and The Killer is Loose is no different. By peppering its various settings with a plethora of street names and address numbers—bits of information which the viewer need not commit to memory because they will never be seen or heard again—the film works to dissolve the commonplace distinction between fictional crime scenes and their real-world counterparts. Such non-signifying toponymy comprises a triple anchor linking the fictional crimes depicted on-screen, the real

t he te le vis ual d is s o lution of film n oir   73 world of the viewer outside the theater, and the phenomenon of headline news in which identificatory names and numbers are used both as a matter of convention (that is, “John V. Smith of 1421 Broadway”) and as a defense against libel. A crucial goal of noir, and one of its auratic resonances, is repeatedly to remind viewers that the ordinary location one passes through in day-to-day travels could be the focus of tomorrow’s lead story. Beyond their establishment of a ground level of realism, noir’s polynomial excesses contribute to a sort of paranoid cartography within the fiction, calling attention to the world in all its cellular sideby-sideness, while conveying an ominous aura of potential newsworthiness upon any namable, or numberable, real-world coordinate. Dimendberg notes that The Killer is Loose is set in Los Angeles but shows little evidence of that fact.19 What the film does present is markers of place for their own sake—street names (“Holly Road,” where the Flanders live), business names (“PubliKredit Loans” where Poole worked) and address numbers (“3152,” and the “20” on Poole’s bullet-riddled apartment door)—none of which we recognize, and which thus come to stand for the specificity of place but in a generalizing way. Such markers exists to say this could be happening right next door to you, dear viewer, and in doing so resound with the luridly local appeal of front-page news. Throughout the film, Poole walks with an awkward limp; Boetticher stresses his physicality in relation to the space around him. Like the lettuce farmer he impersonates, there is nothing superficial about his relation to the physical world. He does not blithely traverse the landscape of Los Angeles and its surroundings like so many commuters do; rather, he palpably inhabits it, is close to it. But Poole’s blunt physicality and simplistic disguises are not just a quirk of character; they are implicitly tied to the circulatory routines of newsprint—a medium which American culture at mid century is leaving behind, in a broad conceptual sense, just as it left behind walking and riding for driving and flying in the early twentieth century. Prior to arriving at the Wagners, Poole briefly puts on his glasses to see a street sign, then he takes them off again. In an earlier scene, he had paused to stare at the Flanders’ house number before proceeding to their back door. His vision problem gives these encounters extra pause, and thus extra weight. In the context of lurid newspaper headlines—ever the source of breakfasttable speculation by average citizens—Poole’s myopic caesura must be understood as an anti-televisual gazing at the tangible localities that comprise a print-based crime story. With a limited view of his surroundings, yet viewed from all angles, the Poole we see at the film’s climax is a touchstone of late noir. Walking mechanically past house number after house number, just as we imagine the paperboy will do in the morning, “Foggy” Poole is a worthy figure through which to usher out American film noir’s classic phase, one who marks the end of America’s fifteen-year slow dissolve from the once-dominant medium of newsprint to the culture of televisuality that would replace it.

74  hu g h s . m ano n Since his imprisonment, Poole has been operating under a pre-televisual set of assumptions, deceiving a public eye that fails to see anything beyond the surface. As such, he is both an emblem of noir criminality and an indicator that, by 1956, such deception has become old news.

NOTES   1. Peter Harcourt, “Sites of Citation,” in The New Brick Reader, ed. Tara Quinn (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2013).   2. In the novella from which the film is adapted, Poole is never called “Foggy.” Instead, his nickname from his military days is “Fat Boy.” John Hawkins and Ward Hawkins, “The Killer is Loose,” The Saturday Evening Post, June 13, 1953, p. 56.   3. William J. Ganz Company, Inc., The Story of Television (1956), http://archive.org/ details/Story_of_Television_The; accessed August 17, 2015.   4. Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth, 1978), p. 46.   5. “Some more early TV memorabilia,” The Kisseloff Collection blog, last modified October 19, 2009, http://thekisseloffcollection.com/wordpress/KC/?p=27; accessed August 17, 2015.  6. William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 34.   7. Ibid., p. 51.   8. Ibid., pp. 46–7. Other sources suggest that these figures are somewhat exaggerated. Sterling and Kittross report only eight thousand sets in operation in 1946, fourteen thousand in 1947, and 172,000 in 1948 (657). Regardless of the specific figures, however, sources agree that post-war television broadcasting was limited to the New York metropolitan area.  9. “Television, Boom!,” Fortune, May 1948, p. 79. 10. Sterling and Kittross, p. 632. 11. Ibid., pp. 342–3. 12. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 242. 13. In this sense, he is akin to the pod people in the noir-infused science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), a film released exactly one month prior to The Killer is Loose. 14. Dimendberg, p. 244. 15. Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), pp. 53–4. 16. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 120. Italics in original. 17. A 1939 article in Collier’s magazine captures perfectly this sense of pre-televisual anxiety: “No one is going to see you or your wife in the bathtub. We might as well get this straight right away because so much has been said about television that people are afraid they will see too much.” Denver Lindley, “Before Your Very Eyes,” Collier’s, March 14, 1939, 12. 18. Although the specific street name is not mentioned in the scene, it can be discerned elsewhere in a passing shot of a street sign. The house is at 3152 Haddington Drive in west Los Angeles. 19. Dimendberg, p. 242.

c h apter 5

Adventures on the Small Screen: Boetticher, Warner Bros., and Maverick David J. Hogan

B

udd Boetticher’s 1957 involvement with Warner Bros., the ABC television network, and the first three episodes of the Western series Maverick grew out of one of the great push–pull stories of Hollywood business during the 1950s: movie studios’ simultaneous loathing for, and attraction to, television. With a landmark 1948 ruling (U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, et al.), the United States Supreme Court forced Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, RKO, MGM, and Warner Bros. to divest themselves of the theater chains that guaranteed profitable exhibition of their products. In addition, the industry’s socalled mini-majors, Universal and Columbia, had to join the others and cease the practice of block booking by which theater chains were obligated to accept set numbers of a studio’s films, and screen them for predetermined periods.1 The court’s decision ended the studios’ vertically integrated—and ­monopolistic—business model that gave absolute control of production, distribution, and exhibition. Henceforth, major studios would be obligated to negotiate exhibition on a film-by-film basis. This change unlocked screens from guaranteed bookings that ate up weeks and months of every booking year. The small studios—Disney, Republic, Monogram/Allied Artists, and EagleLion—benefited. Independent producers got the exhibition foothold they needed to survive, with opportunities to find bookings in big-capacity downtown houses instead of scrabbling for screen space in small urban grind houses, neighborhood theaters, “hardtop” venues located in the sticks, and drive-ins. Simultaneous with the Supreme Court decision was the changing nature of American moviegoing. In 1946, 61 percent of Americans took themselves to the movies more than once a month. By 1955, the figure had plummeted to 26 percent.2 Even as postwar inflation forced studios to spend more money than before to make and market movies, everyday citizens felt obliged to limit

76  d a v i d j . ho gan ­ iscretionary spending. Box office receipts slid further. Inflation eventually d eased but American entertainment habits seemed to have undergone permanent change. Television was free. You didn’t have to dress up to enjoy it, and with four networks, entertainment choices were plentiful. As is well known, the big Hollywood studios fought back with spectacle and technical innovation. Studio executives became preoccupied with biblical and other large-canvas historical films, and trotted out CinemaScope, VistaVision, Cinerama, 3-D, and stereophonic sound. Many individual pictures employing these innovations were profitable but, because the processes were expensive to develop and implement, overall studio profits dipped precariously.3 Income had to be generated from somewhere.

Y o u th W i l l b e S e r v e d As increasing numbers of adults stayed home to watch television, the American movie demographic shifted to the young. In particular, films designed for teenagers and very young adults reduced genres and audience expectations to formulaic, rigidly codified styles and structures. New stars were younger than before, or played younger than their true ages. The villains in so-called teenpics4 were usually middle-aged, and thus perfidious. Scripts became linear, comfortingly predictable, and purposely unreflective. Many filmmakers abandoned subtlety and nuance. In the end, the purpose of the new-style movies was to give undiscriminating audiences precisely what they expected and desired. These formulas translated, almost by necessity, to television production where single advertisers sponsored many shows and helped dictate content. Networks and show runners generally avoided “offensive” or challenging content. Broadcast schedules demanded that harried writers crank out scripts like sausages, and shoots of one-hour television dramas began and wrapped within the week; thirty-minute programs were lensed even faster. Programs of high quality, with ambivalent characters and unexpected story outcomes, were rare. Discerning viewers found Medic, Playhouse 90, and (a bit later) Route 66 and Naked City. But those gems were buried beneath shows designed to fulfill audiences’ simplest desires: Soldiers of Fortune and Gangbusters; The Cisco Kid and The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu; Whirlybirds and Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion. In his important 1997 book, American Visions, art critic Robert Hughes accurately linked television programming of the 1950s to the wishes of advertisers, and advertising to content, a mash-up that Hughes called “the imperatives of the market.” He noted how television weakened regionalism as it set about creating an American “monoculture.” Hughes elaborated: “The rapid

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   77 expansion of an American mass culture meant that more Americans were required—by their peers, their authorities, their media—to hold the same values and symbols in common and not deviate from them.”5

Ch a l l e ng e s f o r W a r n e r B r o s . a n d ABC-TV Warner Bros. entered television production because of economic necessity. Slack box office encouraged the studio to shave expenses. As early as 1947–8, Warner began to cut loose its longtime contract stars; George Raft and Ann Sheridan were early casualties. Other, bigger stars, the likes of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and John Garfield, departed from Warner voluntarily to set up their own production companies and control projects and profits. During a particularly bad period in 1951, thirty-three of thirty-four Warner Bros. staff writers got layoff notices in a single week. The movie business was contracting but television continued to grow. During 1945–6, the United States had a mere six television stations, all of them but one (Schenectady) located in major cities: New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Those six stations broadcast to seven thousand receivers in a nation of 140 million people.6 By the end of 1948, more than thirty stations operated across the United States. During 1948–52, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) froze issuance of new station licenses as it established rules for broadcast frequency. The agency set aside twelve stations for the VHF band (all twelve of which were already in operation) and seventy stations for the UHF band. The two dominant television networks, NBC and CBS, accepted the ruling with equanimity but tiny DuMont and ABC (created by breaking from NBC’s “Blue” network) had to scramble for desirable frequencies. Because virtually no television receivers of the day were manufactured with provision for UHF (federal legislation of 1962 changed that), ABC and DuMont had far fewer broadcast options than the two goliaths. ABC struggled, and did not begin to come into its own as a competitive broadcast force until the infusion of money and talent that came in a 1953 merger with the United Paramount Theaters (UPT) chain. Two years later, the demise of the long-struggling DuMont network opened some desirable frequencies to ABC. Though still the second runner-up during the 1955–6 broadcast season, ABC nevertheless mounted some hit shows: Topper, Wyatt Earp, Make Room for Daddy, Disneyland, The Lone Ranger, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and The Lawrence Welk Show.7

78  d a v i d j . ho gan

T he S t u d i os’ R a c e f o r V i e w e r s The television activities of other entities helped spur Jack Warner into television production. Columbia Pictures established its Screen Gems televisiondistribution arm in 1948–9. The studio’s move into television production came early, with Ford Television Theater in 1948. During its first decade of existence, Screen Gems produced (for very little money) a long list of successful shows that included Burns and Allen, Father Knows Best, Art Linkletter’s House Party, Captain Midnight, and the aforementioned Rin Tin Tin. In 1949, 20th Century-Fox established its television subsidiary, to manage distribution of Fox movies to the small screen. The unit began to produce original shows in 1955, and scored with My Friend Flicka, Broken Arrow, and How to Marry a Millionaire. On the Hal Roach lot, a protracted struggle to succeed with feature films (intended to supersede the studio’s two-reel comedy shorts) left Hal Roach and Hal Roach, Jr. depleted. To survive, they began to build an aggressive television-production slate. A 1950 partnership with Magnavox resulted in a pair of successful made-for-television movies that helped finance regular series production of My Little Margie, Racket Squad, The Stu Erwin Show, and Public Defender. Studio-facility-lease deals with independent television producers brought Amos and Andy, The Life of Riley, and others on to the Roach lot. MCA/Universal spun off Revue Studios in 1952. Between 1953 and 1957, Revue developed many hit series: City Detective (which set a record in 1953 for local-station syndication buys), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, General Electric Theater, State Trooper, M Squad, Love that Bob (The Bob Cummings Show), Wagon Train, Leave it to Beaver, and many others. Revue became a longlived television juggernaut (later known as Universal Television) that brought Universal immense profit. Personality-based television-production companies, notably Gene Autry’s Flying A Productions and Desi Arnaz and Lucile Ball’s Desilu, began to flourish. In 1952, Dick Powell, Ida Lupino, David Niven, and Charles Boyer established Four Star Productions. Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater, one of many early Four Star successes, aired pilots that led to a pair of successful Westerns, Trackdown and The Rifleman. In the face of all this profitable activity by others, Jack Warner was willing to hear tag-team entreaties from Benny Kalmanson, the studio’s East Coast Executive Vice President, and Leonard Goldenson, a former Paramount executive who was chairman of ABC. Warner Bros. had the facilities and talent required for episodic television; ABC was desperate for slick, commercial programming. Jack Warner (who did not allow Mrs Warner to watch television) relented, and approved the establishment of Warner Bros. Television in 1955. In the late summer of 1955, the first Warner TV show, Warner Brothers

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   79 Presents, premiered on ABC. Host Gig Young presented three rotating series, each based on Warner properties: Cheyenne, Casablanca, and King’s Row. Because of an overabundance of television Westerns, Warner Bros. expected Cheyenne to fail but, as things developed, Casablanca and King’s Row were the ones that perished. Cheyenne hung on and, even better, looked like it had legs. This success was the beginning of the Warner television machine, and the great profitability, that Jack Warner had feared for so long.8

Th e W a r ne r F o r mul a Cheyenne’s success led to two more Warner Bros. Westerns, Sugarfoot and Bronco; others, including Colt .45 and the superior Lawman, came a year or two later. All three followed a formula crafted by Warner Television executive producer William T. Orr and producer Roy Huggins: handsome loner rides into town, meets good-looking woman, finds trouble, romances woman, cleans up trouble, tells woman goodbye, and then rides on. (Orr and Huggins established an alternative formula, for the Warner crime show 77 Sunset Strip and its follow-ons, Hawaiian Eye, Bourbon Street Beat, Surfside 6, and The Roaring 20’s [sic]: Three handsome guys and their beautiful, slightly kooky gal pal find romance and solve crimes in exotic locations, that is, process screens and the Warner lot in Burbank).9 A story editor and rewrite man as well as executive producer, Orr kept himself deeply involved with the development and execution of Warner shows. He was mindful of budgets, of course, and approved the free exchange of Warner Bros. television scripts among Warner story editors. The practice (which was particularly handy during a six-month writers’ strike in 1959) allowed quick, superficial rewrites that turned an episode of Warner Bros. series A into a (seemingly) fresh episode of Warner Bros. series B. Western-toWestern, and crime-to-crime, exchanges were most common but cross-genre rewriting happened, too. Sometimes, scripts of vintage Warner movies were recycled.10 A particularly important aspect of the studio’s dedication to cost cutting was Jack Warner’s fondness for good-looking youngsters who signed sevenyear contracts and got paid very little. In return, Warner Bros. put them on television and gave them on-camera experience that might incidentally help them improve their acting. (Recall Troy Donahue, Robert Conrad, Clint Walker, Connie Stevens, Van Williams, Will Hutchins, Diane McBain, Poncie Ponce, et al.) Longtime Warner contract director Richard L. Bare explained to historian Jeff Kisseloff, “Warner Brothers wouldn’t pay any money to anybody that had any clout, so you had people who were young and eager.” William T. Orr told Kisseloff, “We wanted attractive people with good ­personalities.

80  d a v i d j . ho gan They didn’t have to be good actors. That wasn’t what was selling our shows.”11 Warner’s young stars were run ragged not just on the sets but with personal appearances, stage-managed interviews, recording sessions for LPs issued by Warner Bros. Records, and tedious photo shoots that hijacked their images for tie-in comic books, model-car kits, paper dolls, coloring books, board games, and other licensed merchandise. Naturally, there was no extra pay for this ancillary activity.

T he S a m e , O n l y D i f f e r e n t Warner television directors were longtime television veterans or B-picture specialists with many years in the business, emphasis on business. They knew how to shoot fast and keep the boom mike out of the frame. To expose as little film as possible, directors rehearsed their casts once, perhaps twice, and then shot, just once, if they could manage it. Camera coverage was still old-style Hollywood with discrete scenes constructed from long shot, medium shot, and close-ups (including over-the-shoulder shots for dialogue exchanges). In 1955, longtime Warner contract director Richard L. Bare was paid $750 to direct the Cheyenne pilot. A director as experienced as Bare could shoot an hour pilot in about a week and, for the time devoted to the project, then, $750 was a healthy wage. Of course, there were many more television directors than jobs, and not everyone worked every week. The $750 fee, then, was actually very modest, particularly in light of the considerable amounts of money the studio pulled in from sales of commercial time, licensing, and anticipated revenue from reruns. Scriptwriters were mainly television specialists who understood the peculiar construction of television drama which mandated consistent behavior from the protagonist, a grabber opening, and a transparently constructed dramatic peak before each commercial break.12 The writers had more latitude when they fashioned roles for guest stars but even those characters were almost invariably stock and set loose in stock situations: a pillar of the community murders his wife and then prepares to dispose of a local spinster who knows too much; an aging sheriff is more afraid of his secret past than the imminent arrival of vengeful young guns; a meek little man who kills a gunfighter marshals his inner resources to deal with the subsequent parade of trigger-happy challengers; a tough rancher is ashamed of his bullied younger brother but experiences a change of heart when the kid shows guts during a bloody confrontation with a rival ranch; a dewy beauty projects innocence that masks a devious nature (alternatively, the presumed deviousness doesn’t exist at all and is just a big misunderstanding). In “The

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   81 Bounty Killers,” for instance, a 1955 episode of Cheyenne, Cheyenne accepts a job as a deputy, only to learn that the marshal is a bounty hunter who kills without provocation. And in the 1957 “Dead Reckoning” episode of Colt .45, Chris Colt’s scheme to prevent a senator’s assassination by posing as the hired gunman hits a snag when the real killer shows up and takes Colt hostage. Viewers of particular shows became fans because they liked what they saw in early episodes. All subsequent episodes were obligated to provide what fans anticipated.

Tak e t he B um O ut o f B umga r ner Jim Bumgarner—famous later as James Garner—was an athletic young Oklahoman who had laid carpet, lived through perilous combat in Korea, and dropped out of college. After coming to Los Angeles in 1953, he associated himself with an imaginative agent–producer named Paul Gregory, who gave Bumgarner a silent role as a naval judge in Gregory’s Broadway production of The Caine Mutiny. The production was a massive hit. In Garner’s 2011 autobiography, The Garner Files, the actor recalled that, although he did not speak on stage, he listened every night, carefully observing Henry Fonda, John Hodiak, and (especially) Lloyd Nolan, who played Queeg. Later, Charles Laughton directed the road-company Caine Mutiny. Bumgarner reprised his role as the silent judge. Laughton mentored Garner and told him not to be afraid of being temporarily inadequate. John Crawford, a young cast member with movie experience, warmed to Garner and gave him a valuable tip: “Don’t be afraid of the camera. Dominate it, because it’s your audience.” Garner’s first appearance on film was opposite young Ellen McRae (later Ellen Burstyn) in a commercial for Winston cigarettes. Not long after, Warner director Richard L. Bare spotted Garner in a bar and encouraged him to visit Warner Bros. Garner got in the studio door and had bits in a few Warner television shows. While looking at dailies early in the run of Cheyenne, Jack Warner saw an unfamiliar face. During an interview for The Box, a 1995 oral history of television, Bare recalled that Warner said, “Who’s that?” bare: Jim Bumgarner. warner: Take the bum out and give him a seven-year contract. Small film roles in Toward the Unknown, The Girl He Left Behind, and ­Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (directed by Bare) brought Garner the notice that vaulted him to a good supporting part as Marlon Brando’s sidekick in a major Warner production, Sayonara. Because Garner’s Warner contract did not

82  d a v i d j . ho gan ­ ifferentiate between movie and television assignments, he earned a flat $350 a d week.

C o o l U nd e r P r e s s ur e Big-screen B-Westerns began to die in the late 1940s but Broken Arrow, Winchester ’73, and The Gunfighter, so-called adult Westerns released in 1950, perpetuated and elevated the genre.13 As described elsewhere in this book, much of Budd Boetticher’s critical reputation rests on intelligent, ambivalent Western films he made, on two-week schedules, between 1956 and 1960. He benefited from the industry’s shift to adult Westerns but he also demonstrated his ability to startle audiences and force them to question their notions of what a Western was. The first of the Boetticher–Randolph Scott–Burt Kennedy Westerns, Seven Men from Now (produced by the “B” unit of John Wayne’s Batjac Productions for release by Warner Bros.) opened in August 1956, months before the Maverick assignment came Boetticher’s way. The film was taut and intelligent, and received somewhat more critical attention than typical B-plus Westerns.14 Boetticher followed Seven Men from Now with another Western written by Burt Kennedy for Randolph Scott, The Tall T, a Columbia release that opened in April 1957, a month or two before Boetticher shot the Maverick pilot. By now, Boetticher had fifteen years’ experience behind the camera. His work improved steadily during that time and elevated him from the B ranks to handsome B-plus productions. He had directed twenty-four theatrical films encompassing psychological thrillers, Westerns, a comedy, a social-problem melodrama, and a crime suspense picture. Boetticher had proved himself as a commercial filmmaker who coaxed handsome production values, plenty of action, and solid performances from tight budgets and short schedules.15 Additionally, Boetticher’s experience as a television director dated to 1950 when his The Three Musketeers—essentially a made-for-television movie produced by Hal Roach, Jr.—was broadcast on Magnavox Theater.16 Naturally, the Warner Bros. television unit favored competency over artistry. Television presented unique challenges; time and money were constant bugaboos. Boetticher’s deft handling of a series of slick Universal-International Westerns released during 1952–3 marked him as a dependable second-tier professional. These U-I pictures—The Cimarron Kid, Bronco Buster, Horizons West, Seminole, The Man from the Alamo, and Wings of the Hawk—were handsome, upper mid-level projects that belied the relative brevity of their shooting schedules. Boetticher later recalled (with modest exaggeration), “I would get a (U-I) script on a Thursday and finish the picture on [the following] Friday . . . and start shooting the next picture the following Tuesday, it was just absurd.”17

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   83 Reflective of changes in the industry, U-I groomed a stable of attractive, inexperienced stars with presumed appeal to youngsters. Boetticher worked effectively with Rock Hudson, Julia (Julie) Adams, and other near beginners. Warner Bros. was particularly impressed with Boetticher’s handling of Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy. The young Texan came from a non-professional background and had just five leading roles to his credit when he worked with Boetticher on The Cimarron Kid. With Boetticher’s guidance, Murphy put together his first credible screen performance and began to refine the appealingly low-key demeanor that served him during twenty years of stardom. Boetticher’s approach to Murphy tied in neatly with Warner Television’s interest in exploitable young performers who needed on-set ­guidance and development. Boetticher’s professional background allowed him to step into the Warner Television arena of predigested entertainment without disadvantage or misconception. He paid attention to the industry and knew that working directors could make quick money in television.18 His early experience with low-budget thrillers made him familiar with formula-driven picture-making, and inured him to non-existent budgets and tight shooting schedules. Boetticher’s per-episode fee exceeded the Warner Bros. standard of $750. In a 2001 interview with Wheeler Winston Dixon, Boetticher recalled being paid $1,500 apiece for the three Maverick episodes he directed.19 The real money, though, floated around elsewhere: just as Boetticher was preparing to shoot the first episode of Maverick, Henry Kaiser and Kaiser Steel paid Warner Bros. $6 million for sponsorship rights to the show. The Maverick assignment was agreeable to Boetticher for obvious practical reasons but also because of the director’s fondness for Jack Warner. Many in Hollywood nursed ferocious hatred for Warner but Boetticher admired the man’s blunt honesty. In a 1969 interview with Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, Boetticher said, “All the really tough men in Hollywood, who are supposed to be bastards, have been my friends.” Then he identified the true enemies of filmmakers: “The well-polished, manicured, polite, artistically well-hung executives—those are the sons of bitches you have to worry about.”20 Shortly after accepting the Maverick job, Boetticher sat with Jack Warner in a screening room, looking at busted dailies from Sayonara. The raw footage rolled for more than five minutes while an obviously unprepared Marlon Brando struggled to remember his lines. Boetticher silently dismissed Brando’s lack of professionalism and focused instead on the other actor in the scene, James Garner.21 Boetticher immediately favored Garner for Bret Maverick, unaware that Roy Huggins had already come to the same decision. Garner was masculine as well as handsome, and displayed a low-key confidence. His open, easy manner appealed to Boetticher. Garner completed his Sayonara assignment and returned from Japan in the

84  d a v i d j . ho gan spring of 1957. He anticipated nothing but feature-film roles and was mildly dismayed when assigned to Maverick. As a contract player, he had little wriggle room. He was married, with a daughter and a baby on the way. A job was a job. Garner accepted a two-year contract extension and a bump in weekly salary from $350 to $500. Then he and Budd Boetticher set out to bring life to Bret Maverick.

Se t t i ng I t A l l i n M o t i o n During interviews given years after the fact, producer Roy Huggins explained that he conceived Bret Maverick as a bright and charming self-preservationist who took pains to avoid fisticuffs and gunplay.22 Maverick could handle himself physically—but who wants a broken nose? For Maverick, guile eliminated the need for conspicuous valor. Maverick’s amusingly pragmatic personality grew on viewers and allowed James Garner to reveal the wry humor that later made him an important film star and characterized his career. In his autobiography, Garner happily acknowledged Bret Maverick’s place in his life and career but recalled the genesis of Maverick’s personality a little differently from Huggins. Garner remembered: Budd Boetticher and I started to play around with the scripts, injecting a little humor here and there. Soon, Roy Huggins caught on [to the appealing novelty of a funny hero]. By the fourth episode, Roy was writing for it, and things got a lot more amusing.23 In interview comments published in The Director’s Event, Boetticher said, “I think I lend a lot of humor to my films, because I’m always having such a good time. It’s very difficult for me to work eight hours a day without doing something I think is funny.”24 Producer Roy Huggins envisioned Maverick as a television hero who was brighter and possessed of more charm than most. Budd Boetticher, in collusion with James Garner, set up the significant shift in personality that eventually made Maverick a television phenomenon. Maverick: “War of the Silver Kings”25 Written by James O’Hanlon and based on War of the Copper Kings, a book by C. B. Glasscock. Directed by Budd Boetticher. Broadcast date: September 22, 1957. Running time: 49:17

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   85 Bret Maverick: James Garner Phineas King: Edmund Lowe Judge Joshua Thayer: John Litel Big Mike McComb: Leo Gordon Jaunty drifter and gambler Bret Maverick lands in Echo Springs, a mining town controlled by a greedy silver mogul named Phineas King. Maverick spots King as a card sharp and a cheat, and purposely antagonizes the man, hoping to expose the mogul’s chicanery. While he attends to that, Maverick helps an alcoholic exjudge redeem himself, and uncovers an obscure but legal way for the “little” miners of Echo Springs to get a leg up on King. By the time the shouting is over, King is humbled, the miners are happy, and Maverick graciously declines King’s offer of lucrative employment. Orr and Huggins selected a script called “Point Blank” as the Maverick pilot but, because the studio did not already own the source material, Jack Warner objected. He invariably insisted that Warner Bros. television pilots come in as inexpensively as possible so, while Huggins undertook an “original” rewrite of the “Point Blank” material, “War of the Silver Kings” became the series pilot. Coded as Special Project 6909, the “Silver Kings” script is based on a 1935 book purchased by the studio years before and augmented with plot points from a 1948 Warner Western, Silver River. “Silver Kings” is crucial to Maverick because Boetticher and writer James O’Hanlon defined Bret Maverick deftly, and got to it right away. After just a few moments, we begin to understand what this new hero is “about.” Maverick arrives in Echo Springs wearing well-worn trail clothes and looking like a saddle tramp. In the lobby of a swank hotel, he reaches inside his coat and unpins a hidden thousand-dollar bill. He lays the bill on top of a sheaf of newspapers and traces around it with the point of his knife. Now Maverick has a thousand-dollar bill and numerous rectangles of newsprint that simulate the shape and thickness of multiple thousand-dollar bills. After putting the sheaf into an unsealed envelope, Maverick writes “$5,000” on the outside. The desk clerk is horrified when Maverick presents himself and signs the register. Maverick surely hears the clerk’s protests but he ignores them. He’s been snubbed but Maverick doesn’t become angry. In fact, he seems very amiable. Now the envelope is on the front desk. Maverick stares at it for a moment and then removes the thousand-dollar bill. The clerk’s eyes pop. Maverick seals the envelope, scratches out “$5,000” and writes “$4,000.” He inquires whether the clerk might be kind enough to hold the envelope in the hotel’s safe. The clerk can do that. He can offer Maverick a room, too, a very nice room.

86  d a v i d j . ho gan With only about four minutes of screen time, Boetticher established that Maverick is smart and collected, and skilled at manipulating people to do what he wants them to do. Much of the sequence’s amusing nature is in the script, of course, but Boetticher subliminally heightened the fun, eschewing cuts so that his camera could follow Maverick as our hero moves from here to there in the lobby. Hotel guests and other people come and go. They pass in front of Maverick and behind him. In a setup held long enough to be noticed, the desk clerk occupies the background of the shot. Maverick has not been to the desk yet but the man has noticed Maverick and gives a subtle but obviously disdainful toss of his head. With that, we know that something amusing is going to happen shortly and that it will involve the snooty fellow at the desk. Because the camera is mobile, we become involved in the action, moving with Maverick from doorway to table to front desk. Maverick is personally invested in his trickery; given the intimacy engendered by Boetticher’s moving camera, the viewers are as well. To this point, Boetticher played the sequence in real time. He introduced the protagonist, told us a great deal about him, and got some honest laughs. That was good but let’s sharpen up the pace. Maverick finishes with the desk clerk, takes his key, and mounts the stairs to his room. (The desk clerk stumbles after, glad to carry Maverick’s bags.) And now time is compressed. Maverick has gone upstairs and we cut back as he descends to the lobby. Maverick has obviously bathed and attended to his hair, and he’s changed his clothes, too. He looks like the prototypical dude gambler in dark cutaway jacket and creamcolored pants; frilled white shirt, patterned vest, and Western string tie. This is Maverick, revealed. The lobby sequence tells us about character, hints at plot development, brings us into the action, and subliminally establishes the physical limits of the room. The space seems real, palpable. The camera defines space again later when Maverick awakes in his hotel room after being slugged. Another, bigger man is in the room with him. Boetticher allowed the camera to prowl a bit, so that we understand the room’s smallness and that, if Maverick and his visitor tussle, the action will be particularly rough because neither man has any place to go. Late in the opening sequence, Maverick ambles into the hotel bar. Because people are wired to concentrate on just one thing at a time and because we already find Maverick intriguing, we are likely to miss the “Re-elect Judge Bixby” banner that hangs on the wall behind the barkeep. The banner means nothing to us right now but it will mean a great deal later. A key plot point has been set up. Similarly, relatively deep focus worked out a few moments later by Boetticher and seventy-two-year-old cinematographer Edwin DuPar encourages our gaze to drift from Maverick (who occupies the left foreground) to

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   87 a big, nattily dressed man in the right background. The man simply stands there. Maybe he’s watching Maverick. Maybe he isn’t. The point is he’s there. Soon, we discover that the man is Big Mike McComb26 (Leo Gordon) and that he and Maverick have history together, most of it reasonably friendly but some of it highly contentious. In a pair of well-separated interludes that come later, Maverick and McComb play tit for tat, happily taking turns beating the hell out of each other. With the early background image of McComb, Boetticher planted the seed for the seriocomic ambivalence that defines the Maverick– McComb relationship. Remember that Budd Boetticher was a feature director now constrained by the small frame of the television screen. Boetticher spoke frequently of his fondness for CinemaScope’s expansive 2.35:1 image. ’Scope allowed him to create evocative vistas, particularly in his Westerns. He used it to visualize characters’ emotional closeness or, alternatively, emotional separation. With Maverick, however, he had to work within television’s roughly square 1.33:1 screen ratio. Lacking width, Boetticher relied on depth to tell his television stories.27 As discussed, figures placed in the background early in “Silver Kings” presage important characters and events. In later moments, Boetticher and DuPar utilized the entire frame: foreground, middle, and back. In an important moment, as Maverick awaits Phineas King (Edmund Lowe), Maverick’s right profile hugs the left side of the frame in close-up. Another character occupies the middle ground, and a third fills in the background. The depth brings visual interest while suggesting King’s power; Maverick is not the only person awaiting him. Filming of Maverick—and the rest of Warner’s television shows—took place on stages at the studio’s Burbank facility. (Exceptions were genuine exteriors shot on the back lot’s “Laramie Street.”) If Jack Warner was going to meet his overhead, stages had to be kept busy all the time. Because of that, sets were no larger than what was necessary for the action of particular scenes. A smart television director—and Boetticher was one—filled the frames to give cramped sets the illusion of space. The Warner Bros. library of stock footage brought additional production value; “Silver Kings” makes effective use of location exteriors from a variety of vintage Warner theatrical Westerns, particularly lively footage of a full-blown outdoor mining operation taken from Silver River (1948).

Bui l d i ng a C h a r a c t e r , B ui l d i n g a St a r Not all of the actors in the Boetticher big-screen Westerns that preceded Maverick were expressive. Young players, such as Rock Hudson, struggled

88  d a v i d j . ho gan to seem animated, and longtime star Randolph Scott had built his career on flinty stoicism. With James Garner, though, Boetticher had another kind of personality. Though a relative novice, Garner appeared confident and exuded charm. The camera loved him. Boetticher exploited that and drew other things from Garner, too, things that define Bret Maverick as the episode unreels: slyness, self-assurance, and occasional bemusement. When Maverick plays cards with Phineas King and sees that the older man is a cheat, something glitters in his eyes. He doesn’t confront King at that moment but we can see that a switch has been tripped. Maverick is going to bring King down not simply because he can, or because King deserves it, but because Maverick has principles. The rules that he lives by come into play whenever he witnesses a person take unfair advantage of another. The close-up on Garner’s face, dominated by the actor’s eyes, is an important moment in “Silver Kings,” and in the future development of the Maverick character. By holding himself still in his chair and betraying nothing, Maverick paradoxically becomes a man of action. Other action is more traditional. Boetticher had been a college football player and boxer. He fought bulls and was an accomplished horseman. He was a big, physical man with a storyteller’s interest in bodies in motion. James Garner had been an athlete, as well. Partly because of its many Western productions, Warner Bros. had easy access to stunt men. When it came time for Big Mike to propel Maverick across a room with one punch, Boetticher and Garner (and Leo Gordon) elected to do the stunt themselves. The moment is set up as a medium two-shot, with Maverick frame left and Big Mike on the right. The punch connects and Garner flies backwards as if struck by a cannonball. He collides hard with the wall and doorway molding, and then slips to the floor. (In a technique still used today, custom Foley work or stock sound effects heightens the sense of physical force.) Because the action occurs without a cut or shift of point of view, viewers enjoy the spectacle of a reasonably valuable actor risking his body for the sake of the story. Garner was game to do the stunt but the idea surely originated with Boetticher. The explosive punch allowed Boetticher to engineer the sort of action he enjoyed and that television viewers expected. But, in this first episode, and throughout the series’ run, the violence of Maverick is leavened and balanced by wit. Finally tired of Phineas King’s clumsy attempts to dispose of him, Maverick takes an advertisement in the local newspaper: NOTICE I want everyone in the town of Echo Springs to know that PHINEAS KING did NOT make any attempt to kill me TODAY. BRET MAVERICK (watch this space tomorrow)

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   89 The advertisement is a wonderful invention by scripter James O’Hanlon; it’s funny and also lets us know how Maverick’s mind turns. The advert is a brazen, purposely trivializing way in which to antagonize and belittle an annoying, cocksure man. Certainly, Maverick’s joke could backfire. King is dangerous, and has the means to impose his will on his enemies. Well, Maverick knows that, and places the ad anyway. Naturally, the mocking ad brings repercussions that Maverick faces head on. If Roy Huggins had already instructed that Bret Maverick was to be a quasi-coward, Boetticher wasn’t having any. That sort of protagonist was antithetical to his feelings about men, characterization, and storytelling. In his important book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, film critic–­ historian Andrew Sarris wrote that Boetticher was “no stranger to the nuances of machismo, that overweening masculine pride . . . ”28 Boetticher forged his notions about maleness in the boxing ring and the bullring long before he became a filmmaker. With that in mind, the Maverick of “Silver Kings” and the pair of Boetticher episodes that followed is a lighthearted man of direct action. He places the ad. He takes punches and he delivers them, too. He is unique for his intelligence which makes him aware of danger and the nature and needs of people, as well. Yes, King could have him killed but Maverick gambles (gambling, after all, is his profession) that an embarrassed King will be an off-balance, impotent opponent. In a key sequence that introduces a focal subplot, bar patrons mock the town’s stumbling, alcoholic ex-Judge Thayer (John Litel). Maverick elects not to waste physical effort, or even an angry word, to mete out punishment to the offenders. Instead, he literally picks Thayer from the floor and restores the old man’s dignity by befriending him on the spot. Maverick’s kindness sets up the payoff to the “Re-elect Judge Bixby” banner glimpsed at the beginning of the story. Just before the election, Maverick initiates a write-in campaign for Thayer. Maverick’s conversations with the ex-judge reveal that, though Thayer is dispirited, his commitment to the honor and honesty of the bench remains strong. Maverick approves. Playing on his knowledge of human nature yet again, Maverick goes to work without Thayer’s knowledge, suggesting the write-in idea to perhaps half a dozen citizens of Echo Springs, a single person at a time, closing with, “Let’s keep this between you and me.” Mum’s the word. Of course it is! By Election Day, a tidal wave of gossip has made nearly everyone in town a supporter of the Thayer write-in bid. A vote tally maintained on a public chalkboard quickly reveals that Thayer has won, handily. The moment is pleasing and redemptive. To underscore the result of Maverick’s intercession, Boetticher executed a graceful, dignified dolly-in on the weathered face of actor John Litel whose features register silent astonishment, gratitude, and

90  d a v i d j . ho gan pride. The old judge is no caricature of a drunk. He is a man of intelligence and innate dignity. Boetticher could have shot the moment so that we observe Judge Thayer’s reaction after a cut but the dolly-in is better because it makes Thayer’s victory emphatically emotional. The moving camera brings us close to the old man, invests us in his triumph and encourages us to appreciate Maverick’s kindness and cleverness. Like other television directors handling inexperienced star players, Boetticher depended on experienced hands like Litel (and Edmund Lowe who played King) to provide a foundation of dramatic credibility. On location for his theatrical Westerns, Boetticher relied on the experience of Randolph Scott, and supporting players the caliber of Lee Marvin, Richard Boone, Virginia Mayo, and Noah Beery, Jr. Episodic television of the late 1950s existed on formulas, no money, tight schedules, and other roadblocks to creativity. At the same time, the rise of television and relative decline of theatrical films freed legions of experienced movie players for small-screen work. Of all the leading men that toiled in the Warner television factory, James Garner was far and away the most talented and on screen, directed by Boetticher, he only looks better when he plays against (and is challenged by) longtime professionals.

T he P o we r o f C h a r m At a glance, Maverick appears to be a loner but his interaction with Judge Thayer and his eagerness to help others by bollixing up King reveal him as a participating member of society. “Participating,” however, isn’t the same as “selfless”; Maverick assuredly looks after his own interests. (At episode’s end, we still marvel at that thousand-dollar bill, and wonder about the story behind it.)29 If Maverick is a friend to others, he is also a survivor. This is vital to the characterization of Bret Maverick, and Boetticher made the point very clearly in this first episode. Maverick does selfless things because he has a heart and because his survivor’s instinct allows him that luxury. To ensure his own safety and comfort, he sometimes plays people. Contrary to other survivors, though, Maverick does not pursue self-interest as an end in itself. His principles stimulate him to help others and, if he prospers at someone else’s expense, Maverick has decided that the person deserves a bring-down.30 Daily Variety’s anonymous television critic was reasonably pleased with “War of the Silver Kings.” The reviewer noted the episode’s “well-staged action” and “nice touches of humor.”31 The paper praised Garner, and even predicted the actor had a good future in movies, but was less enthusiastic about the script. Westerns were everywhere on the networks’ schedules so the fact that the Daily Variety reviewer called “War of the Silver Kings” a “better than fair TV entry”32 is probably a huge compliment.

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   91 Maverick: “Point Blank” Written by Roy Huggins; based on a screenplay by Howard Browne. Directed by Budd Boetticher. Broadcast date: September 29, 1957. Running time: 49:17 Bret Maverick: James Garner Molly Gleason: Karen Steele Ralph Jordan: Michael (Mike) Connors Sheriff Wes Corwin: Richard Garland In the town of Bent Forks, Maverick accepts a casino job as a spotter of card cheats. He chats up the town beauty which encourages the jealousy of the local sheriff and puts Maverick in grave danger: the woman schemes with her lover to rob the local bank, and effect a clean getaway by dressing Maverick in the boyfriend’s clothes— and then blowing off his face with a shotgun fired at point-blank range. “Point Blank” is the first time viewers witnessed Maverick’s romantic–sexual nature and his involvement in an out-and-out crime thriller. Garner’s qualities as an actor fit beautifully with Maverick’s romancing of blonde and statuesque Molly Gleason (Karen Steele); and his edgy, potentially violent encounters with the sheriff (Richard Garland) who has assumed that Molly is his. Roy Huggins’s script goes further by adding a clever fillip: Molly’s job is to deliver Maverick to her lover, Ralph Jordan (Mike Connors), so that Maverick can be murdered, disfigured, and left behind as “Ralph” following the lovers’ theft of $100,000 in cattlemen’s money. So the story develops as a four-sided triangle, with the possibility that our hero will literally lose face. The script detours slightly to involve Maverick with two citizens who imagine they are going to beat the daylights out of him. Maverick’s tendency to womanize is clear in “Point Blank” but he remains a man of action. As in “War of the Silver Kings,” Boetticher put Garner through his paces as a stunt man, asking him to take a flying leap over a bush to fight and then, humorously, fly right back out again. The engine that encourages events to drift in an intriguing and potentially tangled direction is Molly, whose relationship with Ralph is a kind of coercion levied against her. Ralph’s love of Molly’s body is plain to see but his real mistress is the money that he covets. When Molly seems hesitant about the plan, Ralph puts the knife in: “Do you want what we planned or do you want to go back to . . . where I found you?” Because of her past, Molly feels forced to play a role. Much in the manner of the self-destructive protagonist of Boetticher’s Decision at Sundown,

92  d a v i d j . ho gan Molly warps her sense of self in order to get what she only thinks she wants. Molly’s growing attraction to Maverick makes her ashamed of her deception and afraid for his life. She meets repeatedly with Ralph so that he can whisper and brag about refinements to the plan. Finally, Molly appears to be physically ill. She wants the money but not this way. When she suggests to Maverick that he avoid the sheriff by riding out of town, she fails to reckon with Maverick’s sharply tuned antennae. Molly is acting oddly. She’s nervous. Maverick silently wonders why she wants him out of the picture. To Molly’s horror, he decides to stay. His decision sets up the climax in which Ralph draws on Maverick and gets his comeuppance. Boetticher executed the shootout with the lack of blood mandated by network censors but defied television convention by allowing Ralph’s eyes to cloud, and his expression to go slack, as the thief dies in Maverick’s arms. By the television standards of the day, the death is an ugly and discomfiting one that suggests Boetticher’s comfort with the relative freedom allowed by big-screen projects.

B o e tt i c he r a n d S t e e l e Karen Steele made a nice impression as Ernest Borgnine’s anxious sister-inlaw in Marty (1955). That role was of the “kitchen sink” variety but, in “Point Blank,” Steele played pure glamour. Broad-shouldered and reasonably tall at 5 feet 6 inches, she began her professional life as a cover girl and model.33 She possessed an astounding figure and, according to the laws of Warner Bros. television, Boetticher would not allow it to go unexamined. Steele’s calico dress appears ­custom-molded to her dimensions, and you begin to wonder how she can breathe. In a circumvention of the Western setting, Molly wears full, 1957-style makeup. Absurd false lashes accent her feline eyes; pale lipstick and Steele’s tendency to open her lips during pauses in dialogue call attention to her mouth. Some Westerns made since 1950 reflected the true appearances of frontier women but the “Point Blank” episode of Maverick was not going to be one of them. Budd Boetticher, physical and hypermasculine, shared an on-again, offagain romance with Karen Steele during 1957–9. They planned to marry but did not. When Boetticher and Steele came together on the set of “Point Blank,” they had worked together already, on Decision at Sundown, the first of Boetticher’s celebrated Westerns with Randolph Scott.34 The pair’s real-life romance is relevant here because it informs the way Boetticher shot and weighted intimate moments of “Point Blank.” Whether with James Garner or Mike Connors, Steele enjoyed many lingering closeups. Her good looks are a little overwhelming and some male viewers, in particular, are apt to think too much about her face.

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   93 Boetticher was almost certainly smitten. Then again, the dread scheme that propels “Point Blank” involves a face—Maverick’s—and plans for its obliteration. Forced to study the features of Molly Gleason, thoughtful viewers will find the episode’s title unnerving.

Vis u al i z a t i o n s o f C r i mi n a l i t y The “Point Blank” cinematographer was Harold Stine, a television workhorse who helped Boetticher visualize Ralph and Molly’s spiritual darkness. When the pair meet in a small, isolated cabin, Stine’s illusion of a single, unseen light source throws the shadows of the schemers’ bodies heavily, thickly, onto the plain wall that holds them in place. Ralph and Molly are alone, in secret, yet two other figures seem to be in the cabin with them. The tableau invites us to read the shadows as manifestations of guilt or perhaps as the moving blackness of Ralph and Molly’s souls. When Ralph informs Molly, “Lady, I never worry about anything,” those writhing shadows warn that if he isn’t worried now, he should be. Still, Ralph is not to be taken lightly, particularly because his dedication to his scheme has unbalanced his mind. He is dangerous because he’s desperate to prove himself, unlike Maverick who is comfortable in his skin and has nothing to prove. Mike Connors gave Ralph a dark edge. Though just thirty-two when he did “Point Blank,” Connors had many television episodes and fourteen feature films behind him, including four with Roger Corman, a B specialist who worked with schedules sufficiently fleeting to make even the most experienced television director blanch. Boetticher returned to the “face” motif after Ralph is dead and when a defeated Molly faces Maverick and describes the murder plan. Her confession is a literal face-to-face moment that occurs in her jail cell. Maverick’s right profile dominates frame left; Molly’s left profile (and her ironically “innocent” blonde mane) dominates frame right, brought into sharp relief against a vertical background element of black. Fair hair, white skin, and a wedge of black: Molly is good. She is not good; she is human. The camera cuts away as Molly sits. Boetticher shot down on her (from Maverick’s point of view) so that this striking, imposing woman seems small. Maverick isn’t happy about any of this and, because he is that breed of adventurer who becomes attracted to women too easily, even those that once held thoughts of killing him, he hands her two thousand dollars so that she can find a lawyer and start fresh later, with—as Maverick suggests—the sheriff who cares for her. Maverick. The man is a romantic, and he enchants us.

94  d a v i d j . ho gan Maverick: “According to Hoyle” Written by Russell S. Hughes; based on “A Lady Comes to Texas,” a story by Horace McCoy. Directed by Budd Boetticher. Broadcast date: October 6, 1957. Running time: 49:19 Bret Maverick: James Garner Samantha Crawford: Diane Brewster Big Mike McComb: Leo Gordon Henry Tree: Jay Novello Joe Riggs: Ted de Corsia Plying his trade aboard a sumptuous riverboat, Maverick cleans up at cards and expresses his dislike of Riggs, a casino owner who runs a crooked house in Wagon Wheel, Wyoming. Aided by a beautiful gambler named Samantha, Maverick lays plans to derail Riggs’s operation—unaware that Samantha is a con artist, too. “According to Hoyle” is another romantic adventure tinged with danger. This time, Maverick’s romantic interest comes to him not as a would-be killer but as a con woman aboard a riverboat, a card sharp who piques Maverick’s interest as she takes big-time gamblers for fortunes. In one of those easily shaped, formulaic plots that helped make Warner’s episodic television possible, ladylike Southern gambler Samantha Crawford (Diane Brewster) wants to close the books on something from her past: the financial ruin of her father who lost a great deal of poker money to Maverick and then became a thief. The father is gone now but part of his debt remains. Samantha will pay off the debt when she accumulates $25,000 at cards, and she lets Maverick know that she plans to take the money from him. Running parallel to this is Maverick’s chance encounter on the boat with Joe Riggs (Ted de Corsia), a crooked Wyoming casino owner whom Maverick has despised for a long time. Realizing that Samantha has special qualities, and relatively unconcerned about her plans for him, Maverick enlists her aid in a scheme to bring down Riggs. As he did in “The War of the Silver Kings,” Boetticher established Maverick’s worldview (and predilections) very early. Maverick loses to Samantha at the riverboat poker table. He doesn’t mind losing; it’s the way he lost that bemuses and intrigues him. To appearances, Samantha is a terrible card player—yet she wins. Maverick is not convinced Samantha is a cheat but he knows she has a trick, a system, that gives her the edge she needs to put down overconfident opponents.

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   95 If Samantha were a man, Maverick would not be nearly so patient. Boetticher established in “Point Blank” that Maverick’s interest in beautiful women is perpetual and keen. Individual women may be criminally minded or they may be, like Samantha, of unknown character. The mystery does not deter Maverick; on the contrary, it appeals to him as a man, a professional gambler, and a chronic risk-taker. Boetticher’s obvious interest in Garner’s face and eyes suggests that curiosity about Samantha motivates Maverick even more strongly than lust. His inquisitive nature confirms what we have observed in the two earlier adventures: Maverick is a thinker who likes to get to the bottom of things. Because Samantha drives events, Warner contract player Diane Brewster was the beneficiary of special attention from Boetticher and cinematographer Ellis Carter. Brewster was an elegant, patrician beauty. She was tall as well and thus a physically suitable adversary/partner for Maverick. Boetticher did not summon the same visceral enthusiasm for her as he did for Karen Steele in “Point Blank” but he was nevertheless determined that we admire her features, and sense the brazen toughness beneath. Though mindful of the very tight shooting schedule as he prepared an important close-up, Boetticher asked Carter for a finely tuned effect that places glowing pinpoints of light in Samantha’s eyes. We can see guile in those eyes and the good mind that has attracted Maverick.35

Exp ans i ve ne ss a n d D e t a i l Because he has run into Briggs in the past, Maverick knows what defines the man. Both have dedicated themselves to self-preservation but only Riggs hurts and shames people. That gets Maverick’s dander up and we ready ourselves for an epic battle. Stock footage of the steaming riverboat and the dock at old St Louis gives “According to Hoyle” an expansive feel. On this deceptively broad canvas, the longtime enmity that has shaped the Maverick–Riggs relationship seems large and important. The big riverboat steams serenely through the night. On board, Maverick refuses to let Riggs sit in on his game. Riggs seethes and the encounter suddenly seems like the clash of titans. Boetticher balanced the calculated expansiveness with a series of closely observed vignettes structured around card games. As is made clear in dialogue, a game of five-card stud, which Samantha wins on the minutest of technicalities as defined by Hoyle (named for Edmund Hoyle who, in the eighteenth century, wrote many books on card games), gives the episode its title. The small television screen of 1957 was an ideal medium for faces, and faces are what captured Boetticher’s concentration as the characters concentrate on their cards. So focused is Boetticher’s concentration that the games finally

96  d a v i d j . ho gan express pure thought via slowly moving eyes, pursed lips, tilted heads, the small gesture of a fingertip brought to a cheek. In the pantheon of idiosyncratic American directors, Boetticher occupies a place near Sam Fuller and Sam Peckinpah: so-called “American primitives” fond of shock and the big gesture. Contrarily, the subtlety Boetticher expressed during the card sequences of “Hoyle” suggests that film historians who have been quick to categorize him may have missed something. In a cute reversal as the narrative moves to Wyoming, Maverick discovers that Samantha’s tale of her father is a lie. There was no abused father at all, only Samantha’s desire to assume a role (even her Southern accent is a fake) and exit with other people’s money. She planned to bilk Maverick, too, not simply at cards but by selling Riggs gambling equipment purchased by Maverick. A bit of a con artist himself, Maverick is not completely put out with Samantha. His dislike of Riggs has not lessened, however, so Maverick and Samantha become a team, an uneasy one, but a team. Though Maverick has exposed Samantha, she continues to affect the Southern accent in his presence, an amusing touch.

O v e r c o m i n g B ui l t - i n F l a w s Maverick and Riggs finally face off in a climactic game of blackjack at Riggs’s own casino. Boetticher provided cutter Harold Minter with the close-ups and medium shots needed to alternate rhythmically between the grim opponents. Ted de Corsia was a character player of vast film experience, physically imposing and invariably direct, yet the much younger Garner played opposite him with cool, even assurance. Boetticher’s Western heroes are never intimidated. When Maverick angrily slaps his palm atop the marked cards and puts the final nail into Riggs, we can almost hear the hammer. “According to Hoyle” concludes with a couple of further surprises and a Byzantine exchange of cash and property that ruins Riggs and gives other people plenty to crow about. The plot points here are confusing and far from cinematic. The episode as a whole is not well structured: the story invokes too many locations and introduces two or three characters too many.36 Because Maverick was a television confection and because of the particular nature and appeal of James Garner, Boetticher’s work on the series is akin to magical realism: not a duplication of the real West but an invocation of the made-up West that Americans have absorbed by osmosis over generations. Better, then, if “According to Hoyle” had concluded with the episode’s best set piece, the townspeople’s angry dismantling of the rigged Riggs casino. The outburst is a delirium of stylized violence, accomplished via generous use of

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   97 the mammoth saloon brawl from a classic 1939 Warner Western, Dodge City. So what if the enormous dimensions of the Dodge City saloon don’t match the much smaller “Hoyle” casino? Maverick is about character and attitude, a mildly subversive point of view, and a new kind of Western hero. “Realism” was never its mandate. The mandate was the pleasure of the unexpected. In a 2014 tweet, film critic Dave Kehr reflected on Boetticher’s Maverick episodes and wrote, “ . . . Garner became Garner under Budd Boetticher’s direction.”37 In a pressure-cooker filmmaking environment, Boetticher and Garner encouraged each other. Along the way, they created a minor cultural touchstone.

Wh at a P r o f e s s i o n a l D o e s Budd Boetticher once gave a stripped-down explication of his Westerns: “A man has a job to do, or a couple of men. They try to do it against tremendous odds. They do it.” 38 In 1957, Hollywood directors with taste knew that any attempt to create worthwhile drama for episodic television faced long odds. Boetticher was a working director who had done superior big-screen work. More would follow. But he was not a marquee filmmaker. Though his gifts were considerable, the industry regarded him as a journeyman. Boetticher was much more than that, of course, but there were always bills to be paid, and a good brain best kept occupied. “I really didn’t want to do television,” Boetticher told film historians Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin in 1994: It’s not—it may be now, but it wasn’t a director’s medium then, you know. (scoffs) You go in and make a Maverick picture in eight or ten days and the next poor guy that comes in does it in six . . . it wasn’t for me . . . But I think you’ll like the Mavericks. I haven’t seen ’em for years but I think that what we did was very good. 39

Sourc e s Books Adams, Les and Buck Rainey, Shoot-em-Ups (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978). Anderson, Christopher, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994). Buscombe, Edward (ed.), The BFI Companion to the Western (New York: Atheneum, 1988). Garbicz, Adam and Jacek Klinowski, Cinema, the Magic Vehicle, Vol. 2, The Fifties (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1979). Garner, James and Jon Winokur, The Garner Files (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

98  d a v i d j . ho gan Graham, Don, No Name on the Bullet (New York: Viking, 1989). Hardy, Phil, The Encyclopedia of Western Movies (Minneapolis, MN: Woodbury Press, 1984). Hughes, Robert, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997). Kisseloff, Jeff, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920–1961 (New York: Viking, 1995. Larkins, Bob and Boyd Magers, The Films of Audie Murphy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004). McNeil, Alex, Total Television (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984). Marill, Alvin H., Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush, Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 2011). Nott, Robert Last of the Cowboy Heroes: The Westerns of Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000). Peary, Danny, Cult Movies (New York: Delta/Dell, 1981). Porfirio, Robert, Alain Silver and James Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader 3 (New York: Limelight, 2002). Robertson, Ed, Maverick: Legend of the West (Los Angeles, CA: Pomegranate Press, 1994). Sarris, Andrew, The America Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968). Schatz, Thomas, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Sherman, Eric and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Sterritt, David and John Anderson (eds), The B List (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008). Wicking, Christopher and Tise Vahimagi, The American Vein: Directors and Directions in Television (New York: Dutton, 1979). Woolley, Lynn, Robert W. Malsbary, and Robert G. Strange, Jr., Warner Bros. Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985). Magazine article Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Last of the Hollywood Professionals,” Film Criticism, March 22, 2002. Newspaper articles Binder, David. “Budd Boetticher,” New York Times, December 1, 2001. Whitaker, Sheila. “Budd Boetticher,” The Guardian, December 3, 2001. Web sites www.mavericktrails.com (the smartest and most thorough Maverick web site) www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6pnpx70BBQ (1994 Budd Boetticher Directors Guild interview, conducted by Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin) DVD resources Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That (2005; bonus disc with The Films of Budd Boetticher collection). The Films of Budd Boetticher, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2008. Maverick: The Complete First Season, Warner Home Video, 2012.

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   99

NOTES  1. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, pp. 326–8.  2. Schatz, Boom and Bust, pp. 291–5.   3. CinemaScope and other technical innovations boosted profits of some individual films but could not make up for the studios’ general shortfall created by smaller postwar audiences. A financial burden also fell upon exhibitors: big-city theaters with good cash flow managed to make the physical changes needed to accommodate new technology but small urban theaters and, especially, the “nabes” (neighborhood theaters) struggled to manage the expense of new, larger screens, sophisticated sound systems, special lenses and projection systems, and reconfigured seating, as well as the cost of employee training.   4. During the second half of the 1950s, the B units at MGM, Universal-International, and the other major Hollywood studios dabbled in teen movies. Allied Artists, Filmgroup, Howco, and other independent producers did likewise but the industry teenpic leader was another indie player, American-International Pictures. AIP had no interest in family films that might appeal to teenagers; instead, the company specifically targeted teenage audiences with science fiction thrillers, hot rod actioners, rock ’n’ roll musicals, horror thrillers, and juvenile delinquent melodramas. Two culturally significant AIP hits, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), turn on the devious machinations of a middle-aged male scientist (played in each movie by character actor Whit Bissell) who exploits the innocence and vulnerable emotions of teenagers. Kids who enjoyed playing the martyr ate it up.  5. Robert Hughes, American Visions, 507.   6. Two books about the early days of American commercial television offer particularly informed coverage of the slow—then very quick—growth of television stations, David Weinstein’s The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), and David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher’s Tube: The Invention of Television (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996).   7. For more information about television ratings and network development during the 1950s and after, see the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation’s “Archive of American Television” at www.emmytvlegends.org/resources/tv-history   8. By1958, Warner Bros. was providing ABC with ten hours of weekly programming.   9. Useful production histories of all Warner Bros. television series of the 1950s and early 1960s are found in Woolley, Malsbary, and Strange’s Warner Bros. Television. 10. Jeff Kisseloff, The Box, pp. 273, 296; and Woolley, Malsbary, and Strange, Warner Bros. Television, pp. 122, 123, 213. Vintage Warner Bros. movies were freely adapted by the studio’s television unit. Notable examples are High Sierra, which became the “Blood Money” episode of Colt .45; Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, redone for 77 Sunset Strip as “One False Step”; and Hitch’s Dial M for Murder, transformed into 77 Sunset Strip’s “The Fifth Stair.” 11. Kisseloff, The Box, pp. 290, 295. Warner TV scripter Anne Howard Bailey claimed that “Troy Donahue [who shuttled between co-star duties on Surfside 6 and Hawaiian Eye] couldn’t remember how to say hello.” (Kisseloff, The Box, p. 295.) On the other hand, promising young Warner TV contract players earned mild regard from the front office, and gained useful experience with small parts in various Warner series. Peter Brown, an appealingly understated actor who co-starred later (with big-screen veteran John Russell) in Warner TV’s Lawman, plays a young deputy in Maverick’s “Point Blank” episode. 12. Kisseloff, The Box, p. 290. 13. Phil Hardy, The Encyclopedia of Western Movies, pp. 188, 190, 193–4, 202. Relatively

100  d a v i d j . ho gan complex Western characters and storylines became popular with moviegoers after 1950, and the familiar B-Western style migrated to episodic television. Theatrical Westerns improved and, in 1957, when Boetticher directed the Maverick episodes, Hollywood released seventy Western movies. Inevitably, the glut of television Westerns took a toll on theatrical box office. Maverick completed its run in 1962, a year when just fifteen new Westerns played in theaters. 14. An anonymous reviewer in the July 11, 1956, edition of Variety said, “Scott delivers a first-rate performance.” William R. Weaver, reviewing Seven Men from Now in The Motion Picture Daily, favorably compared Randolph Scott to venerated silent-era Western star William S. Hart, adding that Scott’s “stern, unsmiling” demeanor set him apart from other, less imposing Western stars. The celebrated cineaste André Bazin, writing in the August–September 1957 issue of the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, described Seven Men from Now as “the simplest and finest example of the [Western] form.” Bazin was struck by the film’s deft balance of ironic humor and drama, and pronounced the picture “very superior to Shane.” 15. Boetticher’s early experience as a director came at Eagle-Lion, Monogram, Republic, and Columbia’s prolific B unit. The focus at such places was economy, which meant tidy features—many hardly more than an hour in length—that had to be shot in a week to ten days. Boetticher did his part to fill the product pipeline, doing lively, often atmospheric work. An early credit, Escape in the Fog (1945), mixes a woman’s dreams, murder, and Axis spies; more nightmarish atmosphere defines Behind Locked Doors (1948) in which a reporter working undercover in a brutal private sanatorium finds more weirdness than he bargained for. Following a glossy, high-level Republic drama called Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), Boetticher landed at Universal-International, where he directed slick Westerns designed to showcase (and give experience to) contract players Audie Murphy, Rock Hudson, Julie Adams, Mala Powers, Hugh O’Brian, and James Best. 16. Boetticher’s The Three Musketeers, retitled The Sword of D’Artagnan, saw theatrical release in 1951. 17. Budd Boetticher interview, Directors Guild, 1994, conducted by Eric Sherman. 18. Documentary, Budd Boetticher, A Man Can Do That. During 1960–1, Boetticher took his final television jobs: episodes of Hong Kong, Zane Grey Theater, and The Rifleman. 19. Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Last of the Hollywood Professionals.” 20. Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event, p. 58. 21. “Budd Boetticher,” www.mavericktrails.com The Warner Bros. advertising department prepared poster art and other promotional material for Sayonara long before shooting wrapped. The film’s posters relegate James Garner to seventh billing. However, by the time Sayonara opened in late December 1957, Maverick had been on the air for three months. Garner’s popularity had soared and the show was on its way to becoming a top ten hit. Release prints of Sayonara give Garner third billing, behind Marlon Brando and starlet Patricia Owens. 22. Boetticher was pleased when Garner said he wasn’t interested in riding a docile horse provided by Warner Bros. Boetticher, a very experienced horseman, was happy to loan Garner a lively animal from his own stable. 23. James Garner and Jon Winokur, The Garner Files, pp. 52, 54–5. 24. Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event, p. 53 25. The author compiled cast and credit blocks while viewing episodes. Italicized episode synopses are the author’s. 26. The name is a variation of “Mike McComb,” the character played by Errol Flynn in a 1948 Warner Bros. Western, Silver River.

ad ve nture s o n th e small screen   101 27. Boetticher appreciated CinemaScope’s storytelling possibilities but he was never wedded to the system’s dramatic horizontal aspect. To the contrary, he often created narrow, front-to-back compositions similar to the ones he was obliged to set up in his television work. During a September 2000 discussion of ‘Scope, he told interviewer Ed Grant, “[E] verybody thought you had to have the leading lady over here and the leading man over there and a lot of trees in the middle. [But] you could do whatever you wanted . . . ” (Media Funhouse, New York cable access; viewed on YouTube [www.youtube.com. watch?v=fuCibGMInFM]). Another film scholar, Sean Axmaker, conducted interviews with Boetticher between 1988 and 1992. In one of those talks, Boetticher’s description of compositions he prepared for two of his ’Scope Westerns is a reiteration of the front-toback aesthetic he brought to Maverick: “Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station start off with very long shots [with compositional elements stacked rather than arrayed side-to-side] where you see how infinitesimal the cowboy was in those days up against all these rocks and all these mountains.” (www.seanax.com/tag/budd-boetticher/). 28. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968) p. 125. 29. An amusing aspect of Bret Maverick’s backstory is his philosophical relationship with his father, a gambler and idler who encouraged Bret (and brother Bart, introduced later in the first season) to live for themselves, grabbing as much as they can with as little effort as possible. Honesty and fair play, Pappy said, are optional. On the day Bret left home, Pappy pinned a thousand-dollar bill to the inside of Bret’s coat. The bill was to be used only in emergencies—and, if it was, Bret’s responsibility was to replace it as quickly as possible. The old man’s antisocial wisdom is never far from Maverick’s mind, and Maverick quotes it often, particularly in tough spots. In “According to Hoyle,” Bret muses, “Well, my Pappy said man’s the only animal you can skin more than once.” 30. Yes, the morality of this is fuzzy—Maverick appoints himself judge and punisher—so his innately endearing quality is a vital element of the show’s morality as well as Maverick’s character. 31. Alvin H. Marill, Television Westerns, p. 47 32. Alvin H. Marill, Television Westerns, p. 47. 33. www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com/show/257/karen+steele/register.php; www. heightcelebs.com/2014/12/karen-steele/ 34. Besides Decision at Sundown, Karen Steele was directed by Budd Boetticher in the following films released during 1959–60: Westbound, Ride Lonesome, and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. 35. Ellis Carter created the pinpoints in Diane Brewster’s eyes with an eyelight reflector or a 300-watt “dinkie” incandescent. The time spent on the effect was accounted for, with haste, elsewhere. This may explain why, in another scene, the blocky shadow of the moving camera passes over Brewster’s back. 36. Veteran character man Jay Novello, cast as a private detective, is an awful distraction. 37. www.twitter.com/dave_kehr/status/490869708082528258 38. David Binder, “Budd Boetticher,” New York Times, December 1, 2001. 39. David Binder, “Budd Boetticher,” New York Times, December 1, 2001.

ch apter 6

The Signifying Heel: Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) Robert Singer

“The making of The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond was an experience I’ll never forget. I’d like to, but I never will.” Budd Boetticher, When in Disgrace1

I

n a critically revealing moment in director Budd Boetticher’s gangster biopic, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960),2 Legs (Ray Danton) enters an “executive meeting” of the criminal syndicate’s “board of directors,” dressed to kill and obliging to none. In this sequence, composed largely of medium reverse-shots, Legs contests the flow of power and capital after the murder of the legendary syndicate organizer, Arnold Rothstein. Legs concludes that he has been left out of future underworld operations. Because of Legs’s legendary capacity for violence and publicity, his fellow gangsters view Legs as a liability to the emerging corporate model. Boetticher spatially blocks this shot sequence of enterprising corporate killers with Legs separated from the others not only by his good looks and sense of humor but mostly by a palpable presence of controlled rage and self-entitlement. When Legs enters their physical space, all energy is redirected towards this lone figure. Although this historical moment represents one of the mythic beginnings of American organized crime—“we’re a nationwide syndicate now”—Legs personally belongs to a bygone era of unabated, corrupted individualism, a model of perverse male enterprise, more appropriate in the late nineteenth century. Legs belongs to nobody, not even to his sick brother or ignored wife, and certainly, not with these less dynamic gangsters whom he directly and amusingly challenges. Though this initiates the action that will lead to his death by assassins in an Albany rooming house, Legs stakes his claim but there is little sense of audience identification or empathy with this action. He is striking out on his

the sign ifyin g h eel   103

Figure 6.1  Legs Diamond—a moment in the life of a myth.

own, taking his stand against forced incorporation but for the wrong reasons: Legs wants control of the syndicate and recognition of his stature among other gangsters. Legs Diamond is the villain in the midst of others equally debased but his is an ego demanding brutal confirmation. He is interesting and attractive but never heroic. All he needs is a black, broad-rimmed hat to match his tuxedo.

104  r ob e r t s inge r Boetticher’s characterization of the ruthless individual is not unique in his ample body of work. It is my contention that Boetticher’s gangster biopic may be read as a type of urban Western, featuring hostile villains, compromised women, weak authority figures, and a menacing environment. In The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, there is no discernable champion—the Randolph Scott figure—and the narrative depicts a violent struggle for survival among the crooked and the confused. Legs Diamond is a variation on a Boetticher theme of troubled, ambitious male identity, and Legs belongs to the extended catalogue of attractive but fierce characters created by Boetticher in his Western (Ranown) cycle of films. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond inhabits the space of a post-Western: cars replace horses, drugs and money replace land, and Legs, the villain-gangster, occupies a dangerous place in a dangerous city— mostly of his own making—in which he is condemned to have a transient existence alone. In his famous postwar study, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Robert Warshow identifies the gangster narrative as a modern tale of one man’s personal, violent dissatisfaction with life in an urban context; “the gangster is the man of the city . . . for the gangster, there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination . . . The imaginary city produces the gangster.”3 Warshow notes that, in American film culture, the urban gangster of the twentieth century shares one essential quality with his historical mythic predecessor, the cowboy: a conditional sense of loneliness, mediated by an ever-present threat of violence. Yet the difference in these two figures in American culture may be found in their respective response to manifestations of violence and spatial compositional strategies: the cowboy shuns violence and the city, and resorts to violence and abandoning the openness of space/the frontier only as a last resort, whereas, for the gangster, the city is his proper venue and violence is an agency of his success. Daniel Agacinski has examined the relationship between physical space depicted in the genre film and its ideological contexts in both Western and gangster narratives, both sites of industrial production familiar to Boetticher. Agacinski specifically notes the compositional distinctions between the film genre in language directly addressing Boetticher’s conceptual design of his gangster biopic: Like the Westerner, the gangster deals with a frontier, or rather here with a border, but this one cannot be crossed or moved. It is the border of finite possibilities that are offered to the man in the modern city: either stay in the shadow or lose oneself trying to get out . . . The man of the city, as he is depicted in the mob film, does not transform anything, whether he is a gangster or a detective . . . the properties of space are such that it seems no longer possible to change it through human action

the sign ifyin g h eel  105 . . . this inescapable environment does not even leave him at peace, and eventually it ruins him.4 The gangster thrives on violence, its deployment, though it ultimately dooms him as well. As noted by Brian Faucette, “in gangster films from the 1930s into the 1960s, suits replaced the cowboy’s Western garb as a metaphor for masculinity . . . They [gangsters] were men of action who engaged in violent and sexual acts, and who took control of their destinies.”5 Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, drawn directly from American history and mythic culture associated with the rise of gangsterism, exemplifies this enterprising, urban violence. Boetticher’s gangster film participates in the generation of multiple, sequential variations of a recurring trope in his film work: the asocial male in a hostile space. Perhaps the most significant distinction to be made between Boetticher’s cowboy villains and his sole cinematic gangster involves the consistent cruelty and striking egotism of the cynical Legs Diamond. Boetticher’s depiction of this alluring man, a driven, threatening figure, has its roots in historical reportage. In a New York Times article, “Whalen Warns All To Shun Night Clubs,” the anonymous writer, citing the advice of New York City Police Commissioner Grover Whalen, admonishes the public to avoid the perils of urban nightlife, and basically, to stay at home, citing the indictment of “John (Legs) Diamond, notorious gunman and racketeer . . . for Saturday’s double murder,” which took place in a nightclub Diamond partially owned. “[A] hunt is now on for Diamond.”6 The city is not safe from gangsters, especially Legs Diamond. Diamond, the author continues, “has been a problem for the police since 1914,” having been arrested for “assault, larceny, burglary, and even homicide, only to . . . wriggle through their [the police’s] fingers.”7 The historical Legs Diamond was a well-known vicious bootlegger and murderer, often referred to as a “clay pigeon” because of his ability to dodge bullets and capture, at least for a while. Legs Diamond was also one of the first gangsters to attract extensive media coverage, especially in the newspapers and in newsreel footage shown all over the United States. Like Al Capone, Dutch Schultz and other “popular” urban criminals, Legs lived a violent life, and his life ends in 1931, thus initiating the mythic expansion of his narrative, mostly focused on his vigorous personality and his cruelty. In Paddy Whacked, T. J. English describes Legs as “the most well known of all Irish-American mobsters,” adding that “some believe that he acquired the nickname ‘Legs’ because of his talent on the dance floor, while others claim he had the name from adolescence, and it referred either to his running abilities or simply the fact that he had long, gangly legs . . . it is difficult to separate the fact from the fiction.”8 Budd Boetticher’s biopic of Legs—his rise and ­inevitable fall—is steeped in the myths (the anti-Horatio Alger story) and

106  r ob e r t s inge r

Figure 6.2  Legs (Ray Danton) takes on the Syndicate.

history (Prohibition, the ethnic gangster) surrounding American urban life and cinematic culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond is an exploration of male violence and a model of non-redemption, for the cinematic–historical Legs Diamond cannot be saved. Boetticher’s biopic avoids the clichéd sentimentality of the Irish charmer who “went bad,” because of environmental causalities as depicted by Rockcliffe Fellowes in Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration (1915) and James Cagney in William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931). Instead, Boetticher infuses the narrative with a calculated realism blending the myths and history associated with Legs Diamond: a mixture of charismatic appeal and sexuality, vitiated by ruthless egotism, and some stylish dancing.

T he C y cl e o f T h ugs In Peter Stanfield’s “Punks! Topicality and the 1950s Gangster Bio-Pic Cycle,” he cites the “distinctive and coherent cycle of films, produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which exploited the notoriety of Prohibition-era gangsters.”9 Stanfield lists twelve essential films during this period produced in the style of the industrial, B model, mostly as biopics.10 Film historian George Custen has commented on the popularity and generic markers of the biopic and notes that, “a biopic life would have more in common with other models of film biography than it would with sources outside Hollywood’s discourse.”11 Thus, biopic films are largely inter-referential, following a narrative

the sign ifyin g h eel  107 logic developed as a standard, a template process. Custen further delineates the relationship these biopics would share, a processing of historicized themes, characterizations, and narrative arcs: “intertextuality, a reliance on a limited number of film texts as templates for narratives of the lives of the famous, insured that ideas of entertainment and history became so entwined that much of history became a history of entertainment, a strange ontological slant.”12 This theoretical framework is equally applicable for the infamous, and few figures loom as large in the popular imagination as modern gangsters like Legs Diamond. This intertextual framework extends to the television medium. In 1960, The Untouchables, the popular Desilu dramatic production, featured a onehour semi-fictionalized episode entitled, “Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond,” directed by John Peyser.13 In this episode, Diamond (Steven Hill) confronts, and later swindles, the crime syndicate he helped to establish but is eliminated from as they—Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, Dutch Schultz, and others—play cards but symbolically leave him out of the game. In this establishing shot sequence, Legs stands alone from the other men who barely deign to look directly at him. This Untouchables episode focuses on the historically based Legs-in-exile story, and the action shifts from New York City nightclubs to upstate farms and unpaved roads. Though a great deal of the story is fictional, in particular, Legs’s death in the city streets at the hands of a fellow thug, this episode does link Legs with the nascent drug-smuggling operation he helped to stimulate when he took an extended, albeit, unsuccessful voyage across Europe in search of class and contacts. The “Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond” episode demonstrably blends the historical with a measured fictional license and is an example of the popularity of the gangster narrative across popular media in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Faucette, “the gangster film has never disappeared from the American consciousness. In fact, the gangster films of the late 1950s and into the 1960s display the true brutality of the gangster in all his sadistic glory.”14 Faucette cites Boetticher’s biopic as the first illustration of this premise. If the alienating, violent ontology of the gangster biopic cycle of the 1950s–60s was a unique narrative site to exchange the historical with the mythical, then Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond is a critically prominent gangster biopic from this period although the biopic is relatively uncharacteristic when evaluating the totality of the Boetticher film canon.15 Perhaps Boetticher, never quite the industrial insider, denotes a familiar, rebellious presence? When Legs Diamond exclaims, “the bullet hasn’t been made that can kill me,” one invariably recalls the myths of independence and willfulness associated with Boetticher himself. Stanfield provides an interesting insight to this dynamic when he refers to Boetticher’s alienating-alienated gangster Legs Diamond: “The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond is the story of a maverick,

108  r ob e r t s inge r an individual’s rise to prominence within gangland, his fall comes when the criminal fraternity forms a combine—a syndicate, nationwide.”16 However powerful a figure, the syndicate (Hollywood) seems to always win. Budd Boetticher’s biopic is a narrative of violent, signifying practices in which the central male figure is the consistent symbol of enterprising corruption, a man without conscience who conspires and forces his way, temporarily, to the top of the syndicate heap. Boetticher’s configuration of the Legs Diamond character soundly illustrates Faucette’s assertion of the 1960s industrial conception: “no other genre of film has better represented the desire to capture the feelings of self-interested and selfish men than that of the gangster film.”17 As Toby Roan notes, this is a credit to Boetticher’s blending of myth and history in the biopic: “Ray Danton plays Legs Diamond as evil, cold-blooded, and absolutely power mad—willing to use anyone to get what he wants, but handsome, sharply dressed, flashy, and not without a certain charm; pretty much the way the real Diamond has been described . . . Danton does a good job.18 Ray Danton’s performance as the roguish Irish charmer– killer situates the historical, “real” gangster into the realm of the “reel” biopic figure; in fact, this was the first of two film performances by Ray Danton as Legs Diamond. Danton reprised the role of Legs Diamond a year later in Joseph Pevney’s Portrait of a Mobster, starring Vic Morrow and Peter Breck.19 This biopic, also produced during the gangster cycle, features Morrow as New York mobster–psychotic, Dutch Schultz, Legs’s legendary rival. In Pevney’s biopic, set during the “rise” phase of his life, Legs is already established as a successful mobster in upper-class Manhattan. He lives in a fancy apartment, complete with doorman, sycophantic thugs, and a girlfriend, whereas Schultz, dressed like a working-class denizen of the Bronx, unsuccessfully approaches Legs for a “muscle job,” and proceeds to wreck the furniture upon rejection from this circle. In Portrait of a Mobster, Danton’s performance seems to be a continuation, a part two, of Boetticher’s previously produced biopic; the acting, clothes, and set design recycle Danton’s earlier performance. As the central figure of Boetticher’s biopic, Danton-as-Diamond engages, but never becomes, psychologically attractive to the viewers while Boetticher’s cowboys, however imperfect, solicit a measure of distanced identification.20 Boetticher’s Legs Diamond is a man devoid of genuine compassion but full of allure and bravado like his historical counterpart: “What he [Legs] did have was a guilt-free conscience. He could kill or cheat anyone without remorse and did so often.“21 It was Boetticher’s stated intention to make Legs—the gangster/killer—attractive, if not desirable, to at least one character, his wife (Karen Steele), who mourns his inevitable, violent passing. In an interview in 2002 with Drake Stutesman, Boetticher commented upon Legs’s unsavory characterization:

the sign ifyin g h eel  109

Figure 6.3  Legs (Ray Danton) meets with “Mr Big,” Arnold Rothstein.

[S]omebody had to mourn him [Legs] when he died . . . Until you got out of the theater and you wanted to say to yourself—Why did I care? What a miserable person. He was the one lone hood in the history of gangdom. He didn’t have a mob. He had himself . . . Well I believe that no matter how bad a person he is, no matter how horrible, how meaningless his existence is, somebody loves him and I want you to see this picture through the eyes of his wife who probably loved him . . . I want you to like Legs Diamond.22 Yet, mourning for Legs, even by his wife, is not for the man he really was, a vicious murderer, but more for what he suggested as a charmer, like a surface reading of an unredeemed rogue. Nobody really likes Legs Diamond; his wife, whom he had frequently deceived, too easily accepts murderous faults in her husband. Despite Boetticher’s desire to make the viewers “like Legs Diamond,” there is no rooted, emotional interest felt by the viewers in his rise. Boetticher does succeed in portraying the potentially sociopathic Diamond as attractive but in a dangerous, sexual sense. According to Patrick Downey, the historical Legs Diamond was as colorful and ill-fated a figure as Boetticher’s cinematic characterization: Like most gangsters, he [Legs] was vain and always impeccably dressed. He enjoyed the finer things of life: fancy cars, elegant hotels, good whiskey, and cork-tipped cigarettes. In the eleven-year span of his professional criminal career, Diamond elevated himself from common sneak thief to contender in New York’s drug and alcohol trade, making and

110  r ob e r t s inge r spending hundreds of thousands of dollars only to lose it all and die broke in a cheap Albany boardinghouse.23 As if taking a cue from Brecht, in the satirical, allegorical drama, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), in Boetticher’s biopic, the viewers cannot emotionally identify with this arch criminal but, rather, the viewers watch Diamond as both he and Brecht’s Ui plot and kill their way to the top of the criminal heap by selling themselves as indispensable to the syndicate’s success: Ui’s “vegetable trade” and Legs’s bootlegging enterprise. The fascistic gangster Ui confidently states: “The vegetable Trade needs protection. By force if necessary. And I’m determined to supply it . . . He who holds the purse string holds the power.”24 This Brechtian dialogue could be recontextualized to fit Boetticher’s narrative; both gangsters succeed by selling a corrupt, criminal type of insurance, a “protection” racket, to other individuals correctly perceived as susceptible. To accomplish this, in Boetticher’s film, Legs steals from the all-powerful Arnold Rothstein, and then Legs proceeds to introduce himself as the agent who detected the weakness in Rothstein’s operation and acts upon it to demonstrate why he is a necessary presence in the syndicate. Brecht’s Ui slowly annexes a corrosive presence in the power scheme by showing his importance to its survival, and this facilitates his rise: “First I need protection for myself from cops and judges. Then I’ll start to think about protecting other people. We’ve got to start from the top.”25 This sequence is effectively restrategized in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), another exploration of American criminal syndicalism and a rise-and-fall narrative, as the young stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) compromises himself ethically as a means to introduce himself and ascend to the top in the business world where he meets the all-powerful, corrupt broker–magnate, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas): a Rothstein epigone. Boetticher’s Legs Diamond markets his attractiveness, sense of invulnerability, and suave manner—whether he really was a fine dancer or just fast on his feet running away from a criminal act is irrelevant—but, to Boetticher’s directorial credit, we never identify with Diamond, however seductive the figure. In the beginning of Boetticher’s gangster biopic, as Diamond arrives in the city with his ailing brother (Warren Oates), they witness the aftermath of a burglary. Legs then takes a moment to re-enact the crime as he imagines it from his cinematic point of view; like a vision of the future, Legs beholds his gangster destiny, his next target. Later, as the brothers settle into the city, to set up in advance a cover story, Legs goes for a free dance lesson; ironically, he is a better dancer than his instructor and he confesses to her, “I’m just lonely,” sensing that his suave charm and manipulative manner will win her over for his future need. This is an especially compelling shot sequence; the viewers know that Legs’s false sensitivity toward her is merely a ploy to engage her for some

the sign ifyin g h eel  111 purpose. As they dance together in a medium close-up two shot, Boetticher frames the perfect model of calculating insincerity; what looks romantic is, in reality, a false space which reflects Legs’s self-serving machinations. He has nothing to offer her, or anybody, beyond a surface image. By the time of this dance, Legs’s resistible rise has begun. Later, on a date, as she sits in a theater waiting for him, Legs uses her as an unknowing co-conspirator in the robbery of the jewelry store he envisioned earlier as he leaves her alone and climbs between buildings into the store. Legs had already cheated at a dance contest, and he hides the stolen goods in the winner’s cup, a double betrayal of the woman. Lucien Ballard’s cinematography is dynamically executed, especially as the robbery is mostly conducted in silence, with a few background noises. As Legs descends from the window, and then returns to his girlfriend in the movie theater, the shot sequence recalls the stylized expressionism associated with noir compositional strategies.26 As they exit the theater, a supervising policeman, played by Simon Oakland, is introduced as both a foil to Legs and also as a recurring rhetorical strategy: the social conscience–authority figure.27 As Legs later exclaims, “I’m not going to jail . . . I’m never going to jail,” the audience is set up for the transition from the audible to the visual; the shot cuts to the entry into the jail and the later reverse shot between Legs, behind bars, and his girlfriend, free to be further exploited. Boetticher himself noted in his autobiography the invaluable stylistic contribution made by Ballard in this film: Lucien Ballard was my cameraman . . . we began running all the film made in the “Legs Diamond” era (the early 1920s) to study the camera technique. We noticed that the camera didn’t move in those days. And there were no “dolly” shots, very few pans, and the cinematographers didn’t use foreground pieces. So, to try to do something different, we decided to film Diamond in the 1920s fashion—shot to shot, nothing fancy.28 Boetticher’s collaboration with Ballard in this film is composed mostly in long takes and wide/medium shots, with traditional close-up and two shots to create a balanced, “motion in the shot” space in the frame for the action to unfold. Another cinematically noteworthy shot sequence occurs between the sedentary, powerful figure of Arnold Rothstein and the ever-calculating Legs who will approach Rothstein as if ambling toward the throne of a demi-god. “Mr. Big,” Arnold Rothstein, like Legs, stands between the informing structures of myth and history in modern culture. It is Rothstein who provides an entry point for the struggling Legs to emerge as a player–gangster in the syndicate as he hires Diamond to work within his circle. Whether he is dancing in the nightclub, seducing in the bedroom, or contriving on the streets, Legs uses

112  r ob e r t s inge r

Figure 6.4  Legs hides the stolen jewelry.

and damages people in his rise to the (near) top of the pile; Rothstein is already there and serves as a marker of class and power. He is a dynamic counterpoint to Diamond and also functions as a historical signifier for the audience, as another “ethnic” who made it only to lose it: clothing, women, home, money and eventually, his life. In Boetticher’s biopic, however, Rothstein remains a composed, if not aloof, figure who discovers and eventually betrays Legs.29 Legs Diamond loses himself, and everything else, and affects no change other than the generation of his own violence, saturating the screen with selfserving lies and intrigues. His demise, alone and unsettled in a third-rate room is predictable and often replayed and renewed in various narrative formations. Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond functions as a template narrative, a significant intertext for future Diamond narratives, from Broadway to bookstores.

“ T hi s i s s or t o f t h e w a y i t ha p p en ed. ” 3 0 Narrator, The Almost Totally Fictitious Musical Hystery [sic] of Legs Diamond In the unpublished libretto of the Broadway production The Almost Totally Fictitious Musical Hystery [sic] of Legs Diamond (1988), acknowledged to be

the sign ifyin g h eel  113 inspired by Boetticher’s biopic, the spectacle-driven aspect linked to the identity and career of the 1920s New York gangster Legs Diamond—his dancing prowess—is repeatedly engaged by Peter Allen, Harvey Fierstein and Charles Suppon in this musical collaboration. At one critical juncture in the musical production, the infamous gambler Arnold Rothstein speaks to other gangsters: “Mr. Diamond is, er, a dancer. Just to make him feel at home I suggest we call him Legs,” thus reinstituting the myth of Diamond’s charm and dancing skills, a quasi-mythic social presence that vitiated his historical, documented violence.31 When Legs (Peter Allen) describes himself to Alice, one of the susceptible, exploited women in the sphere of his influence, as “just lonely and I like to dance,” to which she replies, “you’re an absolutely wonderful dancer,” a space is created for the musical routine to engage. Budd Boetticher’s biopic focuses on Legs’s violent struggle toward an unrealizable future, and the dancing, as Boetticher explains, serves a dramatic purpose, a segue into darker aspects of character, involving his artful physicality: “[I]n Legs, in twelve minutes, you establish his dexterity, manipulation, cruelty very fast. Therefore the audience is all set up, ready to go with the character.”32 In The Almost Totally Fictitious Musical Hystery [sic] of Legs Diamond, performance/ dancing is the purpose, the essential identity marker. Another hypertext plausibly emanating from Boetticher’s biopic is William Kennedy’s novel, Legs (1983). This work of fiction deploys a form of narrative emplotment as it imposes real characters and events via the perspective and agency of a fictitious narrator, the flawed lawyer, Marcus Gorman, who relates the Legs Diamond story, à la Bartleby’s elderly lawyer’s confessional tale, after the fact of the historical process, with a space left for the mythic to impose its own interpretation. Gorman witnesses and participates in the Legs Diamond historical–fictional narrative. Boetticher’s cinematic finale, like Kennedy’s, features Legs dying alone in a cheap room, vainly maintaining his mythic invulnerability. Gorman states: “I say to you, my reader, that here was a singular being in a singular land . . . Jack [Legs] was a confusion to me.”33 As if reciting details from an official autopsy, Gorman relates the violent death of Legs Diamond to the reader early in the novel, “Jack’s face [was] intact but the back of his head blown away,” yet Gorman ironically concludes, “I still don’t think he’s dead,”34 as if the myth will outlast the physical memory of his friend’s destruction. The portrayal of Legs Diamond as the gangster–ladies’ man is recycled in J. Christian Ingvordsen’s The Outfit (1993).35 This Canadian film playfully recreates the historical era of gang warfare as it simulates the upstate New York region, and New York City nightclubs and alleyways, as the setting for the legendary rivalry between Legs Diamond (Josh Mosby) and Dutch Schultz (Lance Henriksen). Consistent with Boetticher’s characterization, Ingvordsen’s Legs Diamond is sexually attractive, well dressed, and ruthless.

114  r ob e r t s inge r In an early shot sequence, Legs flirts with two unidentified women he meets on the street after he gets out of a car on the way to a pre-arranged gathering of mobsters; there was, however, a planned attempt on his life. Legs, horrifically and instinctively, uses the two women as shields, and they are shot. Though there is no dancing in the film, as one of the unsuccessful assassins falls from the car, Legs literally kicks him to death. Ingvordsen’s ultravicious film does not advance the Legs Diamond narrative in a cinematic sense but it does represent a historical period for the contemporary audience unfamiliar with levels of corruption and complicity among police, politicians, and gangsters, as well as depicting homelessness and racism, during the Prohibition era. There is, however, a major flaw in the film, the historically inaccurate liberty taken when Dutch Schultz shoots and kills Legs Diamond. The death of Legs Diamond remains a historically unresolvable act. At the time of Diamond’s unsolved murder, the Albany Times Union newspaper featured a byline by reporter H. L. Wood that suggestively indicates the interest in this rise-and-fall gangster narrative: Jack “Legs” Diamond, survivor of a dozen skirmishes with the law and the lawless alike, today went from a clandestine tryst with Marion “Kiki” Roberts, his showgirl sweetheart, to a tryst with death in an Albany rooming house . . . Unknown assassins, stalking down their prey with cool deliberation, pumped a stream of leaden pellets into the racketeer’s head as he lay asleep in a small room at 67 Dove St . . . Death was instantaneous as the bullets furrowed the brain that had been set at rest a few hours earlier when a Rensselaer county Supreme court jury acquitted Diamond of a charge of kidnapping James Duncan, a Cairo youth.36 Gorman’s fictional analysis of Legs Diamond, the dancing figure of urban gangsterism, the socially resplendent “dude of all gangsters,”37 remains wholly on target, and focuses on his complex, overarching, and immoral disposition: Jack failed thoroughly as a hypocrite. He was a liar, of course, a perjurer, all of that, but he was also a venal man of integrity, for he never ceased to renew his vulnerability to punishment, death, and damnation. It is one thing to be corrupt. It is another to behave in a psychologically responsible way toward your own evil.38 Who, or which, was the real Legs Diamond? Whether depicted in antiquated newsreel footage from the late 1920s, black-and-white television productions from the 1960s, a critically acclaimed novel and not well-received Broadway musical from the 1980s, or as an unseen, yet menacing presence in HBO’s gangster series, Boardwalk Empire, Legs Diamond captured the popular imag-

the sign ifyin g h eel  115 ination in both the modern and contemporary eras. Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond is the primary, centering narrative of this historical figure of urban criminality; the Boetticher biopic is the principle text in the “Diamond myth cycle,”39 in which Legs, the suave, cold-hearted gangster, remains a signifying heel.

No t e s  1. Budd Boetticher, When in Disgrace (Santa Barbara, CA: Fallbrook Press 1989), p. 108.  2. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, directed by Budd Boetticher (1960, Warner Bros.).   3. Robert Warshow’s “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” (1948) was the source for these citations and remains a relevant resource about the figure of the gangster in film culture. It may be located in his book, The Immediate Experience, and is available at http://www.srspr.com/ESSAYS/warshow-gangster.pdf   4. Daniel Agacinski, “West and the City,” South Atlantic Review, Vol. 76, No. 2 (spring 2011), 26.   5. Brian Faucette, “Interrogations of Masculinity: Violence and the Retro-Gangster Cycle of the 60s,” Atenea, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, June 2008, 75.   6. Anonymous, “Whalen Warns All to Shun Night Clubs,” New York Times, July 20, 1929, 1.  7. Anonymous, 3.   8. T. J. English, Paddy Whacked (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 129–31.   9. Peter Stanfield, “Punks! Topicality and the 1950s Gangster Bio-Pic Cycle,” Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century, 2010, p. 185 10. Some noteworthy titles from this cycle would be: Machine-Gun Kelly (Roger Corman, 1958), Al Capone (Richard Wilson, 1959), Ma Barker’s Killer Brood (Bill Karn, 1960), Murder, Inc. (Rosenberg, Balaban, 1960), Pretty Boy Floyd (Herbert Leder, 1960), Mad Dog Coll (Burt Balaban, 1961), and Young Dillinger (Terrell Morse, 1965), among others. 11. George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 1992, p. 142. 12. Custen, p. 145. 13. “Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond,” The Untouchables, directed by John Peyser (1960, Desilu Productions). 14. Faucette, p. 76. 15. Boetticher’s Arruza (1972) is a documentary–biography. 16. Stanfield, p. 191. 17. Faucette, p. 75. 18. Toby Roan, “The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video: 27.5, October 2010, 447–8. 19. Joseph Pevney, Portrait of a Mobster (1961, Warner Bros.). 20. According to Boetticher, Danton was one of several actors, including Martin Landau and George C. Scott, who were considered to play Legs in the film. See Stutesman’s interview, pp. 27–8. 21. Patrick Downey, Gangster City: The History of the New York Underworld 1900–1935 (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2004), p. 167. 22. Drake Stutesman, “Interview with Budd Boetticher,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 43, No. 1 (spring 2002), 28. [My italics].

116  r ob e r t s inge r 23. Downey, p. 167. 24. Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Mentheum Drama, 2002), pp. 31–2. 25. Brecht, p. 22. 26. Lucien Ballard, one of the finest of American cinematographers, worked with Boetticher in other films, such as The Magnificent Matador (1955), The Killer is Loose (1956), and Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), as well as working as cinematographer in other films, such as Al Capone (1959), The Killing (1956), Nevada Smith (1966) and The Wild Bunch (1969). 27. Simon Oakland made something of a career playing the male, establishment figure of authority in the American cinema of the 1960s: as the psychiatrist in Psycho, the policeman in West Side Story, Murder, Inc., and again, in Boetticher’s Legs Diamond. 28. Boetticher, p. 110. 29. Rothstein was the subject of his own biopic, King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (Joseph Newman, 1961). He also figures as a central character in the HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. 30. This quote is found in the unpaginated libretto of the Broadway production, The Almost Totally Fictitious Musical Hystery [sic] of Legs Diamond, 1, reel 1-A. The libretto for the 1988 musical, produced at the Mark Hellinger Theater, New York City, is available in the Library for the Performing Arts, at the Lincoln Center. 31. Un-paginated libretto, reel 2-B, p. 3. The stage production, celebrated for its failure, has select scenes currently available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gDQemF-L9Yc and also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lygel15DuCU 32. Stutesman, p. 26. 33. William Kennedy, Legs (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 14 34. Kennedy, p. 13. 35. J. Christian Ingvordsen, The Outfit (1993, Sultan Films). 36. H. L. Wood, “Jack Diamond Slain in Dove St. House: Killers’ Weapon Found,” Albany Times Union, December 18, 1931. Accessed on August 12, 2015. http:// greatlivesinhistory.blogspot.com/2009/07/july-10-jack-legs-diamond.html 37. Kennedy, p. 13. 38. Kennedy, p. 118. 39. This information is available at: http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0050132/?ref_=tt_ cl_t1

Part 2  Introduction

Budd Boetticher’s reputation as an auteur exists due to his memorable work in the Western genre; although his non-Western productions deserve critical reappraisal and will receive renewed attention in this volume, this chapter exclusively celebrates the Boetticher Western. His connection to the Western film genre has deep personal and production roots, dating to Black Midnight (1949), starring Roddy McDowall, and The Wolf Hunters (1949), starring Kirby Grant, both produced during the period in which he was still credited as “Oscar Boetticher.” Under the name “Budd Boetticher,” he proceeded to direct a trio of Westerns in 1952: The Cimarron Kid, starring Audie Murphy; Bronco Buster, starring John Lund; and Horizons West, starring Robert Ryan. Boeticher subsequently directed Seminole (1953), starring Rock Hudson, The Man from Alamo (1953), and Wings of the Hawk (1953), starring Van Heflin, as well as later directing three episodes of the television program Maverick in 1957, five episodes of Zane Grey Theatre in 1960–1, and one episode of The Rifleman in 1961. He continued to work in the genre until 1969, when he directed A Time for Dying, starring Richard Lapp. It proved to be Boetticher’s final Western feature. However, as the Introduction notes, Boetticher’s most notable achievement directing in the Western genre was the “Ranown Cycle,” a series of seven films featuring the Western male icon, Randolph Scott: Seven Men from Now (1956), Decision at Sundown (1957), The Tall T (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), Westbound (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Part 2 examines the Ranown Cycle at length, from multiple critical perspectives, exploring the films for which Boetticher is best known.

c h apter 7

The Ranown Cycle: Budd Boetticher’s “New Look” Western Programmers in 1950s Hollywood Zoë Wallin and Karina Aveyard

T

he Western genre witnessed an immense surge in popularity in 1950s America. Alongside a boost in the publishing of Western literature and the dominance of Western shows on television, Hollywood produced a large number Western features.1 These ranged from Disney’s Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1955) based on a children’s television series, to star-­studded, critically acclaimed contemporary Western dramas such as Giant (1956), and everything between. From 1956 to 1960, at the height of the Western boom, Budd Boetticher made a series of six medium-budget color films, starring veteran Western actor Randolph Scott. The first of these independent productions, Seven Men From Now (1956), was scripted by Burt Kennedy and produced under John Wayne’s Batjac company. Following ongoing contractual negotiations between Batjac and Warner Bros., Boetticher and Scott signed a distribution deal with Columbia, where Scott recruited longtime partner and producer Harry Joe Brown. The five films that followed—The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960)—were all produced in collaboration with Scott, Boetticher and Brown. Three of these films were scripted by Burt Kennedy; cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. worked on a similar number. These close collaborations, as well as the consistencies in theme and style between the films, and the compressed time period in which they were produced, allow the pictures to be viewed as a coherent body of work. In this way, the films are commonly termed the “Ranown cycle” after the name of Scott and Brown’s production company. The majority of these films center on the story of a lone hero, played by Scott, who becomes entangled with a group of gunmen as they journey through the wilderness. They explore the complex relationships and motivations of the characters in this isolated company, particularly the

122  zo ë wa llin and karina ave yard affinity and respect between hero and villain, as they head towards a final showdown. Though these films, along with Boetticher’s bullfighting pictures, are generally thought of as being intrinsic to his oeuvre, they have to date received limited critical considerations. Jim Kitses’ structural auteurist evaluation has dominated appraisals with his focus on Boetticher playing out the Western genre’s “rules of the game.”2 There thus remains room to consider the films from a more historically contextualized viewpoint to understand, on a more immediate level, how and why the films were made. From this perspective, the Ranown films can be seen to hold a particular function within the industry, responding to production trends, filling distribution schedules, and answering exhibitors’ demands amid a product shortage, while crossing over to different market sectors to generate interest beyond traditional Western viewers. In considering the Ranown films in their contemporary production and consumption contexts, the “cycle” label, casually attached to the films, can usefully be interrogated from an industrial perspective. Examining the discourse surrounding the films reveals that these movies were of a class of “new look” Western programmers, developed specifically in response to the fall in cinema attendance, changes in viewing demographics and the perceived threat of television. In this chapter the Ranown cycle is explored as part of a particular strategy pursued by Hollywood in the mid to late 1950s, a market-led approach which attempted to take advantage of the commercial viability of the Western genre and the demand from smaller exhibitors for lower-budget genre films, to appeal to a broader audience at a time when cinema admissions were steeply declining. “Programmers” can be understood as situated between A and B feature productions under the classical Hollywood system, where they functioned as low-risk earners designed to fill screen time and guarantee stable returns. Film historian Richard Maltby identifies the programmer class as typically featuring minor stars, middle-range budgets, original stories, and short running times that enabled them to be played on either half of a double bill.3 At a time when the production of lower-budget films was slowing, programmers and their relation to exhibitor complaints of a product shortage, the changing run-zone clearance system, the rise of independent production, and changes in theatrical venues, comprise a significant aspect of the industrial history of 1950s Hollywood about which little has been written. Western theorists George N. Fenin and William K. Everson have identified an emergent production trend of the 1950s in “new look” Westerns, a series of middle-budget programmers that combined the exploitable technological elements of color and widescreen with “adult” themes and complex characterizations in an effort to compete with television.4 This “programmer” classification provides a new frame through which to view the production and exhibition of the Ranown cycle. Reappraising Boetticher’s films on the level of cycle also challenges previous work on Westerns which are predicated on a “ritual” approach to genre or stem

th e ran own cycle  123 from an evolutionary model and which neglect to consider the more immediate role the films played for contemporary viewers. Kitses’ work on Boetticher tends toward the former, locating the genre as a forum for the exploration of fundamental tensions, with the narrative formula enabling a temporary resolution of these universal frustrations.5 He identifies a number of binaries, such as civilization/wilderness, utilized by Boetticher to imbue the form with his own specific philosophy of individualism and morality. Traditional linear views of the Western genre posit the films of this era as an age of classicism, part of a shift to a more complex, cynical worldview; the heroes are damaged and weary, the narrative conventions invoked with an increasing self-reflexivity and irony.6 Though the films may, indeed, display such characteristics, this in itself should not necessarily be seen to signify a new development in the genre. As Tag Gallagher and Peter Stanfield have argued, genres are complex and unstable, with such trends recurring over time as the genre continually waxed and waned in popularity.7 Thus, a cyclical view, rather than a linear one, is a more appropriate model for genres. Peter Stanfield’s own study, Hollywood Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail, takes into account the revised view of genre theorized by Rick Altman and Steve Neale to explore how Hollywood and its subsidiary discourses positioned and understood Western film cycles. This provides a more historically focused, culturally responsive approach; “a study of the Western in history,” rather than as a product of its own history.8 The decade of the 1950s witnessed fundamental changes taking place in the United States. The demographic shifts of the population boom and mass migration to the suburbs were matched by an increase in disposable incomes, the rise of consumerism, and a wider range of alternative leisure activities, including television.9 With a parallel decline in the cinema attendance of audiences and major changes taking place in the structure of the industry, Hollywood was in a state of uncertainty, dubbing the decade “the frantic fifties.”10 The production strategies pursued at this time reveal the industry’s attempts to combat these problems while capitalizing on the social and demographic changes that occurred. The 1948 Paramount decision was, to some degree, responsible for the unstable industrial condition of 1950s Hollywood.11 In an attempt to break the system of vertical integration, the government decreed that the major studios divest themselves of their exhibition chains and reform their unfair distribution policies, including block booking.12 With independent exhibitors no longer buying films in bulk and without the market guaranteed by their own theater chains, the majors had less of an imperative to maintain a steady flow of lowbudget product and ceased producing these films in large quantities. Instead, a policy was pursued whereby fewer, more expensive films were made.13 At the same time, the majors were investing in the technological development of widescreen, color, and multitrack audio processes that accentuated the ­increasingly

124  zo ë wa llin and karina ave yard spectacular films being produced. As a result of these shifts, exhibitors increasingly complained of a product shortage, declaring in Variety, “fewer but bigger pictures can’t keep the theaters going.”14 This affected neighborhood and small-town theaters in particular which often changed films two or three times a week and were dependent upon a steady flow of low-budget pictures to fill their double bills. The two to three hundred films per year required to sustain this were previously guaranteed under the majors’ production policy and blockbooking distribution system; the fall in output, however, from 423 films in 1950 to 283 films in 1955, left exhibitors with little to keep them going.15 Of the nineteen thousand theaters in operation in 1956, 26 percent were doing so at a loss, and a further 56 percent were failing to make a profit.16 Small theaters continued to close over the decade and attendance shrank further, with each situation compounding the other. The industry thus became increasingly concerned with re-engaging this “lost audience,” a term referring to the general decline in numbers as well as specific groups identified as lagging. As the decade wore on, the need to develop strategies to lure viewers back to the big screen became one of the central discourses of the trade press.17 This industrial context also underpinned the growth of independent production companies seeking to exploit the market gap for low-budget genre product. Film historian Peter Lev surmises that, between 1950 and 1956, Hollywood essentially transformed from a “studio system” of production to one based on individually packaged films arranged by producers or talent agencies. By 1957, 58 percent of the pictures released by majors were produced by independent production companies.18 As one such company, Randolph Scott and Harry Joe Brown’s Ranown created a type of independent production unit that could ensure the stable production of a particular type of film needed by exhibitors. This was crucial in securing their ongoing distribution deal with Columbia. Low-budget routine Westerns, or “oaters,” were considered unsophisticated fare and are described in the trade press as specifically aimed at action fans and children, viewers deemed ‘”less discriminating.” These films generally functioned to supply fillers for double bills and matinees, and were associated with neighborhood theaters, action houses and drive-ins.19 Yet this traditional market for the genre was perceived to decline in the 1950s owing to suburbanization and the closure of smaller neighborhood theaters, with industry commentators also believing them to be lured away by television.20 Hy Holliger’s Variety article “Lost Audience: Grass vs Class,” with the ­subheading “Sticks Now on Hicks Pix Kick,” reveals the extent to which the industry’s classifications remained tied to groupings of class, location, and product type. The growing gap between small-town rural communities and large cities is described, emphasizing exhibitors’ ongoing need for “little pictures.”21 Westerns produced at this time sought to fill the market gap for the

th e ran own cycle  125 lower-budget genre films sought by smaller exhibitors while simultaneously adopting elements to set themselves apart from television and broaden their appeal to a wider range of filmgoers and different market sectors. Through a complex strategy of product differentiation, Boetticher’s films attempted both to capture and to transcend the traditional market. The job was made easier by the incredible popularity of Western television shows in the mid to late 1950s and, with the studios’ release of pre-1948 film libraries to television and a boom in Western literature, public interest in the genre was clear.22 Such popularity spurred the production of numerous cycles to take advantage of the genre’s popularity but which also required the development of different features to set them apart.23 Economic film historian John Sedgwick describes product differentiation operating in vertical and horizontal terms. Varieties of products are differentiated vertically when they contain some or more desirable characteristic than others, creating clear-cut choices for consumers, while horizontally differentiated products contain more of some but fewer of other desirable elements, complicating choice.24 Genre can be seen to span horizontal and vertical categories in different ways. For instance, a vertically differentiated hierarchy of “quality” exists within the Western genre according to such classifications as A and B features, and indicated by production values, stars, budgets, length and so on. At the same time, genre films sought to distinguish themselves horizontally within these vertical classifications through their semantic and syntactic elements, their identifiable images and subject matter, here taking the form of cycles. The Ranown cycle represents one such mode, differentiated horizontally from other mid-range Western cycles of the time, such as the “cavalry versus Indians” Westerns, or the “civic consciousness” cycle.25 In 1957, when producer Julian Blaustein was questioned for releasing an expensive (United States) $1,750,000 Western, Cowboy, at a time when television Westerns were saturating the market, he countered that the comparison in scope, quality, and production values made all the difference.26 Variety commented that such big productions could still attract viewers but that programmers might find it increasingly difficult to compete with television. This suggests a clear element of vertical differentiation at work in the saturated market of 1950s Westerns. Here, programmers needed to differentiate themselves vertically from lower-budget fare made for broadcast. As Variety surmised in 1958, cinematic Westerns must now contain some kind of gimmick or exploitable element, such as CinemaScope, in order to compete with television.27 Variety also pointed to some other important shifts, specifically the increasing trend toward producing Westerns with a social message and with more complex and realistic characterizations. Fenin and Everson characterize these “new look” Westerns primarily in terms of structure and aesthetics; as being filmed in one of the newly developed color processes, with recognizable Western stars, and distributed by

126  zo ë wa llin and karina ave yard mid-range studios.28 Boetticher’s Ranown films clearly fit this frame. The trade-press reviews of the films continually highlight the aspects that set them apart from lower-grade Westerns. For instance, the “plus” element of color, cinematography that takes advantage of outdoor locations, and the marquee value carried by Randolph Scott’s name, Ride Lonesome is described as a highgrade oater and a “medium budget film above the general run,” and Decision at Sundown as “one of the better of the new fangled Westerns.”29 Yet this exploitable “new look” was not solely based on such aesthetic or structural criteria but was equally linked to the content of the films, with the subject matter of Boetticher’s The Tall T described in Variety as “offbeat” and “unconventional,” and passing up most “oater clichés to shape up as a brisk entry for the general market.”30 In making color, widescreen Westerns, imbued with the complex characterization associated with “adult” content, the Ranown films were seen to be more flexible in their appeal. Plus, with a maximum running time of eighty minutes, such films could play on either half of the double bill. Boetticher and his collaborators can be clearly positioned within these contemporary trends, exploiting popular conventions of the genre and recent technological developments in order to increase their appeal for viewers and compete with the increasing amount of Western fare to be found on television. Consideration of Boetticher’s films in terms of a cycle, with specific initiation, development and decline and particular aesthetic and thematic patterns, further illuminates their historical industrial context. To date, cycles have largely been explored from a social perspective that considers their development as part of the process of cultural production in the public sphere.31 One such work is Amanda Ann Klein’s American Film Cycles.32 Yet the Ranown films transgress the defining features of Klein’s conception of film cycles in four key ways. The Ranown cycle was spurred by an industrial need to fill exhibitor schedules and combat the “lost audience” crisis rather than being instigated and sustained by a topical social discourse as envisaged under Klein’s model. Second, the production of Boetticher’s films had a degree of security. Klein argues that the commercial success of the initial film of a cycle is crucial, necessary to spur the production of similar features. But the Ranown films were not immediately dependent on ongoing social commentary or the proof of box-office success for the next film in the cycle to be commissioned. Third, the films did not advance or develop their material nor evolve their content over time in a linear manner but remained ultimately tied to their initial format. Indeed, one of the chief “evolutionary” developments, the use of CinemaScope in the final films, was primarily an industrial strategy to compete with television. Finally, the films did not lose audience interest through an increasing irrelevance of content. Instead, the cycle ended once it was no longer needed to fulfill its market function. This suggests a picture of an industrially conceived cycle akin to that theorized by Richard Nowell

th e ran own cycle  127 in his work on teen slasher films and the truncated roller-disco cycle of the late 1970s.33 Nowell argues that film cycles are not necessarily the product of topical discourses, nor do they require a direct causal relationship to a successful box-office hit to develop but are instead determined by industry decisionmakers’ perceptions of the profit potential of a given film type.34 There is little direct information available regarding the box-office performance of the Ranown films. What can be recovered from the press at the time, however, suggests that the commissioning of subsequent movies was not predicated on the box-office success of the previous film. Comments in the trade press indicate that the first film of the cycle, Seven Men From Now, was reasonably successful. For instance, Hollywood Reporter lists the dual bill of Satellite in the Sky and Seven Men From Now as earning upwards of $90,000 across twelve locations in Los Angeles, including the Downtown Paramount, United Artists, and Hawaii theaters.35 Satellite in the Sky was a British science fiction film with high production values, shot in color and CinemaScope, suggesting that the double bill was intended for a wider market than that associated with low-grade oaters. Similarly, the New York Times records Seven Men From Now being paired with the big Broadway adaptation The Bad Seed at the RKO neighborhood theaters in New York City. With The Bad Seed listed seventeenth in Variety’s 1956 roll of top grossers, this pairing again suggests that Warner Bros. situated the film in the first- or second-run market.36 Even before Seven Men was released in mid 1956, Hollywood Reporter had already announced plans for another Scott–Boetticher Western.37 Despite being delayed by Batjac’s negotiations and the move to Columbia, preparation for The Tall T (working title The Captives) began in June 1956 prior to the release of Seven Men From Now and any indication of its commercial success.38 Indeed, the available evidence suggests that the production of all subsequent films in the cycle was only partially dependent on box-office returns. Often, the next film in the series was planned before the release of the previous film and before it had a chance to be proved successful. For example, The Tall T was released on the March 27, 1957, and by April 5, Hollywood Reporter recorded the commencement of Decision at Sundown’s production, and the next film, The Name’s Buchanan, was announced on April 10.39 This pattern of commissioning indicates that, although the cycle had to perform financially, the Ranown pictures were perceived as low risk with a strong potential for stable returns. It also points to the importance of such cycles in fulfilling exhibition needs, forming part of the trickling flow of films that smaller neighborhood and rural theaters required for their double bills and rapid turnovers. In contrast to the cycle’s steady commercial performance, the aesthetics and content of the films were received more ambiguously and deserve further exploration. The evaluations of Seven Men From Now in the trade press do appear somewhat contradictory. This centered on the degree to which it was a

128  zo ë wa llin and karina ave yard “traditional” Western yet contained “adult Western” qualities. For instance, Box Office regarded Seven Men From Now as tied to “recent sagebrush sagas displaying a propensity for replacing the action ingredients of traditional Westerns in favor of dramatics,” though it also mentions that there is “nary a smidgen of soul searching or psychiatric undertones.”40 On the other hand, Hollywood Reporter speaks of the film as “basically a chase Western of the classical type but it has enough psychological overtones so that it escapes routine classification.”41 Variety, too, notes that the film has a “grimness of mood,” identifying it as a revenge Western for the outdoor market and, though Motion Picture Herald rates its prospect as “good,” it regarded it as “another notch on the same old gun.”42 Such contrasting evaluations of the film speak to its ability to straddle the separate market groups conceived by the industry. This continued throughout the cycle, with the trade press rating the films as appealing to the outdoor market of Western fans located in the smaller neighborhood theaters of low-income and rural areas, yet also balancing action with enough elements of appeal for “discriminating” viewers in larger “general” situations.43 By the end of the cycle, Variety praises Comanche Station’s screenplay as a “conscious attempt to create box office features without straining,” and as being true to both Western traditions as well as to the audience appeal factors: a romance that isn’t a conventional love story, younger actors, criminal elements for suspense, mystery and excitement without overly explicit brutality, and dialogue that is spare but also humorous and colorful.44 The common subject matter of the films and its development, or lack thereof, over the course of the cycles, further reinforce the view of the cycle as functioning according to industrial rather than social stimuli. Columbia’s confidence in the films’ ability to generate stable box-office returns was perhaps tied to their firm foundation upon a straightforward storyline, from which it deviated little over the course of the cycle. The Ranown films, and particularly the first two, Seven Men From Now and The Tall T, and final two, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, all scripted by Burt Kennedy, are notable for their similarities to one another, repeating plot points, characters, situations and even dialogue. Boetticher identified the basic premise of the Ranown films: All my films with Randy Scott have pretty much the same story, with variants. A man whose wife has been killed is searching out her murderer. In this way I can show quite subtle relations between a hero wrongly bent on vengeance, and outlaws who, in contrast, want to break with their past. It’s the simplest relationship that exists in the Western.45 In spite of its simplicity, Boetticher felt that the particular treatment of the relationship between the characters gave the films a new edge. Of Lee Marvin’s villain in Seven Men he stated, “for the first time in motion picture history,

th e ran own cycle  129 the leading man wishes he didn’t have to kill him.”46 A somewhat exaggerated claim, perhaps, but the particular characterization of the villain and his complex relationship with the hero is one of the most notable features of the cycle and does act to differentiate it from similar Western cycles. The films of the cycle that receive considerably less attention from critics are those not written by Burt Kennedy or filmed on location at Lone Pine and which Boetticher himself described as inferior.47 Decision at Sundown (1957) and Buchanan Rides Alone (1958) were produced in the middle of the cycle and can be seen as holding less of the identifiable proprietary characteristics that differentiated the other four Ranown films. Alongside these two middle features, Westbound (1959) can be categorized as a film made with Boetticher and Scott to fulfill contractual obligations to Warner Bros. but lacking the usual Ranown contributors and treated as a standard Scott vehicle in Motion Picture Herald.48 Yet, by examining these films and their difference from the “central” four, the operations of the cycle as a whole and the relation to larger trends become more evident. Decision at Sundown, scripted by Charles Lang, was a more complex psychological study, with Scott’s hero unlikable, irrational and psychopathic in his misplaced drive for revenge. Set in a town, Decision at Sundown can also be considered alongside the “civic consciousness” Western cycle, as, over the course of the narrative, the complacent townspeople are eventually spurred by Scott to stand up to the villain and drive him from the town. Indeed, Box Office’s “exploitips” for the film urge exhibitors to play up the “adult Western” angle and use illustrations of clocks, a reference to the key image of High Noon.49 Variety praised the film as “one of the better of the new-fangled Westerns,” with complex screenplay and an offbeat role for Scott.50 With a script also by Charles Lang, though Burt Kennedy was brought in for uncredited last-minute rewrites, Buchanan Rides Alone, too, has a town setting. The plot and situations themselves are the focus here, following complex and absurd twists and turns as the hero constantly escapes and is recaptured, and the greedy, villainous heads of the town are played off against one another. Variety described the film as a “workhorse of a saddle opera,” being honest, reliable and satisfactory, whereas Motion Picture Herald predicted a better outlook, rating its offbeat situations as “very good” for exhibitors, and “destined for deserving box office returns,” a sentiment echoed in Hollywood Reporter.51 It is interesting to note that, although these films are far less critically acclaimed in subsequent literature, this is not reflected in the Motion Picture Herald’s “Film Buyer’s Rating” where they are rated as equal to, if not better than, the others in the cycle.52 This perhaps suggests the perceived strengths of the Ranown cycle may have remained in their generic appeal to the traditional markets of Western fans rather than to the general market that “new look” films attempted to capture with cross-over appeal. These two films reveal the common practice of adapting popular elements

130  zo ë wa llin and karina ave yard from other Westerns to increase their marketability in the saturated context of the 1950s. Though the films were relatively successful, Boetticher’s return to the previous structure of the earlier Ranown films, once Burt Kennedy was again available, suggests that their treatment of the revenge-journey subject was a more appropriate market strategy for differentiation. This movement of reversion indicates the cyclical rather than linear development of the Ranown films. One clear element of linear development, however, was aesthetic rather than content driven. This was the adoption of CinemaScope for the final two films which emphasized the “new look” nature of the Ranown films as differentiated from television. As Boetticher declared: “the real reason we used ’scope was to combat this horrible thing called television that was raising its filthy head.”53 CinemaScope allowed an emphasis on the spectacular Western landscape, an element again marked as a selling point in the trade press.54 New York Times critic Bosley Crowther described the links between the Westerns’ emphasis on landscape, the spectacle ethos of the decade, and its role in competing with television: It is the separate endeavor to compete with the television Westerns that are herding the bovine public into one great living-room corral. If Gunsmoke and Wagon Train and that ilk can pull millions of viewers to the 21-inch screens to look at endless repetitions of cowboy clichés in flickering black-and-white, why shouldn’t a two-hour-plus compendium of all the plots and variations in the book, blazoned in color on a wide screen and studded with stars, pull twice as much?55 This also illustrates the increasing difficulty with which the programmer class would be able to differentiate themselves from television and compete with A features, indicating that its ability to fulfill its original industrial function was coming to an end. Towards the close of the decade, the elements of differentiation in the “new look” Westerns were becoming less clear-cut. Television producers were developing Western programs along adult lines and occupied an increasing amount of screen time. While there remained the usual “hokum” series, Life noted that big dramatic shows more interested in “inner-life” than the ­outdoors were gaining prominence. These contained new “adult” heroes who are “paragons of neither virtue or wisdom and sometimes even has to do with women [sic].”56 Films were increasingly limited in the available options to distinguish themselves, with Crowther writing in 1959 of Westerns in color and widescreen as having become standard, “as impressive as college education these days.”57 As Fenin and Everson argue, within a few years of their inception “new look” Westerns were soon relegated to the “supporting feature” category, being little more profitable than the Bs they were initially made to replace.58 Though some B Westerns continued to be produced into the 1960s

th e ran own cycle  131 with A. C. Lyles at Paramount and George Kay at Universal, the programmer class of Westerns appeared to be almost extinct. Variety wrote of the final Ranown film Comanche Station in 1960: The feature Western of any category grows scarcer and scarcer, and the medium budget film of this genre has practically disappeared. So rare, indeed, are these examples of the once predominant staple of the Hollywood screen, that one such as Comanche Station even has some novelty value. There must be an audience left for these films, despite the plethora of such fare on television, an audience now left with little from which to choose.59 By the end of their cycle, the Ranown films seemed almost anachronistic, produced to meet a demand no longer present. It was this that led to their decline. Though Klein argues that cycles end when they fail to hold viewer interest, the Ranown film series was not based on a direct and ongoing involvement in social discourses in the way envisaged by Klein.60 Social relevance was not crucial to the survival of this cycle nor did it contribute to its termination. The reviews for the final film, Comanche Station, indicate that it still held “good” prospects for exhibitors and was still able to connect with viewers.61 It was the very nature of Boetticher’s repetition of familiar Western conventions and play upon viewers’ familiarity and expectations, combined with the “new look” elements, that had enabled the films to stand above the regular oater fare at theaters and, initially, on television. The Ranown cycle had fulfilled a specific industrial role in widening viewer appeal at a time when audience demographics were shifting. As the traditional fan base for Westerns diminished through demographic changes, theater closures and television, the “general audience” became increasingly important for “new look” Westerns. Their success, however, was relatively short-lived. The oversaturation of the market, ever-growing competition from television Westerns, and growing orientation towards “event” pictures made it difficult for such cross-over Westerns successfully to differentiate themselves and maintain audience appeal. Taken as a cycle, Boetticher’s Ranown films illuminate one of the industrial strategies that Hollywood developed in response to the exhibition and “lost audience” crises of the time. Working within the popular form of the Western, Boetticher applied aesthetic, structural and thematic strategies of vertical and horizontal differentiation to target a range of market sectors. The Ranown films, as “new look” Westerns, were part of an attempt to compete with television and to integrate aspects associated with higher-quality films, such as color and widescreen, in order to appeal to viewers increasingly orientated towards the top end of the market. Yet they also retained enough conventional generic elements to keep regular audiences interested, ensuring the films’ steady financial returns

132  zo ë wa llin and karina ave yard and ongoing production. Approaching Boetticher’s pictures from this industrial perspective enriches evaluations from aesthetic and auteurist standpoints. Viewing how the films functioned in their original context for the filmmakers and distributors indicates an overlooked market function while also signaling how they might have been viewed by audiences, not in isolation but as one Western cycle among many, maintaining repetitive elements to satisfy viewers’ expectations, yet imbued with enough of Boetticher’s own aesthetic style and thematic concerns to generate an appeal that endures to this day.

NOTES   1. John Cawelti identifies that Westerns made up 10.64 percent of all United States fiction published in 1958, eight of the top ten television shows were Westerns in March 1959, and fifty-four Western features were released by Hollywood in 1958. John G. Cawelti, The SixGun Mystique (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973), p. 1.  2. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Pekinpah; Studies of Authorship Within the Western (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), pp. 89–131.  3. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 132–3.   4. George N. Fenin, and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the Seventies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 306.  5. Kitses, Horizons West, pp. 89–131; Cawelti, Six-Gun Mystique, p. 57.  6. Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 528–31, 581-2; Philip French, Westerns (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), pp. 57, 76; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 64.   7. Tag Gallagher, “Shootout at the Genre Coral: problems of the ‘Evolution of the Western,’” in Grant, Barry Keith (ed.), Film Genre Reader III (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 262–4; Peter Stanfield, Hollywood Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), p. 7; Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 218; Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 67.  8. Stanfield, Hollywood Westerns, p. 6.  9. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 82–3. 10. “Frantic Fifties: Audience War,” Variety, December 30, 1959, 1. 11. Suzanne M. Donohue, American Film Distribution: The Changing Market Place (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1987), p. 35. 12. Block booking refers to the practice whereby the major distributors sold their films to exhibitors in bulk, with exhibitors forced to take a required amount of Bs along with A features, usually in packages of five or six. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 124. 13. Barbara Stones, America Goes to the Movies: 100 Years of Motion Picture Exhibition (North Hollywood, CA: National Association of Theater Owners, 1993), p. 134. 14. “Gimmicks Not Enough: Also Give Branch Managers More Say,” Variety, January 6, 1954, 7; “Exhib Back Features Stack as Bs; Hard For Major Distribs To Appreciate,” Variety, November 24, 1954, 21.

th e ran own cycle  133 15. Blair Davis, The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low Budget Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), p. 74; Fred Hift, “‘Right Now is the Dream Come True for Indie Film Producers’ Sez Albert Lewin,” Variety, March 10, 1954, 3. 16. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 164. 17. “More Data About Audience Taste? Great! But How Does East Get Studios to Act on Finding?” Variety, May 23, 1956, 3, 16. 18. Peter Lev, Transforming the Screen: 1950–1959 (New York: Scribners, 2003), p. 32; Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 124. 19. “Tension at Table Rock Review,” Variety, October 3, 1956, 8; “Gun the Man Down,” Variety, March 6, 1957, 6; “Terror in a Texas Town,” Variety, August 20, 1958, 6.; “The Oregon Trail,” Variety, August 19, 1958, 6. Westerns were included in lists of films aimed at the juvenile market. “Fare For a Young Bunch? We Got ’Em!,” Variety, September 17, 1956, 13. 20. “‘Subsequent Runs’ Called Victim Of Shifting Biz Of Tomorrow,” Variety, December 18, 1957, 19. 21. Hollinger, “Lost Audience: Grass vs Class,” 1, 86. 22. “Western Bigger Than Ever: Top Whodunnit Features 10–1,” Variety, July 11, 1956, 11; B. Chandler, “This Week’s Guess as to Westerns,” Variety, April 8, 1959, 1. 23. “Will TV Bring Back Westerns? [Answer: It Has],” Variety, March 13, 1957, 1; “In Westerns, as in Sex, Vive la Diff,” Variety, October 9, 1957, 20. 24. John Sedgwick, “Product Differentiation at the Movies,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (2002), 702. 25. Calvary-versus-Indian Westerns included The Last Frontier (1955), Pillars of Sky (1956), 7th Cavalry (1956), Ride Out for Revenge (1957), and the “civic consciousness” cycle started with The Gunfighter (1950) and included such films as High Noon (1952), Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), Silver Lode (1954), At Gunpoint (1955), Terror in a Texas Town (1958). 26. “In Westerns, As In Sex, Vive La Diff,” 20. 27. “New Western Gait: Horror,” Variety, July 4, 1958, 7. 28. Fenin, and Everson, The Western, p. 306. 29. “Seven Men from Now,” Variety, July 11, 1956, 6; “The Tall T,” Variety, April 3, 1957, 24; “Decision at Sundown,” Motion Picture Herald, November 2, 1957, 586; “The Tall T,” Hollywood Reporter, March 27, 1957, 3. “Ride Lonesome,” Variety, February 18, 1959, 6; “Decision at Sundown,” Variety, November 6, 1957, 6. 30. “The Tall T,” Variety, April 3, 1957, 6, 24. 31. Peter Stanfield, “‘Pix Biz Spurts With War Fever,’ Film and the Public Sphere—Cycles and Topicality,” Film History, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2013), 215–36; Tim Snelson, “Delinquent Daughters: Hollywood’s War Effort and the ‘Juvenile Delinquency Picture’ Cycle,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013), 56–72; Amanda Ann Klein, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems and Defining Subcultures (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011). 32. Klein, American Film Cycles, pp. 3–4. 33. Richard Nowell, Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2011); Richard Nowell, “Hollywood Don’t Skate: US Production Trends, Industry Analysis, and the Roller Disco Movie,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013), 73–91. 34. Nowell, “Hollywood Don’t Skate,” 73. 35. “‘Satellite’ and ‘7 Men’ Strong Combination,” Hollywood Reporter, August, 14, 1954, 4. 36. “Of Local Origin,” New York Times, November 28, 1956; “Top Film Grossers of 1956,” Variety, January 2, 1957, p. 1.

134  zo ë wa llin and karina ave yard 37. “Boetticher Directing on Second Stint for Batjac,” Hollywood Reporter, October 19, 1955, 1; “Kennedy Scripts ‘The Captives’ For Batjac,” Hollywood Reporter, November 2, 1955, 2; “Batjac and Warners Nix–Bob Fellowes to do Randy Scott film with Batjac,” Hollywood Reporter, December 2, 1955, 1. 38. “Boetticher Reporting,” Hollywood Reporter, June 21, 1956, 2. 39. “Decision At Sundown in Production,” Hollywood Reporter, April 5, 1957, 15; “Scott Signed for The Name’s Buchanan,” Hollywood Reporter, April 10, 1957, 3. 40. “Seven Men From Now,” Box Office, July 14, 1956. 41. “Seven Men From Now Will Satisfy Western Clientele,” Hollywood Reporter, July 11, 1956, 3. 42. “Seven Men From Now,” Variety, July 11, 1956, 6; “Seven Men From Now,” Motion Picture Herald, July 14, 1956, 909. 43. “Seven Men From Now,” Box Office, July 14, 1956. 44. “Comanche Station,” Variety, February 24, 1960, 6. 45. Bud Boetticher, quoted in Bertrand Tavernier, “Trans-Oceanic Interview with Budd Boetticher,” Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 157 (1964), reprinted in Jim Kitses, Budd Boetticher: The Western: a BFI Education Department Dossier. (London: British Film Institute, 1969), 12. 46. Boetticher quoted in Drake Stutesman, “Interview with Budd Boetticher,” Framework, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2002), 21. 47. Boetticher in Tavernier, “Trans-Oceanic Interview,” 13–14. 48. “Westbound,” Motion Picture Herald, April 4, 1959, 212. 49. “Decision at Sundown,” Box Office, November 2, 1957. 50. “Decision at Sundown,” Variety, November 6, 1957, 6. 51. “Buchanan Rides Alone,” Variety, August 6, 1958, 7; “Buchanan Rides Alone,” Motion Picture Herald, August 2, 1958, 928; “Buchanan Rides Alone,” Hollywood Reporter, July 31, 1958, 3. 52. Four months after initial release, the The Tall T, for instance, had five average, seven below average, and three poor ratings, similar to Ride Lonesome’s five average, six below average and one poor. On the other hand, Decision At Sundown, six months after its release held eleven average, eleven below average, and five poor, whereas Buchanan Rides Alone had three above average, one average, one below average and one poor, “Film Buyers Rating: ‘The Tall T,’” Motion Picture Herald, June 29, 1957, 449; “Film Buyers Rating: ‘Decision At Sundown,’” Motion Picture Herald, July 5, 1958, 660; “Film Buyers Rating: ‘Buchanan Rides Alone,’” Motion Picture Herald, January, 31, 1959, 145; “Film Buyers Rating: ‘Ride Lonesome,’” Motion Picture Herald, June 20, 1959, 313. 53. Boetticher in W. W. Dixon, “Budd Boetticher: The Last Interview,” Film Criticism, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2002), 52–3. 54. “Ride Lonesome,” Hollywood Reporter, February 4, 1959, 3. 55. Bosley Crowther, “The Expanding West(ern),” New York Times, 10 May 1959. 56. A 1957 Life article describes how Western shows then occupied sixty-four hours a week of screen time. “Tv Goes Wild Over Westerns,” Life, October 28, 1957, 99–102. 57. Crowther, “The Expanding West(ern).” 58. Fenin, and Everson, The Western, p. 306. 59. “Seven Men From Now,” Variety, July 11, 1956, 6; “The Tall T,” Variety, July 11, 1956, 6; “Buchanan Rides Alone,” Variety, August 6, 1958, 6; “Ride Lonesome,” Variety, February 18, 1959, 8; “Comanche Station,” Variety, February 24, 1960, 6. 60. Klein, American Film Cycles, p. 14. 61. “Comanche Station,” Variety, February 24, 1960, 6; “Comanche Station,” Motion Picture Herald, March 12, 1960, 620.

c h apter 8

Framings, Motifs, and Floating Poker Games in Seven Men from Now (1956) Steve Neale

S

even Men from Now was the first in the now celebrated cycle of Westerns starring Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher. It was scripted by Burt Kennedy, financed and produced by Andrew V. McLaglen, Robert E. Morrison, and an uncredited John Wayne for Batjac Productions (Wayne’s production company), and distributed by Warner Bros. Filmed in WarnerColor, and with an initial running time of seventy-seven minutes,1 Seven Men from Now was conceived as a modest feature, rather than a low-budget B film and, following its official release on August 4, 1956, it was exhibited on its own in at least two cinemas in Washington as well as on double-feature bills with films from the mid-1950s such as The Rawhide Years, King of the Coral Sea, The Steel Jungle and Satellite in the Sky.2 Along with André Bazin, champions of Seven Men from Now and the subsequent Boetticher–Scott films include Andrew Sarris who described them “partly as allegorical Odysseys and partly as floating poker games where every character took turns at bluffing about his hand until the final showdown,” hence the title of this essay, and Jim Kitses who wrote a chapter on Boetticher in Horizons West.3 Kitses provides a detailed commentary on Seven Men from Now in the DVD that was released by Paramount in 2007. I shall draw on Kitses’ commentary at a number of points in this essay. But I aim principally to analyze the ways in which the staging, framing, acting, and editing in three key scenes in Seven Men from Now serve not just to articulate passages of action or conversation (or both) but to do so in ways that complement or augment the nature and implications of what is said, what is done, and what is meant, suggested, or signified. In addition, I aim to draw attention to a series of stagings, framings and visual motifs that serve to link Ben Stride (Randolph Scott) and Annie Greer (Gail Russell) and their largely unspoken attraction to

136  s t e v e n e ale one another. Given the likely input of editor Everett Sutherland and cinematographer William H. Clothier, we cannot be sure that every camera movement, cut, and set-up were devised by Boetticher alone. But, by the mid 1950s, and though final cuts were the province of producers, most directors would have been in a position to decide on the nature and shape of scenes, shots and edits provided that they did not exceed shooting schedules, running times, or budgets.

T he O pe ni n g S c e n e The opening shot in Seven Men from Now begins outside at night with the rain pouring. A clap of thunder, a flash of lightning, and a chord of music introduce the credits and the theme song. Once the credits and the song come to an end, the camera tracks forward and a man who is subsequently identified as Ben Stride (Randolph Scott) enters the frame from the right. He stands for a moment as lightning, thunder, and another musical chord underline his appearance. Then he walks away from the camera as it pans left to keep him in frame, and he continues walking past shrubs and cacti toward a rock-andcave formation in the distance. We cut to a closer framing as Stride nears the entrance to the cave, brushes past more shrubs, continues walking forward, and then comes to a halt. At this point we cut to a medium long-shot. Stride is now in partial shadow on the left-hand side of the frame standing next to two unnamed men who are seated behind an open fire in the cave on the right. We cut to a close‑up of Stride, his expressionless face lit fiercely by the flames against the surrounding darkness. Stride begins to speak: “Don`t mean to bust in on yer but I couldn`t help seein’ a fire from the ridge.” We cut to a reverseangle two-shot of the men. The man on the left responds with a mixture of aggression and nervousness: “What do ya . . .?” But his companion intervenes. “You heard the gent,” he says and, as we cut to back to Stride, he continues: “He’s just stepped by to get out of the rain. Ain’t that right?” “That’s right,” says Stride as we return to the two-shot. “Come on in” replies the man on the right, and we return to Stride as he thanks his interlocutor and moves closer to the fire, the coffee, and the men.4 In addition to the thunder and lightning, and in addition to the garish lighting of Stride as he stands at the entrance to the cave, the sense of tension and the hint of potential conflict can at this point be found in the lack of open smiles and friendly introductions, in the nervously aggressive response of the first man, and in the overstated and therefore potentially double-edged welcome of the second. This is more than enough time to generate tension and, as the scene proceeds, this tension is heightened and sustained by cutting back and forth between wordless looks and framing, and by underlining the delib-

fr a m i ngs , m o tif s , and f lo atin g poker games  137 erate nature of what might otherwise come across as ordinary and everyday actions such as pouring or sipping coffee. It is further augmented by the tension evident in what begins as small talk: “Mighty wet night for a man to be out,” ”Sure is,” and segues via “You must’ve rode a long way,” to which he replies, “I walked.” The conversation continues: “Ain’t you got no horse?”; “Did have. Chiricahua jumped me about a mile back”; “They stole it?”; “They ate him,” which leads to the climax: “Don`t I know you from somewhere, mister?”; “Ever been in Silver Springs?”; “Can`t say as I have”; “I come from there”; “I heard there was a killing in Silver”; “Yeah, I heard”; “The rain’s slacking off. We`d better get moving before . . . ”; “What’s your hurry? No close town around.” The approaching climax to this scene is here signaled not only by the nature and content of the dialogue, which consists of a particularly terse set of statements and questions, but by a change in the patterns of editing and framing. Once Stride has poured his coffee and once the patterns of statement and surmise and question and answer have begun, we cut back and forth between two stable set-ups: a closer two shot of the men by the fire and a closer shot of Stride, all of them blocked in seated and stationary positions. There are thirteen shots in this particular segment: seven of the unnamed men and six of Stride. The only variants are the content of the dialogue and the extent to which and the points at which we cut away from Stride in order to register the men’s reactions to what he has said or is saying. Because they are unpredictable, however, these variants add to the tension, and the patterns of edits and are only broken when Stride reaches for the pot by the fire and pours himself another coffee in medium close-up. From here we cut to a close-up of the man on the right as he turns to the topic of “that killin’,” and then back to the close-up of Stride as the man on the right continues: “Ever catch up to them fellers that done it?” Stride looks intensely at each of the men in turn; then we cut to a new two-shot framing of the men and back to Stride. “Two of ’em,” says Stride as he looks at each of the men again. The tension is now at a peak and conversation at last gives way to action as we cut to a close-up of the man on the right who draws a gun from his holster and aims at Stride. In keeping with the oblique and elliptical nature of the dialogue, and the narration as a whole, we do not see the man on the left firing his gun. Nor do we see Stride or the man on the right firing his gun. Instead, we cut away from the action to register the reaction of two horses tethered outside the cave as four rapid gunshots ring out in succession on the soundtrack, followed by a whinny from one of the horses and a strident chord of music. At this point and, though Randolph Scott’s status as a star suggests that Stride has survived and killed the men, we do not know for sure until we cut to a series of daylight desert settings showing Stride on one of the horses pulling the other horse behind him.

138  s t e v e n e ale

T he R e l a y S t a t i o n a t N i gh t As his journey continues, Stride encounters Annie Greer and her husband John (Walter Reed). The Greers’ covered wagon is stuck in mud and Stride helps them to pull it out. John and Annie confess their inexperience, and John asks Stride to ride with them as they head to the border town of Flora Vista on their way to California, following advice provided by “a feller” in Silver Springs. Stride reacts to the mention of Silver Springs and agrees to guide them. As they journey through the rocky landscape, they are observed by two men with rifles, and the man on the right, subsequently identified as Masters, tells the man on the left, subsequently identified as Clete: “They`re headed for Flora Vista alright.” Stride and the Greers journey on, and the cavalry warns them of the dangers posed by the Chiricahua. But Stride is dismissive. He says that the Chiricahua are simply hungry and looking for food, a fact alluded to in the opening scene and borne out in a later one, and he and the Greers continue on their way, eventually stopping at a relay station for the Overland stagecoach. The relay station has been abandoned because of the alleged threat posed by the Chiricahua. The only person left is an old timer who decides to leave as well. At this point, Masters (Lee Marvin) and Clete (Don Barry) join Stride. “I`ve been lookin’ to find yer, Masters,” says Stride. “Soon as I heard about what happened at Silver Springs I figured you would,” says Masters. “I ain`t ever sunk that low.” Though we are already aware of Silver Springs and its significance for Stride, we still do not know what happened there. It is a feature of the film that key information is routinely withheld, as is apparent in the film’s first scene. Moreover, because the conversation between Masters and Stride, which might have led to further details, is at this point curtailed by the arrival of the Greers, the suppression of information continues. It is only in the next scene, which takes place at the relay station at night, that what happened at Silver Springs, or most of it at least, is finally revealed. This scene begins with Stride on guard outside the relay-station building. He is framed in medium shot in the foreground on the right, seated on a hitching post and cradling a rifle on his knee. One of the Greers’ horses is tethered in the foreground on the left-hand side of the frame and the Greers’ wagon is partially framed and clearly visible behind it. In response to the sound of a coyote, or to the sound of a coyote made by one of the Chiricahua, Stride turns his head to the right and looks off to the foreground. Then he leans forward and raises his head and, from here, we cut to a closer medium long-shot of the station exterior to show Annie framed momentarily in the window as she crosses the room inside, then on to an ensemble shot of the relay-station interior. Masters and Clete are eating at a table, Annie is serving coffee, and John seated at a smaller table on his own near the window. Masters tells the Greers

fr a m i ngs , m o tif s , and f lo atin g poker games  139 that Stride was once the sheriff at Silver Springs and that his wife was killed in a robbery at the Wells Fargo freight office. Annie and John react in separate close-ups. John’s role in the robbery has as yet to be revealed so, at this point, we read his concern as more straightforward than it is and, from here, we cut back and forth between further framings before returning to Stride on the hitching post outside. Stride is still framed in medium shot in the foreground on the right-hand side of the frame and he is still cradling his rifle. He turns to look off foreground, right; then he turns back to look off left and adjusts the position of his rifle. As he does so, Annie opens the relay-station door in the background center, right. Framed momentarily in the doorway with a cup of coffee in her hand, she walks forward, passes behind the horse, and comes to a halt beside it in the foreground on the left. At this point the camera tracks forward to reframe Stride and Annie in closer two shot in order not only to underline their proximity but to suggest the delicacy with which Annie offers Stride the cup of coffee and, with it, the opportunity for Stride to talk about the death of his wife. Following the cry of another coyote—“Is that a coyote?”; “I hope so”— Annie tells Stride how “Mr Masters just told us about your wife.” Stride bows his head in silence as Annie continues: “Would you like to talk about it? I know it`s none of my business, but . . . ” We cut to a close-up of Stride. He looks up, then down, thus averting eye contact with Annie and remembering events that he would rather not discuss. “You`re right Mrs Greer, it’s none of your business and it won`t make it any easier,” he says. We cut to a close-up of Annie who, at this point, turns away and wishes him good night. But Stride, perhaps aware of his churlishness and aware, too, of Annie’s well-meant gesture in offering him the chance to tell her how his wife was killed, decides to continue the conversation. “Mrs Greer,” he says off camera and, from here, we cut back to Stride in a new close-up framing. “There`s one thing Masters didn`t tell you.” We cut back to Annie who turns back to face him and takes a step forward, her hand on the mane of the horse beside her. Then we cut back to Stride who raises his eyes to look at her: “The reason why my wife is dead.” He looks away again and continues: “Six months ago I lost my job as the sheriff of Silver Springs. Three of those months I tried to get work.” We cut back to Annie as Stride continues: “Didn’t find any. Town allowed as I could be the deputy. But”—as we cut back to Stride—“my pride wouldn’t let me so my wife had to take a job.” He looks down in shame and sorrow: “a clerk checkin’ freight for Fargo. She was working at that job,” and looks up at Annie, “on the night she was killed.” We cut back to Annie who is gently stroking the horse, then back to the closer of the earlier two-shot framings. Stride hands Annie the now empty coffee cup and says good night. Annie in close-up looks down in sorrow and

140  s t e v e n e ale begins to turn away, brushing the horse with her hand as we return once again to the two-shot framing. The camera reframes right as she continues walking toward the relay station door. As she enters through the doorway and, as Stride, who is now on guard again, looks off left and places his rifle upright on his thigh, Masters emerges from the relay-station doorway, looks back in ostentatious admiration at Annie, “Mighty fancy lady that Mrs Greer,” he says, and then turns and begins to swagger forward to engage in conversation with Stride. Unlike the conversation between Stride and Annie, which involves a number of set‑ups, cuts, and framings, the remainder of the scene prolongs the framing used to show Annie walking toward and entering the relay-station doorway and Masters emerging from it. Stride is still framed on the right in the foreground and is initially startled by Masters’s presence; Stride turns his head toward the relay‑station doorway as Masters delivers his remarks. But, once aware of Masters’s presence, Stride turns away to look off left as before, feigning more interest in the possible presence of the Chiricahua than in what Masters has to say. Undeterred—and following the howl of another real or feigned coyote—Masters looks off right, then left and continues talking. “Think they’d get tired a crawlin’ out there, playin’ coyote,” he says. Then he looks back at Stride. Stride looks down as Masters changes the subject: “Sheriff,” he says, “folks back in Silver City said you high-tailed it out of town without knowin’ how much they made off with.” He looks up markedly at Stride: “Fargo box near full of the stuff. Course I know that ain’t the reason for ridin’ ’em down, but that’s kinda why I`m taggin’ along with you.” Masters looks down and continues: “You see, me and Clete figured that when they left Silver they scattered, seven of ’em. Two fresh dug holes where your trackin’ began.” Masters looks at Stride. “That leaves five still alive, and one of ’em’s got that strong box.” Still looking off left, Stride replies: “So?” “So, if they’re headed for Flora Vista,” says Masters “that means they`re fixin’ to trade the gold across the border and ride away rich, that is, of course, unless you catch up to ’em.” “And if I do?” says Stride. “Then all that stands between me and 20,000 dollars,” says Masters, “is you.” At this point Masters looks up at Stride, wishes him good night, and turns away. Stride turns his head to look at Masters. “Masters,” he says, prompting the latter to turn back, hands on hips to face him and says, “Yeah?” “You know who they are, don`t you?” to which he replies, “Maybe.” “One thing’s for sure though, they know you. See that’s the trouble bein’ a sheriff; the only time you get to know a man by his face is when you shut a cell door on it, like you did mine.” This is the only point at which we learn something specific about the past relationship between Masters and Stride and, as Masters turns jauntily away and exits via the relay-station door, we cut back to Stride, who turns to look off left, moves his rifle, and cradles it in the crook of his arm once more.

fr a m i ngs , m o tif s , and f lo atin g poker games  141 Throughout this scene we are made aware not only of the nature of the characters involved but of the differences between them, and these differences are underlined not only in and through their respective looks, deportment and gestures, nor only in and through the character of their various verbal exchanges, but in the nature of the staging, framing and editing. Masters’s provocatively talkative flamboyance, which has already been evident in the relay station, and which is marked throughout by the extravagant nature of his gestures and movements, is here characterized by its calculated challenges to Stride to respond to what Masters says and knows. It also contrasts not only with the self‑absorbed reticence of Stride5 but with sensitivity that has earlier marked Annie’s offer of an opportunity for Stride to talk about the death of his wife, the nature of her response to his account, and the nature of her gentle, sympathetic and undemonstrative withdrawal.

Co f f e e a nd C o n v e r sa t i o n i n t h e Wa g on The following morning, an encounter with the Chiricahua ends with the donation of Stride’s spare horse and, from here, Stride, Clete, Masters and the Greers move on. A little while later they come across a man being chased by the Chiricahua. The man is rescued by Stride who is unaware that he is one of the Wells Fargo robbers. But the robber recognizes Stride and nearly kills him, and Stride is saved only by the intervention of Masters who is aware of the robber’s identity—and the size of the robbers’ haul—and who shoots the robber in the back. From here the group moves on. Having camped in daylight, in a scene in which Masters again notes the signs of mutual attraction between Annie and Stride, the members of the group become aware that a storm is brewing and that it is best to move on and prepare for a rainy night. Evoking elements of the film’s first scene, it is now nighttime and the rain has come. Having tended the horses with Clete, Masters heads for the wagon. As we cut to a shot of its interior, we see Stride in mid-ground on the left, Annie nearer the camera in the foreground on the right, and John further back center left next to a hurricane lamp—the only visible source of light. Masters pulls back the wagon’s cover flap, stating: “Well, right cosy in here, ain’t it?” Then he sits down at the back in the center. From here he can see everyone and everything and thus, from here, can dominate the space and those within it. He may be unable to exercise his command of extravagant gestures and bodily movements but he is more than able to demonstrate his command of psychology and speech. Masters offers a jaunty smile as John bids him welcome. “Thanks,” says Masters, as Stride, coffee cup in hand, looks up then down dismissively. “Coffee?” says Annie. “Don’t mind if I do,” says Masters. Annie looks down

142  s t e v e n e ale as she pours a cup of coffee. “I’m afraid it`s not as hot as it might be,” she says as John drinks coffee from his cup and turns to Masters. “Just so it’s black,” says Masters as Annie passes the newly poured coffee to Stride who passes it to John. Annie looks up: “Storm seems to be letting up some.” “Yes ma’am,” says Masters as John passes him his coffee. Masters looks at John: “Stars’ll be showin’ time it’s your turn to take guard,” he says. Then Masters raises the cup of coffee to his lips as Stride raises his. John turns to Masters: “Mr Masters, you know this part of the country.” Annie looks up at Masters: “Every rock.” “Well`, says John, “how far would you say we are from Flora Vista?” Masters looks up and Stride looks up at John then at Masters: “With an easy start come the morning,” Masters says, “you should be able to noon there with no trouble at all.” As Masters looks down at his coffee cup and drinks, so does Stride. “Thank you,” says John who lifts his cup of coffee to his lips and drinks as well. Masters looks up at Annie: “Sure is a good cup of coffee ma’am.” Annie looks up at Masters and John continues drinking.6 Then we cut to a high-angle medium close-up of Annie who is now looking down in embarrassment and avoiding Masters’s gaze. From here we cut to a close-up of Masters, who looks up and off right at Annie, then to a two shot of Masters and John. Masters looks down at John and speaks: “Mr Greer, how come you ever to marry such a handsome woman?” he says, and from here the awkwardness and tension begin to mount as we cut to a reverse-angle two shot of Annie who is on the left‑hand side of the frame, and Stride who is on the right. Stride and Annie look up towards Masters as John begins to speak off-screen: “Well, I . . . ” Then Annie interrupts and responds to Masters’s words. “We fell in love, Mr Masters,” she says. From here we cut back to Masters and John in two shot. “Love?” says Masters, “That’s a might fancy word.” Masters looks in Stride’s direction, then in Annie’s, clearly aware of, and clearly implying, their mutual attraction. We cut back to the two shot of Annie and Stride as the latter looks up then down then up once more. “That`s the trouble with the like of you and me sheriff,” says Masters. “We never take time out for the fancy things of life.” We cut back to the two shot of Masters and John, the latter drinking coffee as Masters continues: “We leave that to the fellers that run sort of gentle, soft . . . ” Masters pauses, allowing the implications of his remarks to resonate as he drains his cup of coffee and, from here, we cut back to the two shot of Stride and Annie who look at one another, then up at Masters. Annie seeks to diffuse the tension by offering more coffee. The tension, however, has by no means diffused and, as we cut back to the two shot of Masters and John, the former hands his empty coffee cup to John who passes it to Stride. “Been that way ever since I guess,” says Masters, who appears to be concluding his story as we cut back to the two shot of Annie and Stride who hands the empty coffee cup to Annie who turns away to fill it. As she does so, Stride looks up at Masters who continues to speak off-screen, beginning to tell an even more pointed tale.

fr a m i ngs , m o tif s , and f lo atin g poker games  143 “Of course that ain’t sayin’ that women don`t warm up to the likes of us. Why no sir,” says Masters in close-up. “Why, I knew me a little old gal one time, looked a whole like you Mrs Greer. She’d been married maybe five, six years. Husband, he kinda short on spine, and one day, along come,” he looks off at Stride, “this big, good-looking gent,” as we cut to Stride in close-up, “started warming up to her.” We cut to Annie turning around with the newly filled coffee cup as she looks off and up at Masters. Then we cut to a close-up of Stride as Masters continues off-screen: “First thing this little old gal, she just up and.” Stride interrupts: “Drink your coffee, Masters,” and, from here, we cut back to the close-up of Masters looking back at Stride, to Stride looking back at Masters, then back again to Masters: “Ain’t you interested in what she up and done, Sheriff?” We cut back to Stride, his eyes filled with anger as he lifts his coffee to his lips, then to a close-up of Annie. “You . . . you say she looks like me?” says Annie. We cut to the two shot of Masters and John. “Not near as pretty, ma’am,” says Masters, as John looks down in embarrassment. “Her eyes, they don’t show deep blue like yours.” From here the tension begins to rise to a peak. We cut back to Annie and Stride: “Can’t recollect her hair too well,” says Masters as Annie looks up at Stride then back at Masters. Annie and Stride look down in embarrassment and Masters continues: “but couldn’t have been near as soft or as black as yours.” We cut back to Masters, “and the way she walked. Nothin’ like you. You move like you’re all out alive,” and then to a close-up of Annie as Masters continues: “And you say words quiet, soft”; then the camera cuts to a close-up of John: “Kind of making a man wish that you was talking to him and nobody else.” There are close-ups of Stride who glares in anger, and John who looks down embarrassment, which are followed by a close-up of Masters who completes his monologue with “Yeah, she looked a lot like you Ma’am. But not near as pretty.” He then looks down as he drinks his coffee. We cut to Annie, who looks down in further embarrassment, then back to the two-shot framing of Masters and John as the latter seeks to put an end to the tension and to mark the fact that Annie is his wife. “Well, I guess it’s about time we were turnin’ in,” he says. But Masters looks at John: “Well, don’t you want to hear the rest of the story, Mrs Greer? You might learn somethin’ from it.” “I don’t understand,” says John. We cut to Annie. “Don`t you,” says Masters. Then we cut to Stride: “He said he didn’t.” Then we cut back to Masters: “You know what, sheriff? I just happened to think of somethin’.” We cut back again to Stride who looks up in increasing anger as Masters continues: “Danged if you don`t remind me of the big, good-looking gent I was talkin’ about.” The camera cuts to Annie: “You know, the one that run off with the other feller’s woman,” then to John who is even more embarrassed, and then back to Stride. “Seems that ain’t nobody don`t remind you of somebody tonight, Masters,” he says. Then we

144  s t e v e n e ale cut back to John and Masters who looks off at Annie, then at John: “Seems that way don’t it,” he says. From here the scene in the wagon proceeds to its conclusion. We return to the two shot of Annie and Stride, back to the close-up of Masters: “Sure you don`t wanna listen to the rest of the story?” and on to the close-up of Stride’s angry face. In a series of successive close-up shots, the camera cuts from Stride to Masters and then, Annie, then back to Masters and John, and finally landing on Masters, “Suit yourself,” then the camera cuts to the two shot of Masters and John. “Much obliged for the coffee, ma’am,” says Masters as he passes his empty coffee cup to John, looks off at Stride and bids him goodnight, then turns to leave the wagon. We return to the two shot of Annie and Stride as the latter gets up to follow Masters. Once outside, Stride accosts Masters and knocks him down thus, at last, giving vent to his pent-up anger and to his ­possible feelings of guilt. As already noted, there are echoes of the opening scene in the cave in the scene in the wagon. The characters are located in an enclosed space at night and the scene is full of mounting tension. In contrast to the cave scene, however, Stride is unable to move around. He is also unable to manipulate the conversation, vulnerable to the implications of Masters’s remarks, and powerless to act until he leaves the wagon. Like the scenes in the cave and the relay station, there are more set-ups, framings and cuts than might otherwise be expected. The scene in the wagon comprises seven camera set-ups and over fifty cuts, testifying not only to the care with which Boetticher frames and edits his shots but also to the ways in which he uses them to articulate Masters’s powers and the unspoken predicaments, thoughts, and feelings of Annie, Stride, and John.

M o t i f s o f M ut ua l A t t r a c t i on There is a coda to the scene in and around the wagon that furthers the unspoken attraction between Annie and Stride. Having dealt with Masters, at least temporarily, Stride beds down for the night under the tail of wagon. He removes his hat and moves his hurricane lamp from right to left and, as he lies there, eyes wide open, we cut to Annie who is propped up in bed in the tail of wagon directly above him and who is about to douse her lamp. Alerted to his presence beneath her, Annie engages Stride in conversation. Using closer shots of Annie, we cut back and forth between them as though they were a couple in bed together (See Figures 8.1 and 8.2). Then they douse their respective lamps, thus creating an even more intimate atmosphere, and bid each other good night. A variant on this set-up occurs later on, after Stride has been ambushed and wounded gunning down most of the remaining robbers amid the desert rocks. Annie and John, who are on their way to Flora Vista,

fr a m i ngs , m o tif s , and f lo atin g poker games  145 appear in their wagon. They notice that Stride’s horse is standing in the open, then that Stride himself lies prone on the ground nearby. Annie and John convey Stride’s unconscious body to the wagon and Annie asks John to place him out of the sun and under the wagon’s tail. The allusion to the bedtime conversation and its set-up is subtle. Stride is framed with Annie through the spokes of the wagon’s nearside wheel, and John is present but outside the circle formed by the wheel on the right; this time, Annie is tending to Stride’s ­physical rather than psychological wounds (Figure 8.3).7

Figure 8.1.

Figure 8.2.

146  s t e v e n e ale

Figure 8.3.

During the course of this scene, John reveals to Annie that he has to go to Flora Visa to deliver the box of money that he has been secreting in the wagon all along. Annie is shocked and, when he recovers and finds out a few moments later, Stride is angry. Stride does not blame John for his own wife’s death and Annie is still loyal to her husband. But, as Annie and John drive off in the wagon, we cut to a shot of Stride who is framed by the arch of the wagon’s canopy as Annie turns to look back him (Figure 8.4). Once again, this is a framing that links Stride and Annie and, once again, it hints at their mutual

Figure 8.4

fr a m i ngs , m o tif s , and f lo atin g poker games  147

Figure 8.5.

feelings. Indeed, it replicates a framing that first occurs earlier on. Following the initial encounter between Stride, John, and Annie, and following the warnings from the cavalry officer, Stride advises John and Annie to “swing west.” For reasons that become clear only when he reveals that he has the money, John is adamant: he is “not heading west” and “not turning back.” He and Annie begin to drive away in their wagon. As they do so, we cut to a medium long shot with Stride and his horses in the foreground and John and Annie driving away with their backs to the camera in the background. At this point, Annie turns to look at back at Stride (Figure 8.5), and Stride changes his mind. Along with its dialogue and along with its superlative performances, details such this that in my view make Seven Men from Now so special.

NOTES 1. Seventy-seven minutes is the running time specified in the film’s review in Daily Variety, July 11, 1956, p. 3, and in Jim Kitses, Horizons West, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western (London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Film Institute, 1969), p. 134. Seventy-eight minutes is the running time specified in various editions of Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide. Allegedly, John Wayne “recut the film without Boetticher’s approval” but, if so, he cut only a minute. (The source here is Andrew Rausch, Fifty Filmmakers: Conversations With Directors from Roger Avary to Steven Zaillan [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008], p. 34, but, unfortunately, the nature of the cut – or cuts – is not detailed). The running time of the DVD, which runs at 25 rather than 24 frames per second, is “approximately 75 minutes.” 2. Daily Variety, August 21, 1956, 3; Variety, August 15, 1956, 22; August 22, 1956, 8; September 12, 1956, 20; September 26, 1956, 8; October 17, 1956, 9. It should be noted

148  s t e v e n e ale that Seven Men from Now and Star of India were shown on a double bill at the Paramount in Buffalo in the week beginning July 22, 1956 which suggests either that the release of Seven Men from Now was brought forward or that this was a “pre-release” engagement (see Variety, July 25, 1956, 16). 3. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968), p. 124; Jim Kitses, Horizons West, pp. 89–137. 4. As Kitses points out in his commentary, the “direction and acting nicely suggest the tension and threats lurking beneath the surface although we have no exposition as yet to explain things since the film has opened ‘in the middle of things’ [in medias res] as the classical term has it.” As he also points out, this “is the first of many scenes in the film where repressed information and subtexts lurk beneath the surface.” 5. As Kitses puts it in his commentary, “it is the villain who exhibits a winning charm, humour and humanity, however flawed . . . Beside the colorless stoicism of the hero, the arrogance and narcissism of Marvin can be almost attractive.” 6. Drinking coffee is a feature of nearly all the scenes in which the characters are seated, eating or both. (One of the exceptions is the scene in the saloon at Flora Vista which features prostitutes, villains, and alcohol). As Kitses notes in his commentary: “It is amazing how much mileage Boetticher’s minimalist style gets out of props like coffee cups . . . being passed back and forth.” In the opening scene in the cave, the sharing and drinking of cups of coffee, a conventional marker of sociability and friendliness, serve to signal and mediate the growing tension between Stride and the other two men. In the relay station at night, coffee is brought by Annie to Stride as a gesture of sympathy and as an opportunity for Stride to express his sorrow and guilt. Later on, “the arrival of the Indians at the relay station has a shocked Annie dropping the morning caffeine,” and in the wagon at night, “the social ritual, the coffee cups prominent in the shots, provides [sic] an ironic counterpoint” to the violations of sociability that mark many of Masters’ words—and, in particular, the provocative nature of the tale that he goes on to tell. 7. John’s presence and concern for Stride are important. John is a weak but decent man. His death is brave and his love for Annie is genuine. His death paves the way for a possible relationship between Stride and Annie but, if so, it will have to happen sometime in the future.

c h apter 9

The Ranown Style: Mapping Textual Echoes Lucy Fife Donaldson

A

film begins with long shot of a distinctive rocky landscape, made up of huge, rounded boulders sticking up out of the parched earth. Distant snowy peaks appear faintly in the background, under a clear blue sky. Music provides an accompaniment, a minor refrain dominated by brass and backed by a persistent hollow-sounding kettledrum beat. Credits appear, a crudely shaped yellow typeface made to look as though it is fashioned from rock or wood. After a minute or so, a small figure on a horse emerges from among the rocks and the camera pans steadily to trace his movement through the terrain. The figure proceeds to ride across this precarious environment, picking his way through winding paths among the rocks and eventually towards the camera. This description fits the opening moments of not one but two films directed by Budd Boetticher: Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Indeed, the similarities of place, style and mood are so close in these first few minutes that they could almost be the same film. Watching the beginning of either film may evoke recognition of the other. Moreover, to watch one with knowledge of the other creates an enriched experience, beyond expectation or the pleasures of familiarity. The openings are formally and narratively spare but acquire density when considered in concert. The contiguity in ways of situating character, signaling relationship to genre, and opening the narrative constitutes not just a parallel but also an overlap. Between them, these films acquire layers that underline or thicken certain qualities, illuminating the shared sensibilities of the films. This chapter will seek to explore how the films’ layering and accumulation, through repetitions and echoes, contribute to the dense texture of the world created in what Jim Kitses termed Budd Boetticher’s “Ranown cycle.”1 The cycle—all collaborations with writer Burt Kennedy, star Randolph Scott

150  l u c y f if e do nald s o n and producer Harry Brown—consists of six Westerns directed by Boetticher between 1956 and 1960, four of which were shot in Lone Pine, California: Seven Men from Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station.2 In many ways, the Ranown cycle offers a straightforward path into evaluating Boetticher’s work, demonstrating a high thematic and stylistic consistency. While Kitses suggests they are so similar that they are “essentially the same film,”3 Mike Dibb writes about the films as a “unique quartet” distinguished by “a unity that sets it apart from Boetticher’s other work [. . .].”4 Kitses outlines the significance of the cycle to Boetticher’s authorship: The Ranown cycle gave Boetticher a stable base and creative relationships which allowed him to refine his form, the films growing deeper and more personal until with Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station the controlled objectification of tensions, the appropriateness of form and style, approach perfection. But above all, Boetticher’s Westerns are a series, this director demonstrating more dramatically than most artists how understanding and appreciation of the single work can grow through a knowledge of earlier and later works.5 This is entirely in keeping with the claims one might want to make about a director’s style, that the distinctiveness of their work can not only be traced but valued through recognition of repeated patterns and themes (after all, even a bad director might have formal and thematic patterns). Narratives feature key parallels with one another while each film’s visual style prominently draws on movements and spaces that can be found in the others, the qualities of similarity and difference becoming tightly woven together through the closely formulated network of concerns. When we know all four films, the contribution of the cycle to the feeling and density of each film’s world becomes an important part of its texture. Building on the observations of Kitses and Dibb, this chapter will focus on the central role played by the location of Lone Pine in anchoring and developing the accumulative layering of meaning, the sense of one film building on another, paying particular attention to Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station which are the films that push the echoes within Boetticher’s work to the furthest degree.

L o ne P i ne A distinguishing feature of the Ranown films, and central linchpin in the connections between the films, is the landscape around Lone Pine.6 Lone Pine is located north of Los Angeles in the backdrop of snow-covered Sierra Nevada Mountains, with the Alabama foothills below them. The most distinctive aspect

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  151 of the area’s topography is the undulating Alabama Rocks: large rounded formations created out of huge boulders standing on end. Since movies were first shot there in the 1920s, Lone Pine, and the contours of the Alabama Hills, in particular, have stood in for a variety of times and places: “They remind you of the Khyber Pass in India. And Texas and Arizona and Utah and Nevada. Even Old Mexico and Peru and Argentina. That’s because they’ve played all those parts and more during their 70-year Hollywood career.”7 Though Lone Pine has hosted historical adventures such as Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939) and science fiction such as Star Trek Generations (David Carson, 1994), the location has primarily been used for Westerns. Dibb makes reference to the way in which the space is invested with the iconography of the genre: “it is alive with the sounds and memories of drifting cowboys, laconic dialogue, galloping posses, gunshots, campfires, stagecoaches and hold-ups.”8 The qualities of its space, much like other locations used prominently by directors of the genre, such as Monument Valley, contribute vividly to the iconography of the Western, not just in terms of a visual setting that corresponds with what “the West” should look like but also as descriptive of the kind of world these films take place in. The Western’s concerns with hardened masculinity, struggles for community, pioneering efforts to survive a harsh environment, are all shaped through such landscapes. At the same time, that’s not to say that Lone Pine is the same as Monument Valley or other locations in Nevada and Utah. Boetticher’s use of its particular qualities, and thus his individual contribution to articulations of the Western, was a deliberate decision, an explicit alternative to the more famous location of Monument Valley: “That was Jack Ford’s, you know, and nobody could have done it better.”9 It is clear that the films Boetticher made there were precisely informed by their location so that a significant collaboration the director was involved in was with the environment itself: The great thing about Lone Pine is that you don’t need to go anywhere else . . . we had sand, desert, a river, mountains, all the volcanic structures, it’s amazing—it looks like it was built there for movies . . . Burt Kennedy and I just went from one place to another rewriting scenes to fit the rocks which is what you should do.10 Boetticher’s response to the location is that of recognizing it as a complete world, indicating more specifically the kind of world he and Kennedy were interested in. The lack of a space to support a functional community is a notable absence in this respect. Furthermore, this comment speaks to the relative freedoms provided by Lone Pine, an ideal place to try things out and therefore encourage artistic development and flexibility.11 Dibb regards this

152  l u c y f if e do nald s o n location as central to Boetticher’s contribution to the Western genre, defining the films’ relationship to their antecedents: “Because Lone Pine is a place where so many of the stereotypical images of the Western have been located, it became . . . the perfect place in which to rework the conventions of the genre in a playful and imaginative way.”12

W o r l d m aki n g We can start by thinking about the ways in which Boetticher uses certain spaces in Lone Pine. In his writing on film worlds Daniel Yacavone observes that, for philosopher Nelson Goodman, worldmaking is an aspect of authorial imprint: “considering the nature of artistic style he makes a passing reference to a recognizable (Alain) Resnais’ style or ‘signature’ and, by implication, a way of worldmaking.”13 As the quote from Boetticher above points out, there are contrasting spaces, from the inhospitable (desert, rocks) to the safer green of woods and watering holes. As might be expected, the qualities of space determine the kind of action that takes place. Where there are more domestic spaces, they are located in the greener foothills of the mountains: The Tall T starts with Pat Brennen (Randolph Scott) riding to the stagecoach way station where Hank Parker (Fred Sherman), the station manager, and his young son Jeff (Christopher Olsen) live;14 Comanche Station ends with Cody delivering Mrs Lowe to her husband and son. Prominent attacks by Native Americans are made in the desert areas, open plains with dunes to the side that form a ridge around the edge (in Seven Men from Now and Ride Lonesome). Complex rocky outcrops offer a stage for shootouts or a number of variations on this typically masculine confrontation: it is where Ben Stride (Randolph Scott) and Bill Masters (Lee Marvin) dispatch the robbers of the Wells Fargo and Masters’ partner Clete (Donald Barry), before Stride kills Masters at the end of Seven Men from Now; and the scene of the final clash between Cody and Lane in Comanche Station. Looking across the films suggests that Boetticher’s use of Lone Pine goes beyond a categorization of space. As these examples indicate, decisions about what happens where are shaped by the particular qualities of that space and how the human body is situated in it. The open, dry and bleached desert is the most exposed and thus most suited to dramatizing one group attacking another, the use of long shots enabling this to play out graphically, with the darker bodies against paler background, while the sand slows down movement which thus works to extend the conflict. The rocky tangle of spaces in the Alabama hills heightens the vulnerability of the body, the softness of flesh and skin against hard stone, while the crevices and passageways formed by the boulders offer places to hide and be trapped, inviting a close relationship

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  153 between body and camera. While Boetticher’s repeated use of these environments is certainly economical, it further demonstrates sensitivity to space and a desire to shape narrative to the possibilities provided by the terrain, rather than the other way around.

Begi nni ng s : O v e r l a p p i n g f i l m ic wor l ds Coming back to the beginnings of both Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, what they achieve is immediately to anchor the films’ worlds in an experience of space and place. The world of a film is established by its opening moments, our first point of contact with the world and its concerns. As argued elegantly by Deborah Thomas15 and Douglas Pye,16 the beginning of a film sets up a range of narrative expectations, genre and our relationship to character through aspects of mood and tone. The narratives of both films are alike not only in terms of action and character but also in their mood. Ride Lonesome concerns bounty hunter Ben Brigade’s (Randolph Scott) pursuit of revenge for the death of his wife. He captures Billy John (James Best) who is wanted for murder in Santa Cruz and is the brother of Frank (Lee van Cleef), the man who killed his wife. In the course of delivering Billy John, he is accompanied by Mrs Lane (Karen Steele) whose husband was killed by Mescaleros, and a couple of former criminals, Boone (Pernell Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn) who want to take Billy John and exchange him for amnesty from their own criminal activities. In Comanche Station Scott plays Jefferson Cody, a man searching for his wife, lost to the Comanche years earlier. At the beginning of the film, he makes a trade with a Comanche tribe for Mrs Lowe (Nancy Gates), and promises to take her back to her husband. At an abandoned swing station they meet, and are then joined by, Ben Lane (Claude Akins)—a man whom Cody knows from their shared military past—Frank (Skip Homeier) and Dobie (Richard Rust), a group of criminals who plan to kill Cody in order to claim for themselves the reward offered by Mrs Lowe’s husband.17 Immediately these overlapping narratives, concerning journeys, isolated heroes, uncomfortable pairings of bad and good and missions of revenge and retribution inspired by grief and greed offer the possibility of multiple decisions that shape our sense of what kind of film it is: where to put the camera; what and whom to include on-screen (buildings, landscape, a crowd, the film’s star); whether the soundtrack is diegetic (noises that might fill in details of where we are: birdsong, traffic, and so on) or a non-diegetic score. The type of space we see and how we see it are crucial determining factors in answering questions about what kind of world the films take place in. The opening shots of both films emphasize a rocky and precarious ­landscape,

154  l u c y f if e do nald s o n an inhospitable environment, with no indication that there might be a community nearby or the possibility of building one. In this way, both films use the rock formations of the Alabama hills to communicate hardened qualities of space and world and, in so doing, the openings situate the character in an isolated and uncompromisingly wild space. This is a location to be moved through, not one to settle into, thereby embedding movement through space as a defining component of the character’s experience. These are also both archetypal Western openings, the lone man on a horse in the tangibly hardened landscape of the American West and therefore constitute an economical announcement of a relationship to genre; these are films that are well aware of their place within the Western genre and are being emphatic about what kind of Western they are. In Comanche Station Scott is first seen in silhouette, a decision that draws out this emphasis further, so that he becomes an iconic image beyond the features of his character (which itself echoes a similarly conventional Western image in Seven Men from Now as the Greers’ wagon and accompanying group of Stride, Masters and Clete ride along a ridge, shortly before they come to the desert and encounter a man being attacked by groups of Chiricahua). The CinemaScope framing offers a very particular way of seeing landscape, one that emphasizes the horizontal expanse of land, a quality which Boetticher certainly exploits to achieve this archetypal look, and to emphasize the relentlessness of the films’ Western hero. Scott’s small scale in the landscape is dramatized through the ’Scope frame, the format underlining the dominating power of the setting, and his characters’ perseverance in it. Despite the precariousness of the setting and the character’s isolation in it, both films begin with a long take, the view of the landscape held during the credits and then readjusted in accordance with Scott’s movement. The camera is content to wait for him to appear, a decision that focuses attention on the environment because it is offered up as such a dramatic expanse of land. Consequently, we are able to consider its place more broadly as part of the spectacle offered by the Western, and more precisely in terms of an attention to the particular implications of such terrain, which are placed in tension with the characters’ progression through it. The sense that the films are holding back from action—that we are waiting for Scott’s character—is a dramatic counterpoint to the inherent risk such a stark location poses. Yes, he is a lone figure in dangerous and difficult country, and his relative miniaturization against the rocks does present him as vulnerable; however, the pacing of the sequence understands his movement not as fraught but, rather, he is at ease in this terrain (though in both cases the character is knowingly riding into a potentially dangerous situation). In both films the pacing conveys a sense of calm: Scott’s character is part of, and at home in, the landscape. These sequences draw on the qualities of setting, making strategic decisions

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  155 about how we see that space that shape the atmosphere of the films and the parameters of their worlds. Furthermore, the experience of watching one after the other reveals parallels in their treatment of the same action that address a proximity between the structural textures of the films (to do with narrative, pacing, rhythm, and so on). This seems to be at least partly what Kitses has in mind when he suggests, “Landscape in a Boetticher always has a conceptual weight.”18 Lone Pine is not just there to set the scene, or signify genre but it communicates more precisely ways of being and ways of seeing. Kitses goes on to observe: [A]lways in Boetticher there is a formal interest in landscape, an observation and delight that give the images a decorative value. Often what we have is very like a painting, the characters moving over brutal terrain in the foreground, the middle distance a wall of jagged spires, the great peaks of the sierras in the misty background beyond.19 Dwelling on the landscape as Boetticher does in the openings of Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station reveals this formal interest and an exacting sense of what these decorative values bring to the image. Not only that but the way these two films, in particular, layer attention to landscape and its singular properties (the brutal terrain, jagged spires, great peaks) constitutes a depth of experience, a familiarity, and a richness that enable such economy elsewhere.

Th e F i ne A d j us t m e n t s Looking at the beginnings of Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station dramatizes the precision of the differences between the films, just as it registers their closeness. Their formal patterns (including mise-en-scène, rhythm and pacing, music, performance) render them extremely close in their unfolding of the drama but these echoes also draw out the fine grain of their differences. For example, the opening shots are distinguished by the variations in camera angle: in Ride Lonesome, the high angle of the opening shot means that Scott’s character must move up towards us while, in Comanche Station, the camera’s low angle entails that he rides above and in profile. The subtle difference between the two ways of seeing him in the space draws out incremental changes in register. In the first, Scott emerges from within the space, slowly riding his horse up a small path that winds its way through the rocky outcrops into the shadow of a large boulder in the foreground. Decisions about costuming blend his own weather-beaten and leathery surface with the browned and hardened exterior of the rocks. In the second, he is more emphatically moving across the space, navigating his path through the rocks with ease but becomes visually separated

156  l u c y f if e do nald s o n from them as he initially rides over the top. Kitses addresses the sense that Boetticher is focused on the particularity and force of such a re-articulation by degrees: “Boetticher’s achievement, though it is not inaccessible to all but the connoisseur, does require for its full impact an awareness of the fine adjustments he makes within the form.”20 Recognition of the nuances within the films’ parallels is not just a way to make an argument about Boetticher’s precision, but also a way to experience immersion in his way of seeing the world. Scott’s characters are closely aligned with the landscape in both, and there is a suggestion, through his unhurried pace, that they occupy a certain degree of mastery in relation to this terrain. In Ride Lonesome he emerges from within, he visually blends into the rocks, immersed to a degree so that he shares their characteristics of hardness and fixity. In contrast, the initial view of him in Comanche Station visually separates him from the landscape–he moves across/on top rather than within–which lays the ground for a comparison with the indigenous people he is about to meet and indicates a fractional division between him and the qualities of the landscape; he is a detached figure. A further example of parallels revealing the varying intonations of a formal perspective can be found in a particular way of framing space which is repeated across the cycle, whereby the foreground of a dwelling is placed in shadow while movement occurs in the background, usually moving away from or towards the stationary camera. One particular instance of this kind of framing in Ride Lonesome is drawn attention to by Kitses, who suggests that this example “with great economy and resonance seems to express the heart of Boetticher’s world.”21 The shot he refers to is a view of Brigade et al. departing on their journey to Santa Cruz from the swing-station porch. The action of them leaving is placed in the sunlit background of the frame while the porch, which is in shadow, frames the image at the sides and on top. A crudely constructed set of posts with a horizontal bar at the edge of the porch creates a further frame within this, the frame bisected not quite half way up by the bar and any action beyond it obscured on the top left by a large ceramic jug hanging from the porch. For Kitses, this framing and the rhythms of the action beyond balance narrative function (the framing is repeated when Frank and his gang arrive at the station) and visual pleasure. “The tension between static black border and bright rhythmic play within is so fine that ultimately the image has the quality, the essence of Boetticher, of an animated still life.”22 Appreciating the fine adjustments to the pattern is, therefore, partly recognition of Boetticher’s artistry—the elegance of this particular composition in depth—and playfulness with cinematic form. The director’s strippeddown approach to narrative/character development is perhaps balanced with a style that tinkers with, and subtly tweaks, ways of seeing and doing things. Attention to such refinements is in tension with the B-picture status of the Ranown cycle, and certainly indicates why writers such as Charles Barr and

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  157 André Bazin were so keen to celebrate Boetticher’s artistry in the 1950s and 1960s, and how radical a position this was in that moment. Moving out to the cycle as a whole, this artful approach to framing space emerges as a fairly consistent pattern with examples in each film. Near the beginning of Seven Men from Now, after Stride has joined the Greers, there is a view of their journey through the trees which places them in the background, with foliage and branches in the foreground framing this more distant action; in The Tall T the approach of the stagecoach carrying Brennan and the Mims is observed through the darkened doorway of the way station and its front porch; later, in Ride Lonesome, the group’s journey is again viewed through a darkened frame, this time of foliage and branches, as they move from light background to shadowy foreground; and a similar view in Comanche Station at the end of Cody and Mrs Lowe’s first day of travel with Lane and the others, when they arrive somewhere to rest. On one level, Kitses’ point about this kind of detail being available only to the “connoisseur” is true, as watching all the films while consciously attending to potential patterns or repetitions enable recognition when they do occur but these particular framings of space do not call attention to themselves as overtly significant. Rather, the pattern they constitute offers worldmaking connections across the films. Yet, more significantly, as with noticing any pattern in an artist’s work, this prompts questions about what this framing is doing and what it might reveal about the filmmaker’s concerns and ways of looking. It may be a personal preference of Boetticher’s, a facet of his own tastes in shooting landscape, though we could speculate equally, given his approach to Lone Pine, that it is a view inspired by interaction with that particular location. On a basic level, the repeated framing reveals a concern with staging in depth, of dramatizing foreground and background. The encounter with landscape is placed in reference to certain details (whatever is in the foreground) while, at the same time, placing the foreground in darkness draws the eye to the action happening in the distance. The result is a complex arrangement which resonates with the qualities of reticence and patience in allowing action and landscape to unfold seen in the opening shots of Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. Movement and landscape are formally layered in such shots, appearing in planes of action emerging from the camera’s central point. The composition itself is thickened through attention to depth as the multiple planes occurring in a single perspective are layered like the notes in a musical chord. The thickened configuration of these shots is thus in tension with the temptation to describe Boetticher’s style as spare or pared down. Space and action are compositionally juxtaposed at these different moments to draw out varying degrees of disquiet. The view from the building—however lacking in domesticity or community it might be—places retreat from it (in Ride Lonesome) as movement away from the possible securities of civilization

158  l u c y f if e do nald s o n out into the open and, therefore, danger. In a similar shot, arrival at the site of civilization (in The Tall T) is entirely fraught with possible danger. Being positioned within the way station, to witness the stagecoach arrive immediately communicates something is not right, especially considering that the space was previously presented only from outside, and implies the presence of Usher and his gang before they are actually introduced. The repeated framing is used in different contexts, a repetition altered through adjustments of detail to shape differences in tone and mood through a relationship to space: the increasing detachment from civilization (however slight a marker) and its influences on the group in the first, and the precariousness of civilized spaces, how open to attack and perversion they are, in the second. The Western’s preoccupation with a tension between interior (civilization) and “out there” (wilderness) might be frequently dramatized from within a single frame; think of the final shot of The Searchers (John Ford, 1958) as John Wayne’s character is seen through a doorway leaving the homestead and walking into the landscape beyond. The specificities of Boetticher’s framing pattern invests the artificial structure with a complete absence of welcoming textures: it is simply a black outline. In both examples, it is an assertion of safety rather than a substantial presence, the comparable visual flatness of the foreground standing in contrast to the full depth of the background. These particular compositions use the flatness of silhouette to call attention to the thickness of the space beyond, and this is where Boetticher’s concerns lie. He is simply not interested in the interior (whatever good or bad it represents). It is a mere framing device, a piece of setting which literally frames his real concern: the wilderness beyond. The contrast between “here” and “out there” is such that civilization is never a possibility or a comfort, however slight, the treatment of landscape thus elaborating on the hero’s own confinement to the wilderness which is marked by his ease and enjoyment of the terrain, its possibilities as much as his isolation.

T hi ck e ni n g E x p e r i e n c e : R e p e t it ion a n d A cc u m u la t i o n Similarities and subtle differences illuminate the work of a director who is interested in creating a very detailed register of meaning within a compressed gamut of concerns. We might say that Boetticher’s Ranown cycle is constituted from a dense network of decision-making whereby choices of how to place camera in space or performer in front of camera are made in reference to previous decisions, reiterated and fractionally adjusted for a complementary exchange of familiarity and difference. In making such interrelated decisions across the films, a web of meaning is created between them. The echoes form

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  159 connections between texts, adding additional layers to their texture. Though texture might immediately indicate a concern with materiality, it also has structural implications. Drawn from its use in music and roots in weaving and textiles, texture “concerns the interrelation of style, narrative, genre in creating the shape and the feel of the film as a whole.”23 Elsewhere I have written about the fictional world created in Ride Lonesome, looking specifically at texture as a structure through consideration of atmosphere, genre and narrative.24 This chapter expands consideration of filmic texture by contemplating how it might be built through more than one film. Parallels between the Ranown films form a layered construction: there is an accumulation of meaning through stylistic, narrative, and thematic echoes. This connectedness, or intertexuality, acquires a force of meaning that contributes most palpably to a communication between the films. Watching a scene in one film reminds the viewer of another moment in a different film so that experience of space (as well as dialogue, character, and narrative) is multiplied or even stretched across, and connected through, the films. Roland Barthes suggests that meaning is formed of citations, references and so on; it is a web, permeable and fluid, added to by those who interact with it.25 From this perspective, the film becomes a layered object and we might reflect on how extratextual elements contribute to the textuality or texture of a film, the complex network that informs response to a particular film. While acknowledging Barthes’s argument for the reader (and emphatically not the author) bringing meaning as a call for agency and active reading, attention to layering and references between texts seems an approach ideally suited to consideration of authorship and genre, as both concepts involve thinking about the accumulation of patterns, relating to an authorial signature on the one hand and generic iconography on the other. More than this, value, and not just identification of recurrent features, is crucial to critical authorship approaches. Within the cycle, parallels are placed more or less visibly; some more striking as actual repetitions than others. Kitses goes through the shared thematic concerns in detail, suggesting from the beginning that the films “can be difficult to distinguish from each other given the recurrence of plots, locations, performers, even names.”26 To supplement his consideration of these connections, I would suggest that the more precise repetitions and references between the cycle figure in the following groupings: 1. Relationships. Scott’s characters are pitted against the films’ villains, usually a trio (or a more prominent trio within a larger grouping, such as Ride Lonesome): one irrevocably bad man he has to kill, the other two slightly younger or more stupid, and more or less villainous. There is always one woman with whom Scott is more or less romantically involved. In Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station he is only interested in securing her safety.

160  l u c y f if e do nald s o n That the women echo Scott’s dead wife (the exception is The Tall T) generates an absent doubling which intensifies the impact of the female characters (themselves invested and developed with the shadow of another’s image). 2. Dialogue. As noted by Dibb, the writing of Boetticher’s collaborator Burt Kennedy embeds repetition into the dialogue: “Kennedy obviously enjoys the use of conversational patterns, in which certain words and phrases are repeated almost like a rhyme.”27 Such structural repetition within the films is expanded across the cycle, as particular lines of dialogue echo between the films. For example: in Seven Men from Now Masters proclaims “a man needs a reason to ride south” and, in Ride Lonesome, Brigade addresses Boone “A man needs a reason to ride this country. You got a reason?” Similar duplications occur in complimenting the women on their cooking and coffee-making skills. Such repetitions increase the resonance of the relationships, fleshing out and enriching the links between the films’ stock characters through the echoes of their conversation. 3. Actions. As a result of the similarities of relationships, the progression of the narratives in the films carries certain parallel beats, with characters repeating actions. The antagonists in Seven Men from Now and Ride Lonesome find themselves burying a man in the desert on behalf of a woman, an action that further cements the desert as a treacherous place across the cycle. Though these actions can be entirely serious, it is this set of echoes that carries one of the strongest indications of Boetticher’s playfulness, referred to by both Kitses and Dibb. For example, in The Tall T Scott’s Brennan jumps into a water trough to avoid being gored by the bull he has failed to stay on while, in Comanche Station, Cody throws Mrs Lowe into a water trough to keep her safe during a Comanche attack. The exchange of the woman and man in this repeated piece of business affords an expansion of the humor in both moments, as Mrs Lowe’s predicament, though urgent in the context of the attack, is treated with some lightness, indicated by her frequent bobbing out of the water and immediate ducking in response to arrows and spears. The possibility for amusement in Comanche Station is increased in the context of the memory of the more straightforwardly comic moment in The Tall T. This echo also reflects on the adjustments of Scott’s characters between films as, while Brennan becomes more outwardly serious through the film’s kidnapping plot and Cody has a moment of comedy when he hops in response to Mrs. Lowe treating his injured leg, the two characters are distinguished through being at opposite ends of Scott’s range of relative softness and hardness; it is difficult to imagine Cody jumping into a water trough to avoid a bull he has ridden for a bet in order to set up his own ranch. 4. Space. This category ties in with the sense I have mentioned already that particular spaces engender a certain atmosphere or are conducive to certain kinds of activity. While there are many spaces that seem obliquely or impre-

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  161 cisely to echo one another, there are those that are explicit repurposing of a location. One example of this is that the same stretch of water is used in Seven Men From Now and Comanche Station. In the first film it serves as a place to wash the Greers’ horses after they have hauled their wagon out of the mud. The men wash the horses while Annie washes on the other side of some reeds. Stride is distracted by Annie’s singing and looks over Mr Greer’s shoulder as he talks, seemingly hoping to catch a glimpse of her. The scene is filmed with the camera facing the bank and then roughly on the same axis as Stride’s line of sight toward the reed bed. In Comanche Station, the river becomes a point for the group to cross along their journey. First Cody tests the water, the camera placed on the bank. Then, when he gives his okay, the camera moves to film them crossing, facing towards the bank with the reed bank visible in the background as it pans with them crossing. In both scenes, the river is invested with a sense of security, a place to wash or cross in safety. To draw out further the precision of such parallels, and the way they might carry a forceful intertextual layering, I want to look in detail at one of the more prominent repetitions of a space used in both Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station: a dead tree in the center of a clearing ringed by trees and the distant outline of Mount Whitney far off behind it. In Ride Lonesome, this clearing and the tree itself are the stage for the final act, the meeting point of Brigade and his quarry Frank. Brigade’s movements have been leading to this point, and it is here that he threatens to hang Billy John in order to exact his revenge against his older brother Frank. The tree is the place where Frank killed Brigade’s wife, thus making it a suitably resonant site for his death, and revealing an emotional repetition within the film’s own texture, the force of which is carried by the multiple encounters of Brigade with the hanging tree, both before and during the film. In contrast, the hanging tree’s appearance in Comanche Station is much more brief. On their way across country, and shortly after their river crossing, the group of Cody, Mrs Lowe, Lane, Frank and Dobie pass through another waterlogged area—a swamp or perhaps a small lake—in the center of which is the tree. The juxtaposition of an object which accumulates such significance within one film and is of passing reference in the other, presents first an acknowledgement of the proximity of the films’ worlds and, second, the possibility of a more substantial connectedness and resulting density of meaning between films. A short scene with Frank, his first appearance on-screen, sets up the significance of the tree in Ride Lonesome. Frank fills in the reasoning for Brigade’s leisurely pace: “It ain’t Billy he wants, it’s me”; and the backstory for the revenge, “I did him a hurt once. Long ago. So long, I ’most forgot.” He finishes the thought by situating the hurt in relation to a place: “He wants me to catch up, and I think I know where.” The scene ends with a dissolve from

162  l u c y f if e do nald s o n Frank leaning back against a wall, and tilting his hat back on his head in a gesture communicating his own lack of urgency, to the group moving through a less open landscape. Shortly afterwards they emerge from a wooded area to come a stop in front of a bleached log. The score, which had been providing a quiet background accompaniment to their journey, begins to shift to the foreground via a rumble of drums as the film cuts to a long shot of the tree. As they ride towards it, the group is presented in a high-angle shot from behind the tree, the crooked angle of the left branch jutting dramatically across the frame. Drawing closer, Boone comments “Hanging Tree” and they begin to pull up at its base where an exchange between Boone and Brigade further sets up the function of the tree within the film’s world and also Brigade’s relationship to it as Boone remarks, “Come to think of it, you strung a few there yourself.” The next encounter with the tree is that night. Having made a camp in the old riverbed a little further along, Mrs Lane finds Brigade staring out at the tree in the gloom. This scene is when he fills her in on past events involving the murder of his wife by Frank. As he sparingly recounts the story, Scott stands to the right of the frame, with Steele on frame left, their backs to the camera and with the hanging tree visible as a silhouette between them in the background. On the line, “He hung her,” Scott turns towards the camera and exits the frame. There follows a shot reverse-shot as Mrs Lane turns first to watch him go and then back to glance at the tree, her look repeated by Boone as the film cuts to him watching out of a hiding place in the bushes. The scene ends with a further cut, back to the hanging tree, accompanied by a rumble of drums and strong brass note on the score as with its first appearance in the film. With these two scenes occurring in short succession, the final confrontation between Brigade and Frank is then mapped entirely around the tree, with Brigade threatening to hang Billy John in order to lure Frank nearer before shooting him. Throughout these three scenes views of the tree cement its narrative prominence visually and aurally. The tree remains central, or at least situated between, characters and is presented as an object of their attention—we consistently see characters looking up at it—while the score further underlines its solemnity through variations in key and adds a material hardening of the soundtrack through the increased prominence of drums and brass. The starkness of the tree itself, its isolation and large scale heighten its dramatic significance, so that the repetition of it through these three moments efficiently increases the power of it as an icon of death, tied to Brigade’s wife, momentarily to Billy John and then finally to Frank. In contrast, the brevity of the tree’s presence in Comanche Station could seem nothing more than a passing thought or a convenient reappropriation of a prior location. Details of how it is presented suggest otherwise, however. The burnt-out hanging tree is positioned near the center of the frame, and the

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  163 shot lasts for twenty-eight seconds, spanning the time it takes the group to move from the mid point of the water to the bank and out of the frame. While decisions about shot scale and editing do not call attention to it—there is no cut in for a closer view—the framing and length of shot support the sense that, despite the dramatic changes in terrain, this is the same place and the same tree. Moreover, the tree is visibly burnt even though it remains distant from the camera. Ride Lonesome ends with the tree being set alight so the particularities of its appearance here bear the traces of those characters’ previous actions. These decisions about how the tree is seen share aspects of its visual prominence in Ride Lonesome so that, although the characters do not refer to it, it is a striking presence. As with my previous examples, the repetition immediately draws attention to the measured adjustments between presentations of the tree, enabling reflection on the differences between the films, particularly in terms of how the space has changed around the tree. Whereas in Ride Lonesome the tree sits in a bare stretch of ground, in Comanche Station it is placed in the middle of water. The change in the quality of the space around rearticulates the visual presence of the tree: the water works against its visual prominence somewhat as it no longer provides such a graphic contrast against a pale and sandy ground. Yet, its reappearance, which acts as a visible marker of the passage of time between the films through its burnt surface, ultimately points more forcefully to the continuities between the films: the repetition of a journey through this environment, and the sympathetic/antagonistic connections between hero and villain, and the conversations at nightfall. Most forceful is the memory it evokes of Brigade and his hardened quest for revenge which has the potential to transfer on to Cody, a man whose grief for his dead wife is not as close to the surface. Could the tree be a visual marker of the passage of time, signifying a less urgent need for revenge? The extent to which the tree acts as a persistent and powerful motif in the earlier film renders its presence in Comanche Station as far from arbitrary. Its placement also repeats its qualities in Ride Lonesome. Building on Boetticher’s interest in the depth of space and juxtaposition of foreground and background, it is worth considering the extent to which the doubling of this tree across the films can work as a further example of comparison between foreground and background, albeit of a more structural kind; to watch one film after the other encourages contemplation of the tree as both foreground (the film being watched) and background (the film that has been watched). The impact of a space in one film on that of another thus posits a further spatial expansion. The very fact of its recurrence creates a powerful and layered object across the films, a prominent point of connection that accumulates meaning. Consequently, the tree’s qualities seem to permeate the boundaries between the films, the shadow of the hanging tree persists in Comanche Station as the

164  l u c y f if e do nald s o n group’s movement through its space comes at a transitional moment in their journey. Whereas the arrival at the water (the river crossing described above) is imbued with a sense of safety, moments after the group passes the tree, one of their number is killed by an unseen Comanche attack when they stop to wash. Rather than offering discrete occurrences of a tree, this specific echo between the films layers the tree’s image and associations to create an intersecting tree space where the resonance of the tree’s power in Ride Lonesome bleeds into its apparently much more innocuous appearance in Comanche Station. The density of the “multiple textual space” is at its thickest in such an intersection, informing perspectives on space, narrative and character.

C o ncl u s i o n This chapter has argued for an appreciation of the parallels, echoes and repetitions within Boetticher’s Ranown cycle with the aim of furthering an argument about the density of the films’ texture, not just individually but in concert. While Boetticher’s films can be described as economical, sparing and succinct, the fictional world he creates through the layering of relationships, dialogue, action, and spaces across the films can be valued as dense and immersive. Attention to certain patterns reveals a concern with depth and complexity in conceptions of space that also supports a thickness to his style. Like the Randolph Scott characters who perpetually ride the country around Lone Pine, the experience of watching the films is to come repeatedly to aspects of the terrain with him again. Boetticher’s films ask us to look at this landscape as a layered environment. On the one hand, it seems that such proximity between the films’ worlds works to efface precision or artistry—“they all look the same”—yet the articulation of these spaces draws us into a more detailed knowledge and understanding of his work, beyond a possible appreciation of economy and sparse style.

NOTES  1. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western (London: Thames and Hudson and British Film Institute, 1969), p. 94.   2. Boetticher made a further two films starring Scott and produced by Brown but neither was shot at Lone Pine: Buchanan Rides Alone (1958) and Decision at Sundown (1957).   3. Kitses, p. 114.   4. Mike Dibb, “A Time and A Place: Budd Boetticher and the Western,” in The Movie Book of the Western, ed. Ian Cameron et al. (New York: Continuum, 1996), p. 161.   5. Kitses, p. 94.

t h e r ano w n s tyle : m apping textual ech oes  165   6. During Randolph Scott’s career, he made several other films in Lone Pine: The Doolins of Oklahoma, 1949; Frontier Marshall, 1939; Hangman’s Knot, 1952; Man in the Saddle, 1951; The Nevadan, 1950; The Stranger Wore a Gun, 1953; The Thundering Herd, 1933; The Walking Hills, 1949.  7. David Holland, On location in Lone Pine: a Pictorial Guide to One of Hollywood’s Favorite Movie Locations for 70 Years! (Granada Hills, CA: Holland House, 1990), p. 4.   8. Dibb, p. 162.   9. Budd Boetticher quoted in Sean Axmaker, “Budd Boetticher and the Ranown Cycle: ‘What a director is supposed to do,’” Parallax View, November 2, 2008, http://parallaxview.org/2008/11/02/budd-boetticher-and-the-ranown-films/2008. 10. Dibb, p. 162. 11. A point made by Warwick Frost in explaining the popularity of Lone Pine as a location: “Filming on location allowed directors to escape financial and artistic control.” Warwick Frost, “Reshaping the Destination to Fit the Film Image: Western Films and Tourism at Lone Pine, California,” Department of Management Working Paper Series, 61/04, Monash University (2004), 6. 12. Dibb, p. 162. 13. Daniel Yacavone, “Towards a Theory of Film Worlds,” Film–Philosophy 12: 2 (2008): 87. This comment is made in relation to Goodman’s book Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), p. 34. 14. Though the safety implied by the opening scenes is quickly undercut by the presence of the villain and his gang when Brennan returns with the stagecoach. 15. Deborah Thomas, Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films (Moffat: Cameron & Hollis, 2000). 16. Douglas Pye, “Movies and Tone,” in Close-Up 02: Movies and Tone/Reading Rohmer/ Voices in Film, ed. John Gibbs et al. (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), pp. 1–80. 17. There are distinct overlaps with The Tall T and Seven Men from Now, though the latter is closer to these two, as Randolph Scott’s character – Ben Stride – is again seeking revenge for his wife who was killed in the robbery of the Wells Fargo. In The Tall T, Pat Brennan (Randolph Scott) is kidnapped, along with Mr and Mrs Mims (John Hubbard and Maureen O’Sullivan), by Usher (Richard Boone) and his younger sidekicks, Chink (Henry Silva) and Billy Jack (Skip Homeier). 18. Kitses, p. 115. 19. Ibid., p. 115. 20. Ibid., p. 94. 21. Ibid., p. 114. 22. Ibid., p. 115. This observation provokes Kitses to compare Boetticher to Yasujiro Ozu. 23. Lucy Fife Donaldson, Texture in Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 41. 24. Donaldson, pp. 49–80. 25. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice et al. (London: Edward Arnold ([1971] 1989), pp. 166–71. 26. Kitses, p. 95. 27. Dibb, p. 162.

ch apter 10

You Were Married, But You Never Had a Wife: The Use of Space in the Westerns of Budd Boetticher Christopher Minz

T

he first time we see Bart Allison (Randolph Scott) in the opening moments of Budd Boetticher’s masterful Western Decision at Sundown (1957), he is already a captive man. There has been no dialogue to lead us at this point in the film nor any movement by characters that would suggest incapacitation, either mental or physical—in fact, Allison is the first person we see in the first shot of the film not associated with the opening credits—but, nonetheless, the viewer understands Allison’s position immediately. The emotive and expressive nature of the shot exists outside the realm of narration or story, especially as no story has begun as yet, and resides almost entirely within the specific capacities of the medium. In the credit sequence, we have seen the traveling stagecoach, shot from afar, distancing us from the riders. A shadow placed against a fairly pedestrian “Western sky.” As the coach stops, the camera cuts to a medium shot of Bart Allison who is inside the coach looking out, stone faced as usual for Randolph Scott. What is immediately noticeable is that he is caught in a frame within the frame. The window frame of the coach acts as a manner of cage, barring Allison from the outside world. Inside the coach is dark with Allison peering out into the bright, sun-washed day. In some regards, it works in contrast to the famous final shot in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). In that film the darkness is the civilized world that John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards can no longer inhabit whereas, in the opening to Decision at Sundown, Bart Allison is kept captive in the darkness, while the bright “civilized world” is something to be peered at. The ultimate purpose of this description, and the primary focus of this chapter, is to explore how Budd Boetticher utilized the formal capacities of his medium to express emotion and meaning. Boetticher did not make complicated Westerns when compared to the likes of John Ford or Anthony Mann.

th e use of space  167 This is particularly true from the perspective of their stories. One can neatly map nearly every major Budd Boetticher Western: lone male hero, searching to reclaim his wronged or dead wife’s honor; along the way he helps another man regain his honor; cut to final shootout. It is precisely the simplicity of his work that allows them to be explored at such a structural level so intimately. Boetticher’s focus on form negates a certain wading through narrative structures and storytelling to proceed, almost surgically, toward mise-en-scène, framing, and staging, all of which create and express meaning far more within the cinematic language than does dialogue or any sort of story. While I do not intend in this chapter entirely to ignore the narrative elements of these films, it is my hope to explore and describe how Boetticher explores the themes of the Western genre and suggest that they are only of any consequence from within the formal aspects of the camera. The primary concentration, within the general formal exploration, of this work is to explore the myriad ways in which Budd Boetticher constructs spatial relations in complex and demanding manners. Historically, when space has been discussed in the Western, it has been situated in the concepts of civilized versus savage, East versus West. The space, in this sense is grand; it is the tale of the frontier, a time in American history, long lost already by the time of many of the Westerns used to promote this line of thought. Hence, they become nostalgic, and the best of the genre intersect with this nostalgia and act as abruptions toward it. This approach lends itself to the generally historical line of thought that has entrenched itself within the mythology of, and critical inquiries into, the Western. Yet Boetticher does not concern himself with history. More so perhaps than any other director who worked in Westerns, Boetticher fled from being tethered by the long lasso of the historical Western. When we watch Ride Lonesome, we are not watching a metaphor for the West itself (either “real” or mythological), we are watching what Jim Kitses calls “existential closet dramas,” a concept to which I shall return when discussing Decision at Sundown, boiling down the genre “to arrive at the structure of the morality play and the fable.”1 Again we see the genre being reduced, not pejoratively, to its formal roots, to the imagery and archetypal sights (sites?). So, if Budd Boetticher divorces his work to a degree from the historical, including the historical space, how then do we interact with the concept of space within his work? Here I intend to take multiple approaches, some which function directly within the frame, and one that is a new way to look at space from an elliptical standpoint. Using three films, Seven Men From Now, Ride Lonesome, and Decision at Sundown, I shall discuss and examine scenes that focus on interior spaces as they are privileged over exteriors. This is a notable feature in Boetticher that runs counter to many other Western directors wherein the exterior is always held in higher regard. Moving from that, the blocking space, or space between characters and their movement (and ­lighting

168  c h r i s t o phe r m inz in the case of Ride Lonesome) becomes particularly interesting. Boetticher often squeezes many characters into a frame, diminishing their ability to move freely or, as I described above with the opening of Decision at Sundown, trapping them within the frame itself. As a more radical deviation, I shall argue, following Janet Walker’s2 work on the traumatic ellipses in Westerns, that the ellipsis itself can be spatial, as well as the standard temporal, especially if we see the ellipses within the structures of genre itself. Boetticher denies us information, denies us the sight of much of the impetus for the action within his films. By doing so, he creates a missing space that would usually be contained within the generic structure of the film. So, instead of A + B = C, we get B = C, with the “A+” implied or alluded to only within the narrative structure of the film. This is especially true within the auspices of the revenge story that drives nearly all of Boetticher’s Westerns.

A S p a c e b e t w e e n M e n : Ride Lonesome Ride Lonesome (1959) was the first of Boetticher’s films shot in CinemaScope, and is the last chronologically in the films I shall discuss. It is a simple film. Simple in plot, simple in design, but near flawless in its pictorial quality. At times the film seems to function more as a painting than as an exercise in cinema, a diligent and exquisite portrait of the West, and of iconographic “man” as a dying icon of the past. Advertisements for a UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) retrospective of Boetticher’s work in 2012 said that, “Boetticher’s low-budget Ranown films were minimalist excursions into pure form. Brutal and ironic, their stark beauty verges on abstraction.”3 This is true, especially of his last two CinemaScope films, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, although I’m not sure abstraction is a correct way to view how the “pure form” manifests itself. Rather, it becomes archetypal, caught within the mythological structures. Kitses says “the controlled objectification of tensions and the appropriateness of form and style approach perfection”4 in the last two films. It is true that these are stark, minimalist films. Little exists within their frames that is not both wild and yet profoundly sparse. The space is wide open—open for a vast amount of movement and freedom—and that it what is most striking about the films. Surrounded by swaths of open country, Boetticher resorts to a strict economy of movement, a sense of pure stasis with little intimacy or activity. This is stoicism in direct form. The space between men and women or, more precisely, a woman (Karen Steele, a regular Boetticher femme), in Ride Lonesome, is of particular interest if we are to consider blocking. Women in Budd Boetticher’s films occupy a specific place, one extremely limited within the realm of the driven narrative diegesis. They are, essentially, catalysts. Lee Russell, nom de plume of Peter

th e use of space  169 Wollen, compares women in Boetticher’s Westerns to the crowd in the director’s bullfighting films. He says that “the role of the crowd, incapable itself of action, is to provoke the bullfighter into action, even if he is wounded. In this respect, the crowd in Boetticher’s bullfighting movies is similar to the women in his Westerns—Phantoms, with no authentic significance.”5 Certainly, as we shall see in a moment, there is something phantasmagorical about how the woman is portrayed, as existing in a space beyond the grasp of the male characters. Even when they lust after her, it is a sort of neutered lust, crippled by their inability to share the same space. This will become more distinctly spectral in later parts of this chapter when I discuss the tragic ellipses where the woman is a ghost. Beyond this, Boetticher himself spoke to the placement of the women in his films: “What counts is what the heroine provokes . . . in herself, the woman has not the slightest importance.”6 There are many scenes in Ride Lonesome where this distinct placement of the woman is juxtaposed against that of the men but there are two in particular where the spacing becomes almost jarring, clearly denoting the inability for the sexes to interact on any meaningful level. This distance is created by spacing and lighting, and the two aspects within the framed shot work in tandem to create an ethereal effect. The first occurs during the first of three evening scenes in the film. Ben Brigade (Scott) stands vigil out near the stagecoach which has recently been the site of death. It is significant that he stands almost completely in the coach’s shadow. Brigade’s life is under the shadow of death. It controls his existence and he thrives only on it. Mrs Lane (Steele) exits from the way station, bringing a cup of coffee to Brigade. She hands it to him but maintains a notable distance. The shot itself is well framed within the frame, something that Boetticher will use repeatedly to ensure our understanding of the character’s immobility. Over the next few minutes, she remains well lit by what is, ostensibly, moonlight that shines brightly, for the night, off her red dress, while he remains almost blacked out by shadows. Little movement occurs but the scene itself is filmed mostly in a single long-take two shot, with only a few brief moments of cutaway shots (see Figure 10.1). Brigade explains that they will be taking Mrs Lane along with them when they leave, hoping to pick up her husband (despite his almost assured death) so she doesn’t have to be alone. Defiantly, she states, “I can take care of myself.” To which, coldly, Brigade replies, “if you were mine you wouldn’t have to.” These are words that cement their distance, and his own obsession, as we shall learn later that he had failed to “take care of” his own wife. In this sequence, the light itself becomes spatial. It clearly separates her from him, and this is further evidenced by the second half of this scene which functions in a near mirror image of the first half but uses the light to indicate similar spatial concerns and also unites the two male protagonists in their own darkness (see Figure 10.2). As Mrs Lanes exits after a brusque cut-off by

170  c h r i s t o phe r m inz

Figure 10.1.

Figure 10.2.

Brigade, the camera tracks her back toward the way station. As she moves to enter, her path is crossed by Boone (Pernell Roberts), the jovial, ex-criminal. Boone also wants to turn in Brigade’s charge for his own reasons. As they cross paths, the camera picks him up and tracks him back to where Brigade still leans in darkness against the spoked wheel of the coach. Again, as before, the scene is shot mostly in a single long-take two shot but, this time, both characters are kept in shadow. It is striking because Boone seems to stand where the light should be but he remains darkened. Both of these men are stranded in a world

th e use of space  171 where escape from the dark seems unlikely. Boone has a criminal past and Brigade cannot extricate himself from his obsessive quest to avenge his longdead wife. Boone, in the interest of honor among men, explains that he wants to turn in the murderer that Brigade is turning in because an amnesty has been offered for anyone who does. He is willing to kill Brigade for the chance to clear himself. While they are shrouded in darkness, it is a darkness they share together as men in Boetticher’s world. This light/dark spatial dichotomy in relation to male/female interaction is used again near the end of the film where Boone comes to offer to take care of the widowed Mrs Lane (see Figure 10.3). He is situated above her, set deeper in the frame, again separated by a distance that one assumes cannot be breached. But, here once more, the light picks her out, keeping her free from the shadowy world he still inhabits. His name has not yet been cleared. What is most interesting about this exchange is that, aside from a few askew comments, there seems to be little desire portrayed. Boone carries an almost paternalistic attitude toward her. There is certainly reference to her “handsomeness” and her eyes but love is never so much as whispered in passing. After his offer to take care of her, she quickly admonishes him by stating (as she had with Brigade earlier) “I can take care of myself.” Of course, after the final shootout, and the diffusion of the situation between Brigade and Boone, Mrs Lane does, in fact, ride off with Boone who is now “in the light space” so to speak. His movement into that light is defined by two interactions between him and his partner Whit, again, with spacing and use of light to guide the viewer on their own path toward understanding the relationship. Boone and Whit (James Coburn) are the only two characters who are allowed

Figure 10.3.

172  c h r i s t o phe r m inz

Figure 10.4.

a spatial intimacy. In most scenes throughout the film, characters rarely edge too close to one another. Even in large group shots there is space to fill. In some regards this is a way to show the technical capacities of the CinemaScope camera. David Bordwell comments that, to cope with the wide angles of CinemaScope, many directors “seemed to favor more distant framings” and “dotted the frame with bodies and décor—sometimes awkwardly, like clothes hanging on a line”7 (see Figure 10.4). In this shot there is an equal distance between the men and, as Mrs Lane passes, she seems to be the only one who is capable of moving or breaking the well-staged shot. Owing to the angle of the shot, however, she never seems to break the geometrical plane. Rather, she moves deeper but not away. Here the “clothes on the line” comparison seems apt. There is a complexity here, however, precisely on the geometrical space level as the world drops, in deep focus, well off into a vanishing point. Bordwell again, discussing Kuleshov, makes an apt description for this type of shot: “Because the film image results from a perspectival projection, the playing space constituted a pyramid tipped on its side, the point resting at the camera lens.” This is “mise-en-scène not as photographic recording but as purely spatial manipulation within a projective geometry.”8 Ultimately, they are all trapped in their space. There is a feeling that any of them are too big to occupy each other’s space. But this is precisely not so between Boone and Whit in their private moments. During the evening at the outpost, after an Indian attack, Boone and Whit share a quiet moment, wondering why Brigade has forced them to stop. It is during this moment that Boone tells Whit about his piece of land that he intends to use to leave his life of crime. It is why he wants the criminal Billy John for himself: to gain amnesty for a life of robbing stagecoaches. Even as Boone and Whit are allowed a spatial bond, however, a closeness not afforded anyone else in the film, they also share darkness, much like all the men up to

th e use of space  173

Figure 10.5.

this point. It is particularly pointed in this scene as they are framed by moonlight yet remain tightly together in the center of the frame, reframed within the shot by the two lit areas on either side (see Figure 10.5). Boone and Whit share a deep intimate space, one that transcends their partnership and borders on the romantic. It would be speculative to suggest a homosexual subtext but I do not think the idea is too far off. In a later scene, also staged intimately, Boone asks Whit how long they have been riding together. Whit answers that it has been two years. Testily, Boone corrects him, “more like five.” Afterwards Boon explains that Whit will not be working for him after they get amnesty but, rather, they will be partners. The language here accentuates the space they occupy. Boone is “obliged to take care of” Mrs Lane, much like his future animals but Whit is his partner, fifty–fifty. This final scene is shot in bright daylight. They have moved away from the darkness, as has Brigade, but his light is a fire that burns the hanging tree. In most ways, he burns with it, while Boone, Whit, and Mrs Lane ride away to the open space of the future.

In t e r i o r / E x t e r i o r : Seven Men From Now Ride Lonesome is a film shot entirely in exteriors. There is not a single shot within an interior space. The closest we are given are the mirrored shots of two groups of riders (the first, Brigade’s party; the second, the villain’s party) riding past a shadowed frame. Here the camera is set back in the way station, looking out, light pours in, leaving the viewer to watch through a double frame, both the camera itself and the porch beams. The interior in Ride

174  c h r i s t o phe r m inz Lonesome which is, much like in The Searchers, the realm of civilization and domesticity, cannot be breached by the figures in Boetticher’s film. We, the viewers, couched in our “civil” positions, can only look out. A great deal of this use of the exterior, something the Western is far more known for, anyway, can be attributed to the specific spatial capacities of CinemaScope: wide desert vistas and towering mesas simply look stunning in the 2.35:1 ratio. Seven Men From Now, the first of Boetticher and Scott’s collaborations, is quite different, however. Here there are still vast panoramic shots of the landscape, and the men who seem simply to exist within them, not much more obtrusive than the occasional cactus, but interior space is used to as much affect in this film. I shall here focus on two scenes that illustrate this before moving on to a phenomenon in this film that I will call the “interior–exterior.” Seven Men From Now was the first great success for Boetticher, gaining him the respect of none other than Cahiers du Cinéma maestro André Bazin who called it “an exemplary Western”; despite this, it was a B Western, which Bazin lamented that many would never see; “thus decree the distributors.”9 Much of the film functions as a vengeance-driven travelogue, as does most of the Ranown cycle.10 There are two distinct moments in the film, however, where an interior shot is used to illustrate precisely the tensions of the film in a microcosm. The first of these takes place inside the Greers’ wagon about midway through the film. Its placement in the script is key, coming almost directly after the conversation between Annie Greer (Gail Russell) and Ben Stride (Scott), where she poses the half-hearted question: “What about my husband? Do you think I love him any less because of the way he is?” She refers to his seeming inability to handle himself in the Western wilds, equated to an inability to take care of her, much as Stride had been unable to care for his late wife. To which Stride quickly and coldly replies: “Yes Ma’am.” The scene in the wagon picks up on this but allows Masters, played by Lee Marvin who steals every scene he is in, to become a pernicious mediator for the growing affection between Stride and Mrs Greer. The scene begins with an expertly staged shot of all four occupants of the wagon (see Figure 10.6). Stride and Mrs Greer downstage, close to the camera, Masters and Mr Greer (Walter Reed) upstage, staggered in their positioning but placed notably between Stride and Annie, separating them. This opening shot of the scene is filmed in a long take, making sure to establish the space between the characters yet tying them all together within the confines of the wagon. The wilderness has come inside and there is little enough space to accommodate it. Boetticher then cuts the wagon across a center axis, further separating the two couples (Masters/John–Stride/Annie). In the rest of the scene, especially once Masters begins manipulating things via his story of a woman who left her man for someone who reminds him of Stride, the scene cuts quickly back and forth between the two couples, forming two shots. This

th e use of space  175

Figure 10.6.

serves to elongate the space they inhabit. The covered wagon, which we have seen from outside to be rather small and confining, becomes a vast distance to be crossed. This is certainly a form of the shot–reverse-shot so utilized in continuity editing but here it works as a divide, rather than a connection. The regularly reversing shots give the impression of space where there is none, furthering the metaphor between what is happening within the wagon and what is happening outside. While the camera is on them, Masters looks almost directly at the viewer while John Greer forlornly looks down. He knows that he is the butt of the story. As the shot reverses, we see Annie and Stride who often share looks. Even when Stride is evidently looking at Masters, whose voice (Marvin’s is one of the more recognizable in Hollywood of the period) dominated the soundscape of the limited space, Annie Greer casts small, desirous glances at the man. As the story continues, the space seems to deepen, until isolated one shots get cast around the wagon. Each character has become solitary, none of them (expect for Masters) being sure of their position in the confines of the wagon. The second of the interior shots, where the concept of the film is pushed along, almost a metaphor for the entirety of Boetticher’s Western oeuvre, takes place as the climax of the film is about to begin (see Figure 10.7). Andrew Sarris says that Boetticher’s films function “partly as floating poker games where every character took turns at bluffing about his hand until the final showdown.”11 In the wild space, where most of the film takes place, this is an apt description but, once in the interior, the floating poker game comes to a crashing halt. Quite literally in this case, the poker game ends, as Masters kicks over the poker table where Payte Bodeen (John Larch), the man who

176  c h r i s t o phe r m inz

Figure 10.7.

­ asterminded the robbery that killed Stride’s wife, is sitting. Chips spill out m on to the floor, causing the entire saloon to turn about to see the two men, locked in a bluff gone south. Masters is sure that Bodeen has sent out his men to be killed by Stride so he can abscond with the bulk of the Wells Fargo cash he has stolen. Masters suspects that he will be sent out as well. The shot is filmed in deep focus, allowing the reaction of the whole interior to be seen. Our focus, as the viewers, is the reverse of the viewers within the diegesis but ultimately the same. Again, the interior becomes a metaphor for the outside world. Where the outside is inhabited by the “floating” poker game, inside, the real game is disrupted. Outside bluffs must still take place but here, in the constricting interior space, Masters and Bodeen are forced to deal with the reality of the situation. What strikes me are the tabletops themselves. The site of real poker seems to stand out starkly against the otherwise muted colors of the rest of the saloon, as floating islands of concrete green reality amid the general abstraction of Boetticher’s individualist world.12 In both the interior spaces I have described, there is a disruption of what has occurred in the exterior spaces. In the wagon, the relationship between Annie and Stride is cemented, breaking her almost completely from her husband, while the saloon space fractures the bluffing nature of the outside world. While the interiors addressed above are obvious, there are exterior shots in Seven Men from Now that function much like a traditional interior shot. I shall call these, somewhat prosaically, interior–exteriors. The basic design of these shots is clearly exterior but, using the landscape, or mise-en-scène, to entrap the characters. Nothing seems more insidious to the Western hero than being confined. Boetticher’s landscapes in Seven Men often seem to carry a sense

th e use of space  177 of collapse, or confinement. The meaningful conveyance in this regard is to create a metonymic space to suggest the increasing obsession of the Scott character. This will come to a pointed, overbearing and claustrophobic extreme in Decision at Sundown. But here it is a collapse by inches, slow and menacing. The film opens with one of these shots, as Stride enters a rock outcropping being used by two men as a cover from the rain which pours down steadily in the open. The cave is open to the elements but the camera is placed in such a way that it seems completely enclosed. It is an exterior shot which is also an interior shot. The fourth wall is invisible to us, as it nearly always is in classical Hollywood design, but the sound of the rain reminds us how close nature is. These two men are the first of the seven that Stride intends to kill, and he does so coldly before taking their horses and retreating back to the open exterior space. Even the mastermind, the last of the seven men, Payte Bodeen, ends up in one of these interior–exteriors as his final moments descend upon him. As he runs from Stride, he ducks between two increasingly narrow rock formations. He tries to squeeze through them but is caught and we watch as he scrambles helplessly as Masters guns him down. He cannot even collapse to the ground, trapped as he is. This is obviously an exterior shot. It is out of doors, the sun shines, but the confinement it portrays functions much like an interior. In the Western, these interiors are places where the men are hardly comfortable. In Boetticher, interiors are places of death, both physically and metaphorically. One space that works as an exterior–interior on more than one occasion within the film is the underside of the wagon. In an earlier scene, it is a place where Stride is able to communicate with Annie Greer through the floorboards. Stride is always just outside the reach of the woman he clearly has a romantic affection for. There is metonymic intercourse here, as we can see how close she is to being on top of him, mimicking the matrimonial bed she is actually sharing with her husband. The visual, split by separating shots of each of them, leads us to the image of them in bed together. She is in an actual interior space while he is technically outside but well confined within the framework of the wagon. Later, this space is used again and, once more, it unites Annie and Stride, this time to the explicit exclusion of her husband (see Figure 10.8). After Stride has been wounded, the Greers come upon him and attempt to nurse him back to health. They place him under the wagon, and the camera rests on the ground while shooting through the spokes of the wagon wheel in what must be a visual citation of the films of Joseph H. Lewis. Annie and Stride are within the spokes while the edge of the wheel cuts harshly through the frame to excise John Greer from them. Annie has made her choice even if she is not aware of it yet. Sadly, it will not matter in any regard. This wagonwheel shot traps the couple while leaving John Greer to grow. It is his growth, despite it causing his death, that the relationship of Annie and Stride compels,

178  c h r i s t o phe r m inz

Figure 10.8.

made so eloquently through the imagery mediated by the wagon’s wheel or floorboard. He wants to enter that space, wants to inhabit the interior–exterior that has confined, yet opened up Stride and Annie.

T he S c a l e -M o d e l W e st e r n : Decision at Sundown Decision at Sundown is unique among Boetticher’s films, and for most Western directors, in that the majority of the film takes place in interiors. It is a remarkably claustrophobic film beset by the growing obsession that is common to all of the films discussed here and most others directed by Boetticher. Ultimately, the use of these interiors creates a complex film which deserves dedicated scholarship beyond the scope of this chapter. Jim Kitses does not list it among Boetticher’s “more substantial works,”13 and I think this is a mistake. Here is a brilliant microscopic view of the entirety of the Ranown Cycle, the existentialist tendency brought to bear with near surgical precision. Lee Russell says of Boetticher that, “in many ways he is a miniaturist—he does not have great imaginative vigour or panoramic sweep or painful self-consciousness, but works on a much smaller scale and in a much lower key.”14 I think this is a remarkably apt way of discussing Boetticher in general but, most especially, Decision at Sundown which scales down the individualism within Boetticher’s work even beyond the archetypal to a representational abstract where, when the light is shone on a single aspect, we see detail in excess but, when viewed from afar, there is an effect of blended and distorted iconography. Space is a premium in Decision At Sundown. This is true in several ways.

th e use of space  179 Unlike the other films I have discussed, which function almost like “road films,” Decision is remarkably static. Movement is limited and, when it does occur, it feels jarring and out of place. The city of Sundown is quiet but not out of simple good nature. It is a town under the thumb of a dandy tyrant, Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll) who just so happens to be the man who, apparently, caused the suicide of Bart Allison’s wife. In the opening description in this chapter, I described the captive nature of Bart Allison as depicted by the use of the tight frame within a frame. The town of Sundown itself is captive in much the same way. People are often pressed together but this does not offer the sense of community or friendliness that one may suspect. Rather, it projects the sense of a powder keg, one that needs only to be lit by stepping on Tate Kimbrough’s toes. It is never clear what Kimbrough has done to subjugate the town. This is kept vague as though to mirror the murky ambiguity of what happened between Kimbrough and Mary Allison to warrant Bart Allison’s vengeful wrath. The clever blocking, which clumps figures together within the frame, results in added tension. Bart Allison and his partner Sam (Noah Beery, Jr.) enter the hotel, where drinks are on Tate Kimbrough’s dime on account of his nuptials that day to the daughter of the wealthiest family in town. Bart pays for his drink but is refused. The hotel is a wide-open space as is made clear by the opening interior shot in this scene which tracks across the room, making the egresses clear. Yet, despite this, the entire cast is situated around the bar, edging each other out and pressing in to get closer. They seem to fade into the background, color and costume.15 When Bart and Sam find their place at the bar, they are kept close by the limited space. Their refusal to drink on Kimbrough’s tab brings over the sheriff and the frame narrows around them but makes clear that movement would be near impossible. When an opponent is this close, the threat and tension become exponentially higher, and that is certainly the case here (see Figure 10.9). There are numerous shots blocked like this. Boetticher has a deep eye for mise-en-scène, and his disdain for groups, or especially collectivism, becomes apparent in these shots. Allison is the individualist who disrupts the collective space around the bar, as he will the space of the town of Sundown itself. Kimbrough, who may be the ostensible villain, is offered a more sympathetic eye than the rest of the town, too. He may be a flawed, cad of a human but at least he is playing by his own rules. Boetticher has always had a soft spot for his villains. This close blocking is useful in creating the sense of Kimbrough’s authority over the space they inhabit. While the narrative may be coy about what Kimbrough has done, or what power he actually holds, the film itself is not. He has the power of movement, something only he and possibly the doctor (John Archer) are afforded. Even Bart Allison is eventually confined to extremely limited space wherein to move. But, for Kimbrough, it is more than just his

180  c h r i s t o phe r m inz

Figure 10.9.

own movement that matters. He constricts the movement of others. Several shots in the film have him occupying a large portion of the frame, concealing the large groups of men we know are there. Even Ruby (Valerie French), Kimbrough’s former (or possibly continuing) lover, is held in check by his presence in the frame. Space is Kimbrough’s to be had and others must simply exist in it while he is gone. In an early scene, Kimbrough explains to Ruby that she cannot go to the wedding. The frame tightens around them as he turns her to face him. We see his back which completely obscures everything below her eyes (see Figure 10.10). She is confined but, like Allison in the opening scene, she can look out, look at Kimbrough. It is telling that Ruby will be the catalyst for the actions that end the film. Often when Kimbrough is shot against groups of the townsfolk, he obscures them, speaking to them, despite our inability as spectators to see them (see Figure 10.11). In this scene, the town has gathered to discuss Kimbrough and to lament their own inaction concerning the cruelty and tyranny that have been the result of Kimbrough’s reign. Framed in a wide medium shot, there is space to spare but they, again, congregate in a clump, except for the doctor who has always been an outlier. When Kimbrough enters, his form, closer to the camera, conceals them. As the film nears its almost anticlimactic shootout, the townspeople begin to rustle, and the tight hold Kimbrough has upon them slackens, but he maintains his dominant spatial position almost until the final moments of the film. The claustrophobia which results from these tight spatial workings becomes palpable especially once Allison is trapped in the stable while waiting for Kimbrough to emerge to shoot it out with him. Allison waits while the town, one by one, seems to converge around him. Again, movement is nearly non-existent. Sheriff Swede Hansen (Andrew Duggan) who is possibly the

th e use of space  181

Figure 10.10.

Figure 10.11.

only genuine villain in the film, made so particularly by his cowardice, barely moves while he waits. When he finally does, walking slowly to a shootout with Allison, it means his death. Swede is comfortable in his space but, when forced to walk out of it, it signals fear and demise. This claustrophobic sense radiates from the town itself, partly because of the tightness of the blocking and the presence of Kimbrough’s authority but also from a sense of the bullring design of Sundown. A bullring is a necessarily confined space lest the bull rampage through the crowd. The use of corrida imagery abounds in Boetticher’s work. We see it in the final shootout of Ride Lonesome, Frank’s brother being used

182  c h r i s t o phe r m inz as the muleta and red cape. Kitses refers to Scott “felling Lee Marvin in the showdown like a dazed bull”16 in the shootout in Seven Men From Now. Sundown, like many towns in Westerns, is centered around a town square which is where the shootouts regularly occur. Here the opponents wait in their respective dens until they are forced to leave the comfort (I use the term somewhat loosely here) of their respective spaces and enter the ring. The broader question in this film, though, is who is the bull? While in most works it would be easy to suggest that Scott’s character is the matador, taunting the bull to come forth and get what is coming to it, Decision at Sundown functions more peculiarly. While Allison is contained in a stable, the space for livestock, Kimbrough is stationed in his fancy hotel room or in the affluent parlor of the Summerton house. Down to their clothing it seems that Allison is the bull in this film. He wears a worn and warm-colored leather jacket while Kimbrough is made up like the dandy he is. Ultimately, most of the film is an attempt to draw Allison from his space in the stable. Though the draw is simple: send Kimbrough out and Allison will come, too. He itches to get out and avenge his wife. Bart Allison, like most of Boetticher’s heroes, defies Robert Warshow’s description of the Westerner as “a figure of repose.” Rather, he’s anxious and constantly about to explode, much more akin to the gangster.17 And, when the bull is taunted out, he is denied his chance to gore the matador which is ultimately done by Ruby who is able finally to break from her confined space to save Kimbrough by shooting him non-fatally.18 The bull, having been denied its only duty, wanders off into the sunset, having entertained the crowd but finding no solace.

So L o ng A go I A l m o st F o r go t: Th e Tr a g ic Ellipses The three films I have discussed here, as well as the final Ranown film Comanche Station, function under what Will Wright refers to as “the vengeance variation” of the Western. This particular trope in the Western fits well into Budd Boetticher’s worldview, concerned as he is with individualism. Wright has a tendency to oversimplify but he is quite correct in saying that “unlike the classical hero who joins society because of his strength and their weakness, the vengeance hero leaves society because of his strength and their weakness.”19 Boetticher’s heroes seem to exist completely as critiques of what he sees as an increasing collectivism of American culture. Hence his eventual retreat from Hollywood into self-imposed exile making his final film Arruza (1972). In Wright’s estimation, however, there seems to be a psychological conflict in the vengeance hero, one that is subject to the influence of those around him. Wright suggests that he will, at some point, be convinced by another character

th e use of space  183 to give up his avenging quest, though he will eventually be forced to take it up again. Lastly, he will enter into society.20 While someone often attempts to convince Scott’s character to give up his quest, it is never successful. He is almost solipsistic in his mission. And, finally, he is never willing to go back to society. The closest we see to that is at the end of Seven Men From Now, where Ben Stride returns to take a diminished deputy position. It seems though that he does so more as a postscript to his wife than out of a notion of renewed social standing. All of the vengeance variation films pivot around what Janet Walker refers to as “the catastrophic past event.”21 Traditionally, this event occupies a space in the generic framework that is notable for creating a psychological impact on the characters in the film as well as on the spectators. It is a space that is often found in an elliptical void. The stories in the traumatic Western, which the vengeance variation is clearly entrenched in, often begin after the event but we are rarely kept in the dark as to what has happened. Walker notes that the event is often shown as “a series of quick flashes . . . or as a trail of signifiers strewn across the landscape . . . or finally as a structuring absence.”22 It is this final point, the “structuring absence,” that interests me most, precisely because it can be seen as a spatial concern as much as a temporal concern. There is a unique space within these films for exploring the traumatic event. In The Searchers we see Ethan Edwards look inside the burning building. We know that he sees the ravaged and murdered body of Martha even if we do not get to see it. The temporal sense of the ellipsis that was used to cover her murder remains but the spectator has been given the generic satisfaction of the traumatic space. We are given the opportunity to mourn with Ethan, knowing what he sees. Even in subplots of many Westerns, where vengeance is not the primary focus, we are regularly given a spatial center. Take, for example, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. In flashback sequences we see why Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) would be interested in taking the railroad’s money to hunt down Pike (William Holden.) The flashback, or the ellipsis, is used to contain the narrative but still offers the satisfaction of letting the viewer in on what the hero feels. John Saunders states that, “the audience’s familiarity with the formula was largely developed through experience of its most banal manifestations, endlessly recycling the basic settings, characters, and plots.”23 Perhaps this is why Boetticher’s films have never achieved the acclaim of his contemporaries such as Mann or Ford; Boetticher is not interested in letting the viewer in. He certainly repeats and strips his films down to “the most banal manifestations,”24 but that is where it ends, pure form. All these films begin after the wife has been killed. Each film has varying degrees of time between the event itself and when the action of the film begins but, ultimately, it does not matter. The urgency is the same in all of them. For the Boetticher/Scott hero, time is of no consequence; he is willing to

184  c h r i s t o phe r m inz wait as long as it takes. It is the empty space where the wife should be that matters. Even when another person, Annie Greer in Seven Men, could fill it, it is resisted. The void in the generic structure must remain open, a wound that drips blood in perpetuity. The spectator is never allowed even a glimpse of the wife in these films. She exists only as a phantom, haunting and near, but, at the same time, utterly absent. Kitses comments that, because of this absence, the revenge is meaningless25 but this seems to miss the point of vengeance. It is never about the avenged, always about the avenger. In Ride Lonesome it becomes apparent that Ben Brigade is not interested in social justice but in a personal justice that he sees as higher than the law. Hence, when he gets his revenge, he turns over Billy to Boone and lets them ride off. Here is the closest we get to reclaiming the space of the traumatic event. The hanging tree is where Brigade’s wife had been killed. It is where he gets his revenge, and then ends the film with him burning the tree down. Yet the closure is hollow since we still have not seen the traumatic event itself. The traumatic event is even more elucidated in both Seven Men From Now and Decision at Sundown. In the former the event has just happened so the vengeance, without allowing us the space of the event itself, feels jarring. The opening scene of Seven Men is a terrifically violent and tense one. Since we have not been given the information of what has happened to Stride’s wife as yet, let alone the images that will remain excised, his killing of the two bandits appears almost villainous. It is precisely the traumatic ellipsis that renders the abstraction and ambiguity here. Had the genre worked true to form, as Boetticher tends to do in most other regards, we would see Stride in a different light. Where, as in Ride Lonesome, we never know how long it has been, as Frank says “so long ago I almost forgot,” in Decision at Sundown the ellipsis has been three years. Bart Allison is not the hothead who would shoot down someone in haste like Ben Stride. He has had time to stew. He can wait. He wants Kimbrough to think about what’s coming to him. The ellipsis here even has a name that evokes the loss, Sabine Pass: the concept of the pass as reference to the long passage of time. Of course, as the film unfolds, it seems that Bart Allison is as divorced from images of his wife as we are. From a narrative perspective, this film is different from the others, as it turns out that the vengeance Bart Allison seeks is based on a fantasy notion he has of his wife. Unlike the noir femme fatale Gilda, who “never did all those things,” it turns out that Mary Allison, in fact, did. When Ruby shoots Kimbrough to save him from Allison’s destructive intent, she screams at him “you were married, but you never had a wife!” She is correct beyond the scope of the story. Janet Walker tells us that “past events are intransigent and ungraspable. They cannot be worked through, but only re-experienced as ‘distressing recollections,’ ‘recurrent dreams,’ ‘hallucinations, and dissociative episodes.’ This is also true for spectators for whom ‘distressing recollections’ and the lot become traumatic

th e use of space  185 mise-en-scène.”26 There was never a wife, not in any of these films. She is a specter, something to be recalled via nostalgic whimsy or melancholy, but never seen or touched. Her space in the construction of the film has been removed, generically erased.

In t o t he S u n se t Rick Altman explains that, “the Western consolidated its identity through criticism.”27 Ahistoricity, violence, and simplicity were all hallmarks of this criticism, and Budd Boetticher appears to have taken that consolidation to its logical end. His films move away from history, push into violence, which is seen as simply necessary, and strips his narrative to consummate framework. Even while creating the most stock forms, he brought vision and depth to concept, rather than delving into the psychology that had been coming to light in the films of Mann most definitely, but also Ford, and the oncoming “revisionist” directors. Even in his endings Boetticher uses the most traditional imagery to provoke subtle meaning. The Western hero cannot stay with the society he has helped. He is not suited for the civilized life, so he often rides off alone. Thomas Schatz says that “the earlier silent Westerns and their later low-budget counterparts had understood the logic of sending the Westerner ‘into the sunset’ after the requisite showdown, thereby sustaining the genre’s prosocial function while reaffirming the hero’s essential individuality.”28 Often this is seen as a site of melancholy, à la The Searchers, or monomythic necessity as in Shane, but for Boetticher it seems something else. It is the icon that draws him but inherently a broken one. Hence, in Decision at Sundown, stripped of his righteousness, and denied his vengeance, Bart Allison rides out into the sunset drunk and broken, his individualism no longer needed in the town of Sundown which he has inadvertently rescued from Kimbrough. There is not the sorrow that we see elsewhere, just a pointed diminishment. “We’ll never forget the day Bart Allison came to town.” Unlike his wife, Allison was at least afforded his space, if only for a day in the diegesis. Boetticher himself rode off into the sunset. Leaving Hollywood at the seeming peak of his creativity, he traveled to Mexico to shoot his dream project, a film about great individualism and beauty, the bullfighting biopic Arruza. Much as the broken Bart Allison, Boetticher never recovered from his time in Mexico and he made no more major films after Arruza which was a commercial failure fraught with tragedy from the outset. His legacy will live in the past, an individual among the throng of the Hollywood studio system, held to the last, trapped in his own space, just as he would have wanted it. This chapter is dedicated to Noble Abner Ray: The first real cowboy I ever met

186  c h r i s t o phe r m inz

NOTES  1. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: New Edition (London: British Film Institute, 2004), pp. 44, 175.   2. Janet Walker, “Captive Images in the Traumatic Western,” in Westerns:Films Through History, ed. Janet Walker, pp. 219–51 (New York and London: Routledge, 2001).  3. http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2012-07-13/ride-lonesome-films-budd-boetticher   4. Kitses, p. 176.   5. Lee Russell, “Budd Boetticher” in New Left Review, No. 32 (1965), reprinted in Kitses and Rickmann (eds), The Western Reader (New York: Limelight, 1998), p. 199.   6. Budd Boetticher, quoted in Russell, pp. 199–200.  7. David Bordwell. Figures Traced in Light (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 27.  8. Ibid., p. 18.   9. André Bazin. “An Exemplary Western,” in Cahiers du Cinéma 74 (August–September, 1957), reprinted in Jim Hiller (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 169. 10. Seven Men From Now is not technically a Ranown film. It was produced by John Wayne’s Batjac Productions. It is convenient, however, to place it at the beginning of the cycle because it sets up the thematic elements that would become so ingrained in the later films. 11. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1968), p. 124. 12. One could also point to the red dress worn by the saloon girl, a staple of Boetticher’s women. They tend to stand out, not being part of the world of the men, in most cases. (See Karen Steele’s dress in Ride Lonesome or Russell’s head wrap in Seven Men From Now.) 13. Kitses, p. 174. 14. Russell, p. 200. 15. Bazin comments on the color palette that Boetticher uses saying they “are uniformly transposed into the tonality of a wash-drawing whose transparency and flatness recall old stencil colors,” 172. 16. Kitses, p. 179. 17. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 106, 107. 18. I think it is safe to suggest that Ruby is the one female character in Boetticher’s Westerns who defies the logic he often sets up. She is there to be more than the crowd in a bullfight. She actively intervenes, and “gets her man.” Ultimately, she saves the day. It is important to note that she is coded as a saloon girl, or prostitute. She shares a deep understanding of the world of men. Ruby is the only women in Boetticher’s Western films depicted as such. Robert Warshow maintains that, “those women in the Western movies who share the hero’s understanding of life are prostitutes,” who show “quasi-masculine independence.” Warshow, p. 108. 19. Will Wright, Six-guns and Society: A Structural Study of The Western (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), p. 59. Emphases in original. 20. Ibid., pp. 68, 69. 21. Janet Walker. “Captive Images in the Traumatic Western,” in Janet Walker (ed.), Westerns: Films Through History (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 220. 22. Ibid., p. 220. 23. John Saunders, The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey (London: Wallflower, 2001), p. 37.

th e use of space   187 24. Ibid., p. 37 25. Kitses, pp. 178, 179. 26. Walker, p. 247. 27. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 38. 28. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 52.

ch apter 11

Ideology and Boetticher’s Westerns from the Late 1950s John White

T

he Westerns Budd Boetticher made in collaboration with scriptwriter Burt Kennedy in the late 1950s: Seven Men From Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome (1959) and Comanche Station (1960) demonstrate the use of classic narrative structural arcs and display considerable depth of characterization. The speech patterns employed in the script lend themselves to the creation of carefully directed dramatic performances; the tensions between characters created in the writing demand expression in the proxemics employed in shot composition; and the locations set out in the screenplay require the almost unavoidable creation of poetic sequences highlighting the relationship between man and the natural world. But what are the underpinning messages and ideologies of these Boetticher–Kennedy Westerns and how is the nature of this worldview revealed when set alongside Boetticher Westerns from the same period with screenplays by Charles Lang, Decision at Sundown (1957) and Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), and Berne Giler Westbound (1959)? If anyone were to be in any doubt as to why Boetticher is seen by many as a high-quality Hollywood director, they would need only to study the opening five minutes of The Tall T to understand exactly how he has gained such a reputation.1 The first shot is of a rocky, boulder-strewn landscape that immediately presents itself as a harsh, unforgiving environment. In the distance there are two arid and dusty hills and, beyond that, there is a cloudless, grey-blue sky.2 The whole area from the far distance into the foreground is dry, barren and largely devoid of greenery. The static camera invites the viewer to take in this landscape as the credits fade in across the screen in a broken, jagged font and an orangey red that immediately brings to the semiotic mix the usual foreboding connotations attaching to that color. As we move toward the end of the credit sequence, a horse and rider (Randolph Scott as

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  189 Pat Brennan), minute within the composition of the shot, enter the middle distance from behind a large boulder on the left of the screen and move toward a fixed camera point, weaving between rocks. The rider sways and shifts in the saddle according to the changes in terrain in a choreographed expression of a particular relationship between man and nature. As the credits end he arrives in the near foreground of the shot at the center of the screen, still small between rocks and casting a shadow that suggests the sun is high in the sky. To maintain a full-length shot of the horse and to keep the rider center screen, the camera slowly tilts and pans slightly to the left as the rider moves towards it. The sound of hooves can be heard as horse and rider continue to move closer to the camera, coming back toward the left and the foreground corner of the shot. As the rider stops with the horse side on to the camera, the celebration (or mythologizing) of the cowboy of the American West in the final decades of the nineteenth century embodied in the shot is similar to the aggrandizement to be found in Wild West paintings and sculptures3 by artists such as Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell;4 in both this film and these artworks there is that same attention to the fine details of clothing and horse tack, that same idolization of the solitary, resourceful male.5 The dominant colors of horse and rider—faded yellows and browns— merge into the background. The man’s yellow leather gloves denote a working cowhand, and the poise of the hand holding the reins denotes a practiced horseman, the pale hat picks up longstanding genre conventions reassuring the audience of this character’s essentially decent nature (though viewers may then, almost immediately, also notice that the man’s face is partly in shadow, casting some uncertainty over their initial assumption), and the water bottle reinforces the arid nature of the landscape. Both the shot itself and the figure

Figure 11.1  Idolization of the solitary, resourceful male (The Tall T).

190  j o hn white

Figure 11.2  Attention to detail within shot composition (The Tall T).

within the shot, therefore, exist within a whole, to the audience, well-known mythology.6 The actor’s movement, as he leans forward in the saddle and looks offscreen past the camera, indicates his attention has been drawn to something and, at the same time, encourages us to want to know what has caught his eye. This movement coincides with the sound of a blacksmith hammering on metal, a sound for which we have been prepared without realizing it by the sound effect of the hooves, and this further intrigues the viewers. And so, when the rider moves past the camera and we cut to a shot from behind him we are pleased to be able to look in the direction of our anticipation. There is now an area of greenery visible with a cabin set against trees, though still with arid foothills to the right and towering rocky outcrops behind the cabin, and now, also with massive mountains in the distance. Attention to detail is to be found in the larger elements of composition—the vegetation and wider landscape, forming this new shot—but also in the fine detail of the sweat mark on the back of the rider’s shirt. The blue of the sky has become lighter in this reverse shot but now the blue is found only in small patches and much of the sky is filled with heavy, ominous clouds. As he moves away from the camera, the rider is again placed in the position of being a small human presence surrounded by a vast, for the most part, rocky and mountainous, landscape. As the rider reaches the middle distance we cut to a boy (Christopher Olsen as Jeff) coming out of a dark doorway on to a shadowed porch where there is a series of basic homemade items: a chair, a child’s cart, and a water barrel. The items are immediately homely but also flimsy. The chair, for instance, appears rickety and one leg is splayed at a precarious angle. We reflect, perhaps, how

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  191 the immediately apparent innocence of the young boy contrasts with the elements of darkness and shadow surrounding him. The strong vertical lines created by the posts holding up the porch divide the on-screen space into boxed spaces. The colors are mostly washed out grays and browns but with red stripes on a blanket on the seat of the chair and three areas of vivid red on a blanket hanging over a rail. The boy is childlike in his movements but his clothes are those of a young man: white shirt, braces, and grey trousers. All this must be something of what the rider was looking towards in the earlier shot because we can still hear the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer, tolling like a bell. The boy’s movements are light, there is a smile on his face, and, holding a bucket, he jumps happily into the small child’s cart; but, for our understanding of the film as a whole, what are the connotations of all of this? The cart, a boxed space, is on wheels, and so, to jump into it as the boy does is a precarious proposition, not without an edge of danger; and the bucket is in his hand for a reason, to collect water, to be taken to the well and thrown down into the depths. At this point, the camera has been still for a few seconds, allowing us to watch the child and contemplate this new character but, as he skips out of the cart, the camera pans left to follow him. Again, the background is full of grays and browns but with a glimpse of green trees, red paint on an upstairs window, and further red flashes on blankets. We move along beside the boy in a tracking shot as he skips past a workshop and we are given glimpses of the flickering flames from the forge. His father (Fred Sherman as Hank Parker) is in the dark, boxed space of the workshop lit by flashes of fire. The boy looks toward his father who smiles back at him but there are pelts of wolves or coyotes hanging on a wall just past the forge. There is also a three-legged

Figure 11.3  Connotations of danger within apparent innocence (The Tall T).

192  j o hn white

Figure 11.4  Idyllic or slightly disconcerting? (The Tall T).

chair by the forge entrance, the seat of which slopes off to the left. Essentially, this remains an idyllic father-and-son scene but there are elements that we might find slightly disconcerting. Perhaps, for example, in addition to the pelts of wild animals, we notice that a series of objects past the sloping chair at the forge entrance are all set at an angle, barrels tilt, a bench-seat is on a slope and has items on it that look to be in danger of sliding off, and, all in all, it feels like we are moving downhill with the boy. But, because the music is light and chirpy, in tune with the boy’s movements, we barely notice any of this. As the boy moves beyond the buildings, within a very small space of time it begins to feel as though he is rather alone and perhaps vulnerable, and, by the time he reaches the well, his isolation within the physical space, with rough terrain in the middle distance and jagged rocks and boulders beyond this, becomes clear. Once again, we see boxed spaces, the well itself and the wooden water trough to the right. The pulley and rope for drawing water remind us, perhaps, of a recurring image in Boetticher Westerns, that of the hanging tree. And, as the boy leans on the edge of the well, we cut to a reverse shot that places the deep, boxed space of the well before him. At this point, we are less than two minutes into the film. Now, a series of lines again divides the screen space. The posts of the long, shaded porches of the buildings are in the background. The distance to these buildings seems foreshortened compared with the distance Jeff seemed to walk as we followed him a moment ago. The ropes of the well, the post of the well, and the braces of the boy create further lines. The buildings have become dark spaces full of shadows in the background, and there is a further shadow being cast into the well. The boy drops a stone

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  193

Figure 11.5  A rope slashes across Jeff’s face (The Tall T).

into the well, peers in and listens, before creating sudden panic and a sense of danger by calling out for his father, “Pa! Pa!” When the boy’s father emerges with his rifle, he enters a boxed space created by a porch post and one side of the forge doorway. As he cocks the gun and moves forward, his shadow is cast on the wall behind him. And this time, it is his turn to call out using a tone of desperation we perhaps imagine him using later on another occasion: “Jeff! Jeff!” As we cut to a point-of-view shot from the father, Jeff is seen running towards the rider through the framework of the well. The shot positions him beside the bucket that stands on the edge of the well, waiting to be thrown in. As we cut to look back through the well toward the father, the line of a well rope cuts through his face; then, as he moves forward, it cuts through his body. As father and son greet Pat, the bucket sits on the edge of the well sloping at an angle. What we end up with here is a scene that, despite being, for the most part, happy and full of smiles, and lightly scored, after a moment’s reflection comes to be seen as full of deadly, foreboding. On a first viewing, we barely notice it—a hidden danger—the evidence for which we become conscious of only during subsequent viewings. What is it that makes this opening so densely packed with meaning? The cinematography is certainly crucial.7 But, to a large the extent, the nature of that cinematography is dictated by the script: the initial setting, the expanse of that setting, the isolation of man (whether as an individual or as the occupants of a small homestead) within that expanse and the ever-present sense of threat within that environment are all implicit aspects of the script. By placing the action outside an urban context, the writer calls for the creation of tension

194  j o hn white between man and a particular, chosen environment. By eschewing social context, an uncomplicated space is created for the contest between men who may see the world in similar ways but who have very different views of how to live in that world. The key point here is not, as has often been contended, that, with a slightly different experience, the villain, Frank Usher (Richard Boone), could have turned out like Brennan (Scott) but that they understand the world in a similar way but respond differently and only one of these responses is the advocated, American way. So, in this opening, the way the camera moves, the pace with which the camera moves, the way in which it stops and holds a moment for our reflection, giving us a mental imprint of an image for us to carry forward into the rest of the film, and the way in which actors are directed to move within the frame, these things are derived from the creative interpretation of the director, the director’s understanding of the felt essence of the script. But it is the script that sets up the possibility for these interpretations to take place: it is the narrative that is structured in such a way as to open with close observation of the pure innocence of a child and the bonded unity of a father–son relationship, and it is the narrative that determines that both father and son are soon to die in a most horrific way. Furthermore, it is the narrative that determines that these deaths are to occur off-stage and, therefore, that these deaths need to be realized in all the fullness of their brutality within the viewers’ imaginations. The script places us within a world that, on the surface, is idyllic but which is, beneath the surface, full of ominous threat. The demand on the viewer (in this Cold War era) is to recognize that this is the nature of the world and that, seemingly out of nowhere, a horrendously destructive force can descend on nice, ordinary people.8 The framing and composition of shots has to be determined by the director and cinematographer during production but the parameters within which will already been decided by the writer. The script demands that we should be shown this type of world as a result of the startling narrative trajectories that are given to Jeff and his father, as well as the characterful stagecoach driver, Rintoon.9 The dialogue, when it does begin around the well-head, is immediately pointed (“You heading for Contention?” Jeff asks Pat)10 and, full of the depth of retrospective tragic irony (“You got a fine boy there, Hank”) and symbolic implication (Jeff asks Pat to buy him cherryflavored “striped candy”) but the dialogue is of secondary importance; it is the writer’s decisions on setting, character relationships, and narrative arc that primarily define the nature of the opening. Another Western from this period, directed by Boetticher and starring Scott, not mentioned so far, is Westbound (1959). This film has a screenplay by Berne Giler and, as with the two credited to Lang, it is again distinctive from the Kennedy-scripted Westerns in that it is largely set in a town and again that town has come to be controlled by one powerful man.11 In that classic

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  195 Hollywood style of the 1950s (and beyond), the mass of ordinary people are shown as being weak in the face of villains taking over their town.12 In fact, when Scott as the film’s hero is humiliated by the thug gunslinger, Mace (Michael Pate), operating as enforcer for Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan) who “owns” the town, the townspeople lining the street join in the laughter. These “ordinary” people also seem to be a party to the brutal insensitivity meted out to Rod Miller (Michael Dante) as a disabled Northern soldier (“It’s too bad they didn’t shoot your head off instead of your arm.”)13 Here we have two levels of social complexity being incorporated into the text: attitudes towards disability (Rod himself make this explicit as he worries about being “just half a man”) together with the notion of the United States after the Civil War (and, perhaps, still in the late 1950s) as a country with a dislocating North–South divide. This is a society divided at its roots. “Some of these people grew up with me, knew me since I was a kid,” says Rod. And it is a division which is further flagged up when we see Putnam’s house represented as the stereotypical big, white-painted, plantation-style property. In addition, Westbound also provides a stronger portrayal of women than is the case in Boetticher– Kennedy collaborations. When we first see Jeanie Miller (Karen Steele), she is doing “a man’s work” plowing the fields. She is wearing pants and workingman’s gloves. Of course, this is Hollywood and she has blonde hair, blue eyes and an open-neck shirt. Nevertheless, as the camera opens the scene looking down at the plow moving through the soil and then tilts up to present us with Jeanie, we register not only her female form but also her “male” occupation. It is definitely and very noticeably the case that when “her man” returns from the Civil War, she follows the trajectory expected of American women after World War II in immediately taking out her dresses again and returning to traditional domestic work roles. When the men are at work she is relegated to bringing out the coffee.14 The final scene of the film, however, shows her back in a shirt and pants, and, one could argue, adopting an empowered role in an implied very open relationship with Scott’s character, John Hayes, that is unrestricted by any notion of marriage. The script for Westbound, therefore (like both Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone) sets up classic Hollywood narrative oppositions between weak and strong, and good and bad, but within an altogether more complex social matrix than Kennedy’s scripts; and this difference is achieved largely as a result of the decision to locate the movie in an urban context. What Boetticher enjoys about the Western as a genre is revealed in Wheeler Winston Dixon’s Film Talk: Directors at Work. “I love it, because it’s outside and you can do a lot with people and there’s a lot of action,” according to Boetticher.15 Westbound, Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone, therefore, do not immediately call for Boetticher to work in those areas of the genre to which he feels particularly drawn. In the opening minutes of Westbound, as the b­ ackground is given

196  j o hn white for what is to come, there is a sequence that follows a group of riders galloping fast, left to right across the screen. Here Boetticher’s tracking shot takes us so close to the riders we feel we are riding with them; but, to a large extent, the rest of the screenplay denies him these sorts of opportunities. This is not to suggest Westbound, Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone offer more coherent packages of meaning, or are more successful in their use of the genre, or more aesthetically pleasing than the Boetticher–Kennedy films because they most certainly are not. In Westbound, for example, the social complexities are eventually moved to one side through the simple device of loading all the responsibility for the presence of evil in the world of this film on to one man, Mace, the gunslinger. “You’d like to see this break out into open killing, wouldn’t you: I can see it in your face,” says Putnam (Andrew Duggan) to Mace at one point. What we end up with is something that is intensely simplistic in its address to social issues as the townspeople come together as a community and help Randolph Scott (very much playing the role of Hollywood star as hero) as John Hayes to defeat the villain. This does not, however, detract from the fact that, in their determined location of the action within towns, these three films highlight a key point of divergence from the Boetticher–Kennedy Westerns; and that, whether ultimately successful or not in their forays into these areas, these three films, because of their urban location, differ fundamentally from the Boetticher–Kennedy Westerns in the intended scope of their ideological playing field. Kennedy is not interested in ways in which individuals function within the social dynamics of communities. His (perhaps, instinctive) working method is to reduce the narrative space afforded to community and ignore the importance of society.16 Not only does Kennedy tend to remove his central characters from an urban social context, he also likes to divorce them from any historical context. Edward Buscombe characterizes Boetticher’s Westerns as a whole in these terms: “His Westerns are concerned exclusively with individual courage and self-reliance, showing none of Ford’s interest in the values of the community or sense of historical tradition.”17 But it would be more correct to talk of Boetticher’s films made with Kennedy as demonstrating this trait.18 In the Boetticher films from the period with screenplays by Lang and Giler, although this context may be vague, there is something there. In Decision at Sundown, the central character appears to be a Texan and reference is made in connection with this to the Civil War. “There’s a lot of folks around here ain’t interested in seeing you rebels,” says the owner of the livery stable. In response, the central character’s sidekick, Sam (Noah Beery, Jr.), tells him, “The war’s over,” but the liveryman retorts, “I bet you got plenty of folks down in Texas still think the war’s goin’ on.” In Buchanan Rides Alone, Scott is a Texan from the west of the state on his way home from fighting apparently in support of the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, perhaps for a time under General Emilio Campo, though the

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  197 dialogue refers to a “General Campos.”19 Exactly what this character may have been doing remains uncertain but, nevertheless, some sort of context for him traveling through a Mexican border town is given. In Westbound, Scott plays a Union officer who, towards the end of the Civil War, has to try to set up a staging post for the Overland Stage Line in a town where most people support the Confederacy. A significant difference here is clearly that this central character is a Northern officer; the classic Western genre context of a Southerner who, in some psychological, if not actual, sense has refused to surrender is eschewed in this film made for Warner Bros. rather than Columbia Pictures. In Seven Men From Now, which operates as something of a template for the other three Boetticher–Kennedy Westerns made in this period, there is no effort to place the central character within any real historical background. Instead, Ben Stride (Scott) is positioned within the mythology of the West and the Western film. Vague references are made to “Cheroquois” Indians who, it is implied, have been mistreated. “I take it you don’t think the Indians are dangerous”/”They’re worse than that, they’re hungry.” This is perhaps some vague reference to the forced march known as the Trail of Tears of 1838,20 or at least to that type of treatment of Native Americans. The husband and wife traveling west to California in this film are following the classic westward migration trope of the Western but they are said to be from Kansas City, a place that only gained that name in 1889. Perhaps they’re supposed to be following the classic Santa Fe Trail from Independence, near the town of Kansas, through the Indian Territory and into New Mexico that was in operation as an overland trail from the early 1820s until the end of the 1880s but the more usual California Trail runs north of this following the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri for much of the way. In the end there are no genuine historical reference points on offer in Seven Men From Now; instead, we have the mythical dimensions of the American dream narrative of westward expansion.21 The Boetticher Westerns from this period not scripted by Kennedy are admittedly not that much stronger in genuine historical context but they do not move with such confidence and definite purpose toward use of the mythological space offered by the concept of “The West.” In Horizons West, Jim Kitses describes Kennedy’s style as being that of stripping the Western genre down to its basic structures. One of the ways in which he does this is not only to remove the action from an urban context but also to remove any genuine historical context. In The Tall T, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, historical references are stripped out even more completely. The Tall T does have at its heart a stagecoach hold-up; the central image of Ride Lonesome is a hangingtree; and the starting point for Comanche Station is a white woman being taken by Indians. These are core ideas for Westerns and, to some extent, genuine aspects of the experience of the “Wild” West but, as they are used here, they

198  j o hn white exist wholly within that mythology of the West that has been particularly created through the intertextuality of Hollywood films. In the West, in reality,22 and in the world envisioned by Boetticher– Kennedy, men and women are allotted very clear traditional roles. Stride (Scott), the hero of Seven Men From Now, has failed as a man because when he was not re-elected as sheriff his wife had to take a job. “Could have been a deputy,” he says, “but my pride wouldn’t let me. So, my wife had to take a job: a clerk checking freight for Fargo. She was working at that job the night she was killed.” His failure as a man has had a terrible consequence. The ideological struggle over a woman’s role in society was a feature of media representation in the United States in the 1950s: Despite losses of jobs in the wake of World War II, overall from 1940 to 1950, the number of women in the labor force grew by 29 percent (Coontz 1992, 161). Concomitantly, a reinvigorated cult of domesticity flourished that was antithetical to the lives and concerns of working women. This recycled ideology heralded unpaid professional mothering and household chores as the most valuable work in which a woman could engage. The expectation—perpetuated by advertising—was that domestic work was fulfilling work . . . and that women’s personal development and fulfillment were and should be subordinated to those of their spouses and children. Paradoxically, the 1950s represent both a proliferation of these ideologies and high employment for women workers in the United States. By the end of the decade, 40 percent of all women over the age of sixteen held a job (Coontz 1992, 163.)23 The domestic role of women is looked at in Seven Men From Now. When Annie Greer (Gail Russell) is washing clothes and hanging them on a line to dry Stride helps her, though this amounts largely to helping with the fire that is needed to boil water. “Most men object to doing a woman’s work,” says Annie. “I hardly blame them though: they’re right about our work never being done.” So, what does the film suggest men should be like? Stride is very much in the mold of the strong, silent type. Masters (Lee Marvin)—the male counterpoint to Scott in this film—debates whether Annie’s husband is “half a man” or not and implies that he’s “soft”, unlike both himself and Stride.24 Yet, in helping with the washing, Stride demonstrates he is capable of being both “hard” and “soft.” This is the ability that Masters lacks. Ironically, it is he who is “half a man” in that he is capable only of being the stereotypical “hard” man. The question then becomes, if Stride is the ideal man, how did he lose the election to be sheriff? What the script tells us is it was not a problem with Stride but with elections and, therefore, with democracy and with people, en masse. “He wasn’t much for kissin’ babies,” Masters tells us.

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  199 In The Tall T, the hero, Pat Brennan (Scott), believes in free will and frequently implies you always have a choice in what you do. His antagonist in this film, with whom an intense series of exchanges takes place,25 Frank Usher (Richard Boone), believes people sometimes don’t have a choice. The ideology of the film is strongly focused on the individual as the author of his/her own destiny. According to Brennan: “You can’t always sit back and wait for something to happen; sometimes you gotta walk up and take what you want.” But there is also always a choice to be made about how the individual is going to achieve his aims in life: usher: I’m gonna have me a place someday . . . brennan: You figure you’ll get it this way? usher: Sometimes a man don’t have a choice. brennan: Don’t you? Interestingly, however, when Usher dismisses his two sidekicks as “animals” that cannot be helped, Brennan disagrees: usher: Look at them. Billy Jack no folks, no schooling: been fightin’ and cheatin’ his way since he was first able to walk. And Chink, the same: shot his first man dead when he was twelve, his old man, found him beatin’ his mother with a broken Tequila bottle. Nothin’ but animals . . . I can’t help the way they are: nobody can help their kind. brennan: Nobody tries. But it is important to recognize that the implication here is not that society should intervene. The focus should not be on Usher’s use of the term “schooling,” that is, the intervention of the community to address a collective concern. The focus should be on the phrase, “no folks.” Neither Billy Jack nor Chink experienced a stable family life. The conservative ideology presented by Boetticher–Kennedy believes not only (and this may seem like a contradiction) in the self-contained individual,26 but also in “the family.” In Comanche Station Scott Jefferson Cody makes the same point about choosing the path your life will take. “A man can cross over any time’s he’s a mind,” he says to Dobie. Dobie’s response is, “It ain’t that easy. It ain’t that easy at all,” but what Dobie actually does in the film, in exactly the same way Greer (Walter Reed) does in Seven Men From Now, is to make that choice and “cross over”’ to the good side. That is to say, this is the trajectory given in the narrative by the scriptwriter to both these characters. Both Dobie and Greer are shot in the back and killed in the process of “crossing over” but, for the ideology or morality of the film, that does not matter: a man has done what a man has to do and achieved through stepping up to the plate of “rugged ­individualism” the only thing there is in life for a man to achieve.

200  j o hn white In Ride Lonesome, as in Seven Men From Now, Scott again plays a husband, Ben Brigade, who has failed in this role. When he meets Carrie Lane (Karen Steele), whose husband has left her on her own at a staging post in wild country with Indians in the area, he is very clear about the nature of that role: brigade: He left you alone. lane: I can take care of myself. brigade: If you were mine you wouldn’t have to. The irony of this becomes apparent only later when the audience learns that, in the past, Brigade left his own wife unprotected with (again, as in Seven Men From Now) tragic consequences. What Kennedy has added to Seven Men From Now after his experience of working on The Tall T which was based on a story, The Captives, by Elmore Leonard is a stronger sense of the brutality of the actions men are capable of performing.27 Brigade’s wife has been taken from her home by the outlaws and hung from a nearby hanging tree. What Kennedy was already strongly aware of was the ends to which men will go for revenge once the concepts of “family” or “manhood” have been violated. What we see being played out in each of these films, and what Westerns as a genre not only permit but glorify despite often turning away from lynch law, is a relentless form of something like vigilante justice. In Westerns, the coming together of a collective group to pursue justice is usually seen to descend into an impassioned lynch-mob mentality, whereas the cool, calculated, relentless and merciless pursuit of extra-legal justice (for which, read, vengeance) by the individual hero is offered for our admiration. We might discuss Brigade in the way Paul A. Cantor talks about Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956): Ethan has been hardened by his experiences . . . But he needs that hardness to deal with a harsh and hostile world. Homer’s heroes are not nice either, because their world also does not allow them to be so. Ford’s Western frontier is Homeric precisely because it is a world in which a man survives only by the strength of his own arms. Like Homer and Aeschylus, Ford portrays a prepolitical world in all its epic and tragic grandeur, a world whose heroes can be savage in their self-reliance while at the same time providing the only bulwark against the triumph of barbarism over civilization. 28 Like Edwards, Brigade at the end of the film is left standing alone and outside any community there might be.29 But, if we do pursue this line of argument, we also need to ask what the intended and actual effect of all this might be on contemporary viewers? Are audiences supposed to view these events, whether

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  201 in The Searchers or Ride Lonesome, as something that happened in a distant past and, therefore, in moral and ideological terms is of no immediate relevance to today, whether that “today” is the 1950s or the present? Talking about his relationship to Wayne and, in the process, positioning himself politically as he saw it, Boetticher said: “We didn’t agree on anything, politically, or otherwise. Politically myself, I’m right down the middle.”30 This is at least naive since Boetticher’s movies essentially endorse the same “rugged individualism” to be found at the heart of Wayne’s ideological conception of “America.” The screen comes alive in episodes of real film creativity in a Boetticher– Kennedy collaboration, achieved, it is worth remembering, under intense time pressure within the Hollywood system of production but, if we are not aware of the ideological dimension to the work, we are in danger of accepting in an unquestioning way certain very clear political perspectives. Look again at the opening to Seven Men From Now where it all started for the Boetticher– Kennedy combination. The black screen and then the rain and the flash of lightning reference the hanging-tree scene in William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), and perhaps, the scene in which Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) comes upon the dead body of his young brother early in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946). The movement of the music from dramatic to calm and then back to dramatic adds to the viewer’s uncertainty that is further accentuated when a man’s back with a black hat and wet oilskin poncho moves into the foreground from the right. The viewer is so engaged that a very slight flame/light at the

Figure 11.6  Darkness, danger, and the threat of violence (Seven Men From Now).

202  j o hn white extreme left of the screen is noted. The man in the foreground also registers it and moves towards it. As he comes across two men sitting sheltering in a cave, his back fills the left-hand half of the screen and the two men occupy the right-hand side of the screen, and so, in this three shot the whole dynamic of the opening scene is embodied and held momentarily for our contemplation. This is stunningly creative filmmaking31 but it is also seductive filmmaking and, without vigilance, the underpinning ideology can slip in under our guard, unchallenged.32

NOTES   1. In 2000 this film was selected for preservation in the United States’s National Film Registry. The requirement for inclusion is that a film should be seen as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” “Brown’s (producer, Harry Joe Brown) budgets limited Boetticher to eighteen-day shooting schedules which meant that he had to shoot quickly and precisely, especially difficult since he often picked remote locations near Lone Pine, California. There was no fooling around on his sets . . . Everything had a purpose, and everyone was expected to perform on cue.” (Daniel Eagan, America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry [London and New York: Continuum, 2010], p. 526.)   2. Boetticher uses the rounded rock formations of the Alabama Hills to the west of Lone Pine, California, with the added shot possibilities offered by the Sierra Nevada in the distance, in each of the Westerns scripted by Burt Kennedy and discussed here. He described this landscape as “about as primitive as you can get.” Sean Axmaker, “Ride Lonesome: The Career of Budd Boetticher,” Senses of Cinema, http://sensesofcinema. com/2006/feature-articles/boetticher (accessed January 10, 2013).   3. “ . . . always in Boetticher there is a formal interest in landscape, an observation and delight that give the images a decorative value. Often what we have is very like a painting, the characters moving over brutal terrain in the foreground, the middle distance a wall of jagged spires, the great peaks of the Sierras in the misty background beyond.” Jim Kitses, Horizons West: The Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2007, p. 186).   4. See, for example, Remington’s Mounted Cowboy in Chaps with Race Horse (1908) in the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; or, the attention to the details of cowboy and horse in Russell’s Friend Bob [Robert Stuart], 1913 in the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, or, his cast bronze sculpture The Horse Wrangler, 1924, in the same museum.   5. “Boetticher knew how to make prodigious use of the landscape, of the varied substance of the earth, of the grain and shape of the rocks. Nor do I think that the photogenic qualities of horse have been as well exploited for a very long time.” André Bazin, “An Exemplary Western,” in Cahiers du Cinéma: Vol. I: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 172.   6. It is also worth noting the absolute precision with which Scott stops his horse side-on to the camera with his horse’s head aligned with, but not cutting, the line of a rock in front and with his own back and bodyline picking up the line of a further boulder behind horse and rider.

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  203   7. Charles Lawton, Jr. was director of photography not only for The Tall T but also for Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. He had been a Hollywood cinematographer since 1937 and had been working for Columbia Pictures since 1944. He had covered a full range of genres, had already worked with Randolph Scott a few times, and had collaborated with directors such André De Toth, John Ford, and Delmer Daves.   8. There is much more that could be said about violence and the Cold War in these films, particularly in relation to the way in which the characters played by Scott choose to deploy maximum use of overwhelming force of arms at critical moments of “necessity.”   9. In this case, Kennedy’s script is derived from a story (The Captives) by Elmore Leonard but none of this opening is in the original. See Rick Thompson, “The Tall T,” Senses of Cinema, http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/tall_t/ (accessed January 10, 2013). 10. There was an actual town called Contention, to the north-west of Tombstone in Arizona, that arose on the back of silver (rather than copper, as in the script) mining and is now a ghost-town but this remains a beautiful line. See Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2011), pp. 509–11, for some photographs of the town’s mining works in 1880. Also, James E. Sherman and Barbara H. Sherman, Ghost Towns of Arizona (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), pp. 40–2. 11. This is the only Western from this group that was made for Warner Bros. Scott owed Warner Bros. one film from a previous contract and Boetticher agreed to direct it. (Dixon, pp. 48–9.) According to Robert Nott, Boetticher later described this film as “crap” (The Films Of Randolph Scott [Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2007], p. 212) and his perspective seems to be shared by others such as critic, Terry Teachout, who calls it, “a forgotten potboiler that Boetticher directed simply to keep the collaboration (with Scott) going” (“What Randolph Scott Knew,” American Cowboy, October 2004, 22–6). And that idea of maintaining a “brand” would seem to be borne out by the opening in which the camera follows Scott as a lone rider making his way through the landscape beneath an ominous, cloudy sky. It is an iconic star’s trademark introduction but bears little or no relationship to the film that follows. 12. See, for example, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) and John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). 13. This is the sort of bullying prejudice against a disabled war veteran that was dealt with in Bad Day at Black Rock in which Spencer Tracey, as John J. Macreedy, talks of the “gorillas” having taken over the town. 14. The scene in which Jeanie and Rod Miller (Michael Dante) are reunited demonstrates just how powerfully Boetticher can create meaning for the viewers through a combination of composition of a shot, direction of actors, and arrangement of a series of shots into a sequence. The moment at which Jeanie registers that Rod has lost his left arm in the war could be a tacky moment but is fully achieved as a moment of tenderness. The point at which the camera tilts down to show Rod’s hand on Jeanie’s hand as they both go to pick up his bag, “works” as a moment of melodrama at its best. Simple, effective storytelling is achieved without the need for more than minimal dialogue. 15. Dixon, p. 47. 16. On the evidence of the movies, Kennedy would have been with British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, when she said in 1987, there was no such thing as society. “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is

204  j o hn white no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” (Margaret Thatcher, Interview with Douglas Keay for Woman’s Own, September 23, 1987, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 [accessed January 10, 2013].) This is the ideological basis for neoliberalism which believes that any suggestion that society can address common social concerns in a collective way is false. According to this political doctrine, “ . . . each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being.” (David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 65.) There is insufficient room to go into the debate surrounding neoliberalism and its current hold over the global market and global populations. The aim here is simply to characterize Boetticher–Kennedy Westerns as what would now be seen as neoliberal in outlook. Neoliberalism emerged in the late 1970s/early 1980s; what we have here are the conservative wellsprings of that political theory and related practice of political economics. The nature of politics in any particular period, of course, remains complex. The late 1970s to early 1980s is the very period the concept of the Old West was beginning to be challenged by new historical perspectives that recognized the roles of Native Americans, Latino Americans, African Americans and women of various ethnic groups and social classes in this “story.” 17. Edward Buscombe (ed.), The BFI Companion to the Western (London: Museum of the Moving Image, 1991), p. 321. 18. It should be noted that John Ford’s ideas of “community” and “history” take a very particular ideological form. 19. In The Name’s Buchanan, the novel by Jonas Ward (pseudonym for William Ard) on which the script is based, the character’s disillusionment with revolution is made clear. “After two years, Tom Buchanan and Mexico had had enough of one another. Buchanan wanted to get away from the great hellhole that was Sonora, and in particular from that lying, cheating Campos who called himself General of the People’s Army and El Libertad. All Campos wanted to liberate was the government treasury, and Buchanan wondered again why it had taken him two long, weary years to find out what a phony revolution he had got mixed up in.” (Prologue Books, 1956/2012, e-book), pp. 2–3. 20. After gold was found on traditional Indian lands in west Georgia, the Cherokee were pushed out of the area east of the Mississippi. Around sixteen thousand were taken on a forced march that resulted in perhaps four thousand deaths from hunger and disease. (Simon Schama, The American Future: A History from the Founding Fathers to Barack Obama [London: Vintage, 2009], p. 329.) See Vicki Rozema, Voices from the Trail of Tears (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2003). 21. “Boetticher is clearly not much interested in history or communities.” (Mike Dibb, “A Time and a Place: Budd Boetticher and the Western,” in The Movie Book of the Western, ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye [London: Studio Vista, 1996], p. 164.) 22. Though it has been argued that a good proportion of the small number of white women who ventured into the West as wives were not only capable of displaying considerable independence but were expected to take on work that middle-class stereotypes might not envisage for them. See The Women’s West ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) for an initial address to this complex area of historical representation, and also Writing the Range: Race, Class and Culture in the Women’s West, ed.Jameson and Armitage (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). 23. Carl E. Van Horn and Herbert A. Schaffner, Work in America: An Encyclopedia of History, Policy and Society (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), p. 603.

w e s te rns f ro m th e late 1950s  205 24. In Comanche Station the same type of debate is held regarding Nancy Lowe’s (Nancy Gates) husband—“I don’t mean to low-grade him,” says Ben Lane (Claude Akins)—and also Dobie (Richard Rust)—“That Dobie kinda runs on the gentle side don’t he?” 25. As with violence and the Cold War (see Note 7, above), there is also much more that could be considered in relation to homoerotic male relationships in these films, not only between Scott and his nemesis in each film but also between “couples” such as Frank and Dobie in Comanche Station and Sam Boone and Whit in Ride Lonesome. Perhaps this is particularly so in relation to ratios of men to women in Frontier lands. It has been suggested that in Texas in 1890, for example, the ratio was 110 to 1! (George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 7th edition, [New York: W. W. Norton, 2007], p. 737.) 26. “ . . . the great man is he who in the midst of a crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude . . . ” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays [Port Townsend, WA: Coyote Canyon Press, 1841/2010], p. 23.) 27. The Captives was first published in the magazine, Argosy, in February 1955. At the time, this publication was subtitled, “The Complete Man’s Magazine.” 28. Paul A. Cantor, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2012), p. 46. 29. In a reassertion of family and a further statement of the outsider/extra-community position of the moral “rugged individual” in the mythology of the Frontier West, Scott as Jefferson Cody is left to ride off alone at the end of Comanche Station (1960) having returned the wife to her home. 30. Dixon, p. 46. 31. As Dibb suggests when referring to this cycle of films in “A Time and a Place: Budd Boetticher and the Western”: “ . . . the films are a direct expression of the strengths and limitations of the men who made them.” (166) 32. We are being offered a very particular 1950s conservative America ideology. “We see a Budd Boetticher Western with Randolph Scott not so much as a shoot-’em-up story as some kind of morality play.” (Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event: Interviews with Five American Filmmakers [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972], p. vi.)

ch apter 12

Outlaws Without a Cause: Generational Conflict in Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle Brooks E. Hefner

G

enerational issues were nothing new to the Western in the late 1950s. In fact, the post-World War II Western appeared to thrive on questions of generational difference. Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), presented the aging Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) as violent, tyrannical, and irrational, while his adopted son Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift, one of the first Method actors to make the transition to Hollywood) demonstrated a measured and logical approach to leadership. Other major postwar Westerns frequently sided with youthful alternatives when presented with generational conflict. In John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) stands in for an aging and broken masculinity shot through with racism while Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter)—in Edwards’s mind a “half-breed”—embodies a younger and more sympathetic brand of multiracial masculinity. In many of Anthony Mann’s 1950s Westerns, the conflicts are more familial, with strong Freudian overtones. Featuring brothers fighting brothers, in Winchester ’73 (1950), and twisted relationships between both biological and adoptive parents and children—The Furies (1950), The Man from Laramie (1955), and Man of the West (1958)—Mann’s films present a postwar world where parents such as Dock Tobin (of Man of the West) are the primary corrupting forces in the social and political landscape.1 The prevalence of heroic youngsters and broken, if not monstrous, father figures in these Westerns is curious in light of common assumptions about the genre’s conservatism. It is doubly interesting in a period during which the Western redoubled its efforts to appeal to an adult audience that had followed the genre as children in 1930s B pictures. These heroic Western youths also stand out in light of the growth of films in the 1950s dealing with juvenile delinquency. After the release of Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One (1953), star-

ge ne ration al con flict  207 ring celebrated young stage actor Marlon Brando, fresh from a successful film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Hollywood studios began to capitalize on larger cultural fears of generational conflict, from the biker gangs of Benedek’s film to the high school gangs in Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle (1955) and the confused and anxious characters of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Featuring troubled and inexplicable teenagers, these films presented the younger generation posing dangerous threats to existing social order. Budd Boetticher’s Westerns of the late 1950s entered a film culture rife with generational conflicts that stood in for larger social questions. Much of the critical consideration of Boetticher’s “Ranown cycle” has considered the films’ constant meditation on the role of masculinity in the Western.2 For example, a documentary feature on Boetticher’s work is titled A Man Can Do That, from a line of dialogue in his film Ride Lonesome (1959). Accordingly, the exact nature of what it takes to be considered a man in Boetticher’s Westerns is of paramount importance; what it is that a man can or cannot do often shapes the films’ narratives. What a man is defined against, however, remains far muddier; in Seven Men from Now and The Tall T, for example, Randolph Scott’s protagonist is defined against weaker men, husbands of the female leads. But Boetticher’s films do not merely promote some ahistorical and existential question about the nature of men; with this often their focus, critics have neglected the ways in which Boetticher’s films engage 1950s anxieties about generational conflict. Like other Western filmmakers of the 1950s, Boetticher structures his films through generational oppositions but pits Western icon Randolph Scott against outlaws representing a younger and more reckless generation with a variety of both explicit and implicit connections to the juvenile delinquent (j.d.) films of the period. In effect, Boetticher’s films Seven Men from Now, The Tall T, and Ride Lonesome all present an aging protagonist, portrayed by an actor with deep roots in the Hollywood studio system, holding fast to disappearing codes of masculinity and being threatened on all sides by young, violent, and frequently irrational outlaws. To some degree, these rebellious threats—outlaws without a cause—draw on conventions and broad caricatures of Method acting associated with 1950s “juvenile delinquent” stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean. As such, the films of the Ranown cycle operate as a complex amalgam of layered generational conflicts, between a nostalgic white masculinity and vaguely ethnic groups of violent and anarchic youth, between aging studio actors and new emblems of rebellious young masculinity, and between the generic remnants of a Western past characterized by moral certainty and social meaning and glimpses of the genre’s future, dominated by social chaos and anarchic and terrifying meaninglessness. In the existing critical discussion of the Ranown cycle, critics have focused so exclusively on the characters portrayed by Randolph Scott and what Peter

208  b r oo k s e . he f ne r Wollen has called the “classical form” of the films’ simple narratives, that less attention has been paid to the Boetticher villains, who are often lumped together in a single group.3 With their “simple, clear, and unpretentious” form (in the words of Peter Lev), these films have been characterized as everything from “existential closet dramas” by Jim Kitses to “primitive and archetypal art” by Paul Schrader.4 As for Scott’s archetypical character in the film, André Bazin represents perhaps the earliest example of this critical trend. His 1957 review of Seven Men from Now, entitled “An Exemplary Western,” highlights Scott’s stoic acting, as Bazin writes, “[f]inally, there is Randolph Scott, his face irresistibly recalling William Hart’s right down to the sublime lack of expression in his blue eyes. Never a facial gesture, never the shadow of a thought or a feeling, without this impassiveness, needless to say, having anything to do with modern interiority in the style of Marlon Brando.”5 While Scott is associated with the long history of the Western through this comparison to William S. Hart, the Western past is strongly contrasted with the contemporary 1950s “interiority” of one of the most famous young stars of the era and a poster boy for misunderstood youth.6 Bazin’s comparison of Scott with Brando is curious but it speaks to broader and more multilayered questions of generational difference displayed in Boetticher’s Westerns, sometimes characterized as part of the 1950s “adult” or “psychological” Western. For Bazin, Scott’s “impassiveness” operates as a rejection of psychology and, by extension, a rejection of new acting models exemplified by young actors like Marlon Brando. It is no mistake that Bazin sees Brando’s Method-inspired “modern interiority” as the antithesis of Scott’s approach to acting; the Ranown cycle itself repeatedly returns to the differences between Scott and his antagonists who are more than merely “charming rogues” (as Jim Kitses calls them) but rather subtle variations on the young rebel that Brando and others were portraying in the mid 1950s.7 Perhaps Bazin’s mention of Brando also stems from a memory of The Wild One which also featured Lee Marvin who portrayed Scott’s nemesis in the film under review. Nevertheless, Bazin’s clever opposition between Brando and Scott reveals an important undercurrent of the Ranown cycle, an ideological positioning of the “adult” Western against the wildly popular juvenile delinquent films of the same era. In effect, Boetticher’s films, in particular the four titles written by Burt Kennedy, thematize generational conflicts, allowing the aging and stone-faced Scott—a throwback even to silent stars like Hart—to confront and vanquish a variety of characters associated with the broader social fear of a youth rebellion rooted in the multiethnic and multiracial mixture of urban and suburban teenagers and young adults. In the years between the end of World War II and the release of Seven Men from Now in 1956, American cinema underwent a host of changes in terms of industrial structure, aesthetics, and performance. A surge in independent production companies followed the Paramount decision in 1947. New widescreen

ge ne ration al con flict  209 formats, such as CinemaScope (introduced in 1953) and VistaVision (introduced in 1954), sought to transform the filmgoing experience and differentiate film from the growing television market. Efforts to hold on to the youth market also included the promotion of young actors, such as Brando and Dean, who both served as models for rebellious young Americans and ushered in a new style of acting that provided an alternative to the “narrow, repetitive range” of the star system.8 These stars, characterized as both “fascinating neurotics” and “emblem[s] of a generation” by Foster Hirsh, ushered in what Pauline Kael described in 1955 as “The Glamour of Delinquency.”9 But, while the “primeval sexuality” of these young stars struck a chord with young audiences struggling with teenage existence, “cultural guardians likened American teenagers to barbaric hordes descending on a city under siege.”10 Along with Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause tapped into broader cultural fears about unregulated teenagers in postwar America. The Wild One, very loosely based on an incident involving a gang of bikers in Hollister, California, presents its young protagonists as leather-clad, motorcycle-riding sociopaths, led by Johnny (Marlon Brando) and Chino (Lee Marvin), rebelling at anything and everything they encounter. In the film, small-town Wrightsville, run by a soft police chief, is at the mercy of the gang for a couple of days as they drink, dance, and riot, nearly tearing the town apart in the process. Rebel Without a Cause, on the other hand, follows misunderstood Jim Stark (James Dean) as he arrives in a new town and is taunted and teased by a group of rough classmates, provoked into fights and dangerous stunts. In both cases, weak or absent parental authority leads to social catastrophe. In his history of the 1950s “teenpic,” Thomas Doherty notes that, “judging from contemporary expressions of concern from parents, public officials, and the media, [‘dangerous youths’] were perceived as an authentic threat to the social order.”11 Variations on this teenage threat abounded in the late 1950s, and became a specialty of new independent film companies looking to capitalize on the youth market. Among these were such titles as Gene Fowler, Jr.’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), the film that launched American International Pictures’ financial success.12 At some level, The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause—the most broadly influential examples of this genre—point to the important postwar connections between Method acting, the juvenile delinquent genre, and the emerging young Hollywood stars of the 1950s. Method actors, such as Brando and Dean, usually portrayed “basically decent but misunderstood ‘good’ teenagers” but such figures were inevitably surrounded by anarchic and “reprehensible ‘bad’ teenagers” like Chino.13 So, if Method acting and juvenile delinquency were not equated in these films, they were certainly brought together by association: both involved an antiestablishment attitude, a rejection of authority and tradition, and a proclivity to irrational violence, brooding, and irreverence.

210  b r oo k s e . he f ne r These young rebels, however, exhibit a strong connection to another dangerous cultural bogeyman of the late 1950s: the multiethnic and multiracial urban hipster. Norman Mailer’s notorious 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” draws on the work of psychologist Robert Lindner, whose 1944 case study Rebel Without a Cause: the Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath gave the title to the celebrated Nicholas Ray film. For Mailer, the hipster is “a philosophical psychopath,” whose emergence after World War II was a result of the “ménage à trois” of “the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent . . . with the Negro.”14 This multiracial mixture produced the hipster, or the “white negro,” “a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts.”15 Mailer’s troubling primitivist account of African American culture, rooted in sexual “pleasures of the body,” violence, and “the language of Hip” nevertheless gives voice to broader social concerns about the dangers that juvenile delinquency might foretell.16 For, if the hipster and the juvenile delinquent were the dominant strains of youth culture in the mid to late 1950s, then American society was soon to be overrun by young psychopaths. In his own bombastic way, Mailer suggests as much, noting that, “the psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over.”17 The dangerous and reprehensible juvenile delinquents of the 1950s films suggest not only a discursive racial dimension to the representation of the hipster/juvenile delinquent “looking for action” but also an emphasis on the young outsider as a potential psychopath who, in Mailer’s estimation, is “at his extreme . . . incapable of retraining his violence.”18 It is into this new cinematic world, full of youth-inspired chaos and among desperate efforts to capture and commodify the youth market through juvenile delinquents films, that Boetticher’s Ranown cycle begins. When Randolph Scott starred in Seven Men from Now, the first in Boetticher’s famous cycle of the late 1950s, Scott had been a fixture in Western pictures for twenty-four years, nearly as long as James Dean or Marlon Brando had been alive. After a handful of uncredited roles in the late 1920s and 1930s, Scott found a home starring in B Westerns with Paramount Pictures, beginning with Henry Hathaway’s Heritage of the Desert in 1932. Over the next four years, Scott would appear in another nine B Westerns before The Last of the Mohicans (George B. Seitz, 1936) elevated him to A status, though he continued to star in Western programmers such as Alan Dwan’s Frontier Marshal (1939). He ultimately starred in a total of sixty-two Westerns between 1929 and 1962. By the mid 1940s, Scott focused exclusively on Westerns; indeed, he became so strongly associated with the genre that Sam Peckinpah cast him in the nostalgic Ride the High Country (1962)—Scott’s final screen credit—and his name was evoked in one of the many in-jokes in Mel Brooks’s 1974 Western satire Blazing

ge ne ration al con flict  211 Saddles. By the time Scott began starring in Boetticher’s Western cycle in 1956, his name was all but synonymous with classic Westerns, and he was arguably more strongly linked to the genre than even John Wayne who continued to take non-Western roles, generally in war films, into the 1960s. When he began appearing in these films directed by Boetticher, Scott was nearing the end of his acting career; in his late fifties when the cycle began, Scott and his characters in these films were nostalgic remnants of a Western past, an aspect of his character only highlighted by critics’ proclivity for comparing him with William S. Hart, whose celebrity derived from a series of silent films rooted in Victorian morality. While Peckinpah would capitalize on Scott’s association with the Western tradition most explicitly in Ride the High Country, Boetticher deploys Scott in an analogous fashion, using his tough and aging masculinity as a means of defining an experienced and coherent moral vision present in pre-World War II Westerns. Scott’s stern visage echoes the dry and rocky backdrops that define the films’ landscapes, and his sense of what it means to be a man—a common topic of conversation in the films—is as solid as the rocks that seem to surround him on every side; in the words of Mike Dibb, Scott’s “expressively inexpressive face echoed the stones.”19 As critics have repeatedly mentioned, the films strip away the historical elements of the Western, leaving the space of the genre to represent “a philosophical ground over which his pilgrims move to be confronted with existential choices wholly abstracted from social contexts.”20 In this ahistorical world, Boetticher presents “the historic crisis of individualism” which is characterized by moral choices.21 In a recent consideration of Boetticher’s work, Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr describe these as “existential” choices, “both between right and wrong and between authenticity and inauthenticity.”22 Ultimately, Scott—the representative of the cinematic tradition of the Western—falls on the side of both right and authentic in these films, opposed by villains who, despite their charm, remain legitimate threats to both Scott and to the larger social order. In Seven Men from Now, Scott’s principle antagonist is not, at first, a clear enemy; as the film progresses, however, the inevitable conflict between his Ben Stride and Bill Masters (Lee Marvin) becomes ever clearer. Boetticher’s choice of Marvin for this role is both intriguing and instructive. Before Seven Men, Marvin’s most memorable role was that of Chino, the leader of a biker gang in The Wild One. Unlike the more sympathetic Brando in The Wild One, Marvin’s Chino exemplified a type prominent in what Thomas Doherty has called the “hard-nosed j.d. film,” calling Marvin’s character a “sadistic biker . . . [that] provided the transitional figure that established the association between the young (but still ‘adult’) psycho of the crime melodrama and the juvenile psycho.”23 In The Wild One, sympathy and liberal understanding might rescue Brando’s Method-driven character, and his claim that “My father hit harder than that” puts him in the realm of the “softie” or ­psychoanalytic

212  b r oo k s e . he f ne r juvenile delinquent film; Marvin’s “sadistic biker” is pure chaos, beyond understanding and salvation, a characteristic of the harder j.d. films at the end of the 1950s. Through “hip” language and reckless actions, both characters conjure up not only the specter of the juvenile delinquent but also the emergent and potentially psychopathic hipster. Chino’s ethnically ambiguous nickname emphasizes the racial anxieties that underwrite the identity of the hipster. While Marvin’s Chino is a rival of Marlon Brando’s Johnny in The Wild One (and Marvin was, in fact, the same age as Brando), in Seven Men from Now, Boetticher has Marvin play an older character prematurely graying. Still, Marvin’s Bill Masters is far younger and more virile than Scott’s aged and stone-faced Ben Stride. While Seven Men ostensibly follows Stride on his mission to kill the seven bandits guilty of murdering his wife during a stagecoach holdup, these outlaws are largely nameless and nearly faceless figures, a few of whom are not even killed by Stride but, instead, by Masters. In one sequence, Masters saves Stride’s life by killing a bandit as he prepares to shoot Stride in the back. As a result, the film is a revenge story transmuted into a battle between Stride and Masters; the film’s conclusion pits the two characters against each other in a series of shots framed around the Wells Fargo cash box that the bandits have stolen. What is strange about the story’s relatively seamless narrative transformation is the fact that Stride has no real reason to kill Masters; he was not involved in the death of Stride’s wife and he has tagged along on Stride’s mission with the goal of stealing the cash box that the bandits took in the stagecoach holdup. And, with the death of Payte Bodeen, the seventh bandit and ringleader, killed by Masters, Stride’s revenge plot has concluded. Stride’s moral compass, however, will not allow him to let Masters run off with the stolen loot. The final confrontation between Stride and Masters encapsulates the generational nature of the conflict that has defined the film from almost its beginning. Gone are the concerns with retributive justice; in their place, Boetticher stages a quick-draw battle between Stride, hobbled by an earlier shot and using his rifle as a cane, and Masters, chomping on a cigar that is reminiscent of Marvin’s rebellious young character in The Wild One (see Figures 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3). This particular interaction will foreground one of the essential differences between the generations these two characters represent. Hobbling up in long shot with the help of his rifle, Scott’s age is apparent: hatless, his gray hair prominent and echoed by the muted colors of the rest of his outfit, he represents an almost ancient figure of Western nostalgia, a figure shot through with signs of working-class whiteness. By contrast, Marvin’s portrayal of Masters, alternatively grinning and grimacing, his brown clothes offset by bright green and red accents, mark him as younger and more irreverent than the gray and stoic Scott. Jim Kitses has noted the crucial emphasis on villains’

ge ne ration al con flict  213

Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.2.

costumes in the mise-en-scène of the Ranown cycle, writing that “Boetticher’s villains differ from the Scott figure in their comparatively flamboyant style, ever sporting a shocking touch of green or pink, a colorful Indian armlet, a fancy draw. Within the community, this impulse can produce a villain that has the splendour of a peacock”24 Such performative costumes highlight the films’ opposition between the serious, somber, and authentic Scott and his flashy and chaotic young antagonists. Villains such as Masters wear costumes that draw attention to themselves, like the black leather jackets of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in The Wild One or James Dean’s famous red leather jacket in

214  b r oo k s e . he f ne r

Figure 12.3.

Rebel Without a Cause. These signs of nonconformity are also the link between Boetticher’s villains and the figure of the potentially psychopathic hipster. The verbal interactions between the two also emphasize the importance of generational divisions. In this final confrontation, Masters tells Stride he has killed Bodeen, the seventh of the film’s Seven Men and the leader of the holdup gang. When Stride asks him why he has killed Bodeen, Masters’s response is “Why not?” This flippant response is couched in terms common to the juvenile delinquent film of the 1950s. For example, when asked what he is rebelling against in The Wild One, Johnny asks “Whattya you got?” Such responses are seemingly disingenuous; Masters has clear reasons to kill Bodeen, because he wants the money in the Wells Fargo box, and he could even claim to be carrying out Stride’s revenge for him. But his demeanor here marks him as fundamentally different from Stride. Seven Men from Now is largely defined by Stride’s quest for revenge; he is a man who does things for a definite reason, and who articulates his reasons clearly and succinctly. Masters, on the other hand, strives to appear to do things for no reason at all, rejecting Stride’s moral stand and replacing it with a kind of “just for kicks” mentality of young rebels in the juvenile delinquent films of the 1950s. Early verbal encounters between Stride and Masters echo this division between the older man who says little but means much and the younger man who says much but ultimately means very little, another battle between the authenticity of Stride’s nostalgic whiteness and the inauthenticity of Masters’s

ge ne ration al con flict  215 outlaw hipster. This is clear throughout the film in Masters’s jocose verbal banter which slightly echoes the feverish dialogue of Marvin’s Chino in The Wild One, and it comes to a head in one of the film’s tensest encounters inside the Greers’ covered wagon. Here, Masters makes known his own desire for Annie Greer and his low opinion of the masculinity of her husband John. He also drops a number of hints about Stride’s sexual past, both suggesting Stride’s desire for Annie and possibly—it is intentionally unclear here— implying that Stride’s sexual past included stealing his wife away from another man. While Masters chatters on, complementing Annie’s appearance in a detailed and rather ominous manner, the others look on uncomfortably. Jim Kitses has rightfully identified this as one of the key scenes in the film, claiming that, “[c]ocksure of himself, Lee Marvin tells his tale with great charm, virtually ravishing Annie verbally in the process, and wholly disrupts the ritual of shared coffee, while the hero sits helpless.”25 Here, Masters’s use of speech as a weapon, both in its irreverent objectification of Annie and its light-hearted but sinister takedown of John and Stride, is contrasted with Scott’s relative silence and generally laconic portrayal of a man with purpose.26 While his dialogue is not laden with slang terms, like Chino’s in The Wild One, it nonetheless foregrounds another characteristic of Mailer’s psychopathic hipster: the “artful language” of Hip.27 Boetticher lights this encounter to underscore the distinction between the two men. While the interior of the wagon is generally quite dark, Stride is well lit, his face and white hat clearly visible in the frame (Figure 12.4). Masters, on the other hand, appears like a figure out of film noir, his face half shrouded in darkness with a strong chiaroscuro effect (Figure 12.5). The lighting of this sequence also underscores the film’s debt to, and nostalgia for, B Western

Figure 12.4.

216  b r oo k s e . he f ne r

Figure 12.5.

c­onventions: prominent in these shots are Stride’s spotless white hat and Masters’s ominous black one. In evoking these longstanding clichés, Boetticher also nods to Randolph Scott’s deep history with the genre, reaching back to his earliest roles in B Westerns of the early 1930s. Lighting and costuming choices in this sequence demonstrate the fact that, despite his earlier successful efforts to save Stride, Masters will become the film’s principle villain. The lighting here also suggests that speech itself, particularly Masters’s continual talking, operates as a kind of shadow, hiding true intentions through various forms of artifice. That Masters’s demeanor is generally only semi-serious underscores the role of artificiality in his approach to communication: an “artful language” of the potentially psychopathic nonconformist is part of a more complex rebellion against the social norms and standards represented by the hero. By contrast, Stride’s clearly visible face and short sentences suggest not just older and wiser but also more honest and forthright. Seven Men from Now, based on an original story and scripted by Burt Kennedy, provided a model for a number of the other films in the Ranown cycle, notably Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station (1960), which both feature a widowed (or presumably widowed) Scott protecting a female lead against the implicit and explicit sexual threats of young outlaws. In Comanche Station, Claude Akins’s Ben Lane is, like Bill Masters, far too talkative and dangerously overt in his sexual interest in the female lead. Comanche Station, however, removes the revenge plot entirely, relying purely on the tension between Lane and Scott’s Jefferson Cody. Lane is certainly younger than Cody in the film. For ten years, Cody has been out looking for his wife, kidnapped by Comanche, but Akins lacks the explicit juvenile delinquent

ge ne ration al con flict  217 intertext of Lee Marvin’s Chino and this film largely reiterates the conflicts of Seven Men. Other films in the Ranown cycle, however, adapt and transform the issues of generational conflict introduced in Seven Men. The 1959 film Ride Lonesome, another revenge narrative, introduces an even more curious and disturbing figure of youthful rebellion. In Ride Lonesome, Scott portrays Ben Brigade, a bounty hunter with an ulterior motive for capturing the fugitive Billy John, played by James Best. In some respects, Ride Lonesome, also written by Kennedy, inverts the narrative motivations of Seven Men from Now. If Seven Men replaced the revenge plot with a representative battle between Western generations, Ride Lonesome hides its revenge plot behind Brigade’s bounty hunting of the decidedly youthful Billy John who is, in the words of his brother Frank, “only a boy.” In this film, Billy John is not Brigade’s real target. As with most of the Kennedy-scripted Ranown cycle, Brigade has a tragic past that involves the death of his wife, this time at the hands of Billy John’s older brother Frank, here played by Lee Van Cleef. Again, the film presents a pair of rivals for the bounty but, in this film, they do not become the eventual targets of Brigade’s violence. Instead, the film resolves as Brigade lures Frank and his gang to a haunting hanging tree, the site of the death of Brigade’s wife, kills Frank and leaves Billy John and the bounty to the pair of endearing rivals (played by Pernell Roberts and a young James Coburn). While characters continually mention Billy John’s age, Best’s portrayal of Billy John is more than a mere wayward youth; his frenetic and giggling performance actually recalls some of the early work of Dennis Hopper whose first film role was the gleefully sadistic “Goon” in Rebel Without a Cause.28 Billy John’s inability to take anything seriously, along with his continual talking, put him squarely in line with figures like Lee Marvin’s Bill Masters. Both talk without saying much; both act without reason. And, like Masters, Billy John’s costume, including a striking feather in his hat, marks him visually as a rebel, at odds with the somber dress of Brigade. In Ride Lonesome, the age difference between Brigade and Billy John is stark; there can be no doubt that one is a man and the other, as the dialogue makes clear, is “so young.” Billy John, however, is also a killer with a price on his head, wanted for shooting a man in the back in Santa Cruz. When he first encounters Billy John, Brigade notes that this victim “was killed from behind, like the others.” As with so many outlaws, Billy John’s habitual back shooting is clear evidence of his cowardice; combined with his unnerving lack of seriousness and his perpetual grin, he seems more than a bit like a young psychopath. In Billy John, Boetticher presents an example of youthful irreverence taken to extremes; this iteration of the juvenile delinquent/hipster is defined through his inability to see the gravity of his situation and the seriousness of the death that surrounds him. Throughout the film, his grins and ­overconfident

218  b r oo k s e . he f ne r s­ nickering are routinely contrasted with the seriousness of the other characters. In two cases—just after the Indian attack on the way station and during the approach of Frank’s gang—Boetticher presents a tableau of the entire troupe, facing imminent danger. While the faces of each member of the group exude a seriousness in the face of death, Billy John laughs, his toothy grin standing out among the serious faces, and contrasting most strongly with the stone-like seriousness of Scott’s Ben Brigade. Most disturbing, however, is Billy John’s schizophrenic reaction to the arrival of a stagecoach full of corpses, killed by Mescalero Indians, near the film’s opening. Initially, Billy John urges Carrie Lane (Karen Steele) to stay away from the sight. When he realizes this might delay their departure and increase his own chances for escape from the hangman’s noose, however, he doubles over with laughter. Boetticher frames this shot to emphasize Billy John’s morbidly psychotic irreverence. While Billy John laughs in the foreground, the background of the shot features Brigade and Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts) in a serious discussion about their predicament while, behind them, the gruesome signs of an Indian attack—the arm of a female corpse, the speared body of the driver—are clearly visible (see Figure 12.6.) Billy John’s psychological disjuncture here highlights the danger such irreverence poses to order; his psychopathic giggling points to a possible Western future where death is mocked by laughter. Despite Billy John’s thematic centrality to the generational oppositions of Ride Lonesome, Brigade’s final confrontation is with Billy John’s outlaw brother Frank, all too willing to bail out the irresponsible Billy John from his troubles. Frank’s gang, while not nearly as young as Billy John, still points toward the future of the Western, particularly the generic transformations it would undergo in the 1960s. Most notable is Frank himself, portrayed by Lee Van Cleef, who was already becoming, like Scott, an actor most associated with the Western after appearing as a young gun in films like Fred Zinnemann’s High

Figure 12.6.

ge ne ration al con flict  219 Noon (1952). His status as a Western legend would be solidified after his work with Sergio Leone on For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), films where the West is conceived more broadly as a space occupied by violent psychopaths, suggesting that psychopaths like Billy John and Chino might actually represent, to evoke Mailer, “the perverted and dangerous front-runner” of the future of the genre. Ride Lonesome concludes with an encounter between Brigade and Frank while Brigade has Billy John precariously strung up on the hanging tree Frank used to hang Brigade’s wife a number of years before. Ultimately, Ride Lonesome returns to its revenge plot in the final gunfight; Brigade’s vendetta against Frank is put to rest as Billy John helplessly squirms at the end of a rope. After killing Frank, Brigade cuts down Billy John, still alive. His callous treatment of Billy John, using him as bait in his larger revenge scheme, nearly hanging him and finally giving him, and the coming reward money, to his companions and rivals, implies a generational fantasy of how to treat young rebels who lack the ability to see meaning in the world, to take life and death seriously, and to take responsibility for their actions. While Variety singled out Best’s performance in Ride Lonesome as “the giggling killer,” a nod to the disturbing juxtaposition of violence and frivolity that characterized the juvenile delinquent, Boetticher’s The Tall T, considered by some to be the finest film in the Ranown cycle, actually features Actors Studio member Henry Silva as Boetticher’s most clearly psychopathic young villain.29 Based on a story by Elmore Leonard, with a screenplay by Kennedy, The Tall T diverges from the widowed husband in search of revenge (or closure) narrative that dominates the other Kennedy-scripted films. In its place, it rearranges the narrative elements in a way that highlights the dangers of young outlaws like Silva’s conscienceless Chink. In The Tall T, Scott’s Pat Brennan character is mirrored by the seasoned outlaw Frank Usher, portrayed by Richard Boone, whose celebrity was at that time on the ascent with the television series Have Gun–Will Travel (CBS, 1957–63). Usher is ruthless but he becomes more palatable, and even charming, as the film develops, expressing his desire to leave his life outside the law, much like many younger and less threatening foils to Scott’s protagonists in the cycle. Doing most of Usher’s dirty work, including the murder of a child (off-screen) early in the film, are young outlaws Billy Jack (Skip Homeier) and Chink. At this point, Homeier was most notable for his portrayal of the back-shooting upstart Hunt Bromley in Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), a noirish film that inaugurated the gunfighter cycle in the early 1950s.30 In Silva’s brooding gunslinger Chink, however, Boetticher manages to strip out all of the endearing characteristics that make figures like Masters and Billy John palatable, and leave only a t­errifying and sadistic psychopath. In many respects, Henry Silva was a darker alternative to better-recognized Method actors such as Brando and Dean. Silva was actually more strongly

220  b r oo k s e . he f ne r associated with early public successes of the Method-inspired Actors Studio, joining as a lifetime member in the mid 1950s when he was in his late twenties. He was also instrumental in the creation and success of the Actors Studio Theatre production A Hatful of Rain which actor and theater historian David Garfield called “perhaps the single most famous project in the Studio’s history.”31 A Hatful of Rain, began as an Actors Studio improvisation entitled “Pot,” featuring Silva, Michael Gazzo, Anthony Franciosa, and Paul Richards.32 The third production of the Actors Studio Theater and the first production “developed through improvisations,” one of the central features of the Studio’s version of the Stanislavski Method, A Hatful of Rain was a story of a young, morphine-addicted Korean War veteran and his workingclass family.33 Ultimately adding Actors Studio members Ben Gazzara and Shelley Winters in its final form, with a script written by Gazzo, A Hatful of Rain eventually ran for nearly four hundred performances on Broadway. Silva played the character of “Mother,” the “evil dope peddler”; he reprised this role in the 1957 film adaptation, directed by Fred Zinnemann (See Figure 12.7).34 Silva’s performance as the psychopathic gunman Chink in The Tall T is effectively bookended by his experience in A Hatful of Rain: he performed in the stage production before Boetticher filmed The Tall T and participated in the Zinnemann production shortly afterward. Zinnemann’s film version of A Hatful of Rain was released in theaters just three-and-a-half months after Silva

Figure 12.7.

ge ne ration al con flict  221 appeared as Chink, one of his first credited film roles. In this sense, Silva is Boetticher’s clearest link to a younger generation of actors, frequently associated with the Method: one might draw a direct line from his portrayal of an evil dope peddler to his role as a psychopathic young ethnic outlaw. In both cases, the roles are outsiders “on the margins,” a characteristic Foster Hirsch and others associate with the success of the Method, especially in Hollywood.35 Additionally, Silva’s dope-peddling “Mother” is, like Chink, vaguely ethnic, which helps to indicate the degree to which the cultural bogeyman of Mailer’s psychopathic hipster underwrites both dangerous and threatening figures. Chink is, by far, the least sympathetic villain in the Ranown cycle; far from the idea that Boetticher villains are “charming rogues,” Chink represents the logical and dangerous extension of the violent youth of j.d. films. In addition, his name, a well-known ethnic slur, highlights the way that the hipster (Mailer’s “white negro”) is also encoded with deep cultural anxieties about racial and ethnic difference.36 Chink may not be the primitivist “negro” of Mailer’s 1957 essay—African Americans are completely absent from the Ranown cycle—but Chink’s marked and nominal ethnic difference still clearly embodies the broader multiracial threat of the hipster to the nostalgic whiteness of Randolph Scott’s Pat Brennan. Without James Best’s incessant giggling or Lee Marvin’s clever and artful innuendoes, Henry Silva plays Chink as a quiet and ruthless killer, slouching and brooding his way through a series of horrifying murders, including the murder of a child at the beginning of the film. This brooding was, without a doubt, one of the primary characteristics of the juvenile delinquent films of the era, and Chink’s mostly silent brooding operates almost as a hyperbolic extension of Dean and Brando in their early films. Peter Lev’s history of 1950s Hollywood notes, for example, Dean’s “slouching, mumbling, perpetual motion acting.”37 The Tall T, perhaps Boetticher’s most unsettling film of this cycle, presents Chink and Billy Jack as characters who may lack the potential for redemption. They have no intention of “going straight” as their leader Frank Usher does, and as other Boetticher antagonists, such as those in Comanche Station, do. Even the leader of this group of outlaws seems to hate these two youngsters and everything they stand for. In one of a handful of meaningful exchanges between Frank and Brennan, this becomes clear: frank: Me, I never tripped a hammer on a man in my life. I leave that to young guns like them two over there. Look at ’em. Billy Jack, no folks, no schoolin’. Been fightin’ and cheatin’ his way since he was first able to walk. And Chink the same. Shot his first man dead when he was twelve: his old man, caught him beating his mother with a broken tequila bottle. Nothing but animals. brennan: You run with ’em.

222  b r oo k s e . he f ne r frank: Well, I can’t help the way they are. Nobody can help their kind. brennan: Nobody tries. Brennan’s sympathy here is of little help; the film presents Billy Jack and, especially, Chink as driven solely by animal appetites of lust and violence. While Billy Jack’s inexperience is noted—he claims to be “young, mostly,” and he suggestively sucks on a piece of cherry striped candy early in the film—his lust for Doretta Mims (Maureen O’Sullivan) becomes the weakness Brennan exploits in his plan to escape capture (Figure 12.8). Still, the ominous lighting and framing of the scene where he nearly rapes Doretta underscore the dark potential in this naive figure. The duality of these young outlaws as both violent, lustful animals and simple-minded children is a central part of Robert Lindner’s characterization of his “rebel without a cause,” elements highlighted in Mailer’s essay. If Billy Jack’s assault of Doretta, bathed in noirish shadows, indicates how and where his threat to order and stability might emerge, the film’s presentation of Chink, generally outside and well lit, puts the threat of violence fully in view (Figure 12.9). As if to emphasize his identity as a true loner, Chink frequently appears alone in the frame, and certain sequences, such as the first meeting between the outlaws and the captives, isolate him from shots that contain the rest of the group (Figure 12.10). These isolating shots, often against blue sky or brown rock, combined with his rather flamboyant pink shirt (not unlike the flashier outfits of Marvin and Best) make Chink into a figure who stands out but for all the wrong reasons; he is a true psychopath. As such, Chink becomes

Figure 12.8.

ge ne ration al con flict  223

Figure 12.9.

Figure 12.10.

the clearest embodiment of the threat posed by mid-1950s violent youth in the Ranown cycle. Beyond redemption, and more than merely an example of what Mike Dibb calls one of Boetticher’s “social orphans,” Chink moves away from the simply misunderstood teenager of the “soft” juvenile delinquent films such as Rebel Without a Cause, more commonly associated with the Method, and toward what Thomas Doherty has called the “juvenile psycho” of the “hard-nosed j.d. film.”38 Ultimately, Chink represents the threat of random

224  b r oo k s e . he f ne r violence perpetrated on innocents; it is notable that, early in the film, he kills the station manager and his young son and disposes of them in the well, an act of violence too gruesome to be shown on-screen. Chink would be more at home in a film like The Wild One, not with the sensitive and romantic Brando, but with the wild, anarchic, and similarly named Chino. The Tall T brings generational concerns of the Ranown cycle most clearly into focus, as Brennan’s largely polite banter with the more seasoned and respectable Usher is eclipsed in the narrative by the unhinged threats posed to Brennan and Doretta Mims by the two young guns. Additionally, the film highlights the strong contrast between men and boys. “Some things a man can’t ride around,” utters Brennan in this film, a line that echoes across multiple Kennedy scripts. In this case, the unpredictable threats posed by violent youth present a clear and unavoidable danger to social order. Even Frank Usher, the gang’s older leader, wants to differentiate himself from them: “Billy Jack and Chink. I don’t like them. Sometimes I get the feeling they ain’t even along. Always talking the same words: women, drinkin’, and such. Mighty narrow thinkin’, but a man gets tired of that all the time. A man gets awful tired of that.” A man, he claims, gets awful tired of the “mighty narrow thinkin’” of immature youth, fixated on drinking, violence, and sex, central themes of the juvenile delinquent films of the late 1950s and major threads of the broader cultural discourse on the threat of the nonconforming, violent hipster. If anything, Chink, and to a lesser degree, Billy Jack, embody the sharpest generational lines in these films; these violent and sadistic young outlaws pose the strongest threat to the order and stability that Randolph Scott’s characters represent. And, while Scott’s Brennan triumphs at the film’s conclusion, walking off into the wilderness with Doretta Mims, and away from the gruesome signs of violence at the outlaws’ camp, his claim that “It’s going to be a good day” both rings hollow and suggests that good days for the aging Brennan and Mims might be dependent on the annihilation of anarchic young threats.39 Since their release in the late 1950s, Boetticher’s Ranown cycle of films has drawn attention to the ways in which the films present an exemplary man confronting existential questions through a series of well-worn generic tropes and conventions. And it is true that, as André Bazin claimed in his review of Seven Men from Now, Boetticher managed to move away from the overly selfconscious psychologizing of other postwar Westerns, stripping the genre down to a very sparse set of key elements and centering the cycle on a leading actor that evoked a strong sense of generic nostalgia. At the same time, however, critics and reviewers have noticed the charisma and quirks of Boetticher’s villains. In an interview with Mike Dibb, Boetticher lamented of Randolph Scott, “[e]very picture he would let the villain upstage him!”40 In many cases, these villains represent younger and more threatening versions of Western mascu-

ge ne ration al con flict  225 linity, figures who would soon dominate the genre in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the California bikers of The Wild One, Randolph Scott’s antagonists present sociological problems as well as existential ones. If Scott represents a long history of the Western—a history reaching as far back as William S. Hart—and an attendant nostalgia for a generic world of order and stability, actors like Lee Marvin, James Best, and Henry Silva all point toward a Western future dominated by chaos and uncertainty, characterized by irreverence for the genre’s standards and a troubling and sadistic fascination with sex and violence. It is no surprise that the Ranown cycle of films was among Scott’s final pictures; his final screen credit was in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), another film where he, along with Joel McCrea, stand in for a more coherent Western past in the face of a band of dangerous young brothers. In the Ranown cycle, however, Boetticher deploys Scott in a manner that depicts the complex layers of generational opposition. These films do not merely depict the clash between older and younger generations. Rather, this clash resonates more broadly, with sociological concerns intertwined with the history of film and film genre. More than perhaps any other director associated with the Western, Boetticher presents, in these films, a cinematic world, and a deep cinematic past, under siege by young actors, shrugging, sneering, and fighting their way into the foreground. These young actors, in turn, become a sign of the future of the genre, for better or worse. After 1960 there will be fewer nostalgic fantasies filled with Hollywood legends in the Western; instead, the genre’s future, from spaghetti Westerns to revisionist spectacles, will be built on the sadistic, brooding, and irreverent outlaws of a younger generation, a veritable “wild bunch” that is both multiethnic and multiracial. “A man needs a reason to ride this country,” Scott’s Ben Brigade utters in Ride Lonesome; to consider the broader generational implications of the Ranown cycle is to see how the films’ consistent obsession with defining a “man” is not merely an existential question. Rather, it resonates more broadly across the 1950s, from social fears of multiethnic juvenile delinquent and psychopathic hipsters to radical transformations in Hollywood style, from literal conflicts between men and boys to the deeper question of what constitutes a Western past and what will define its generic future. I should like to thank Sean Grattan, Erin Lee Mock, and Matthew Rebhorn for their helpful comments on various drafts of this essay.

NOTES   1. Other major 1950s Westerns equalize conflicts, pitting one young gunslinger against another (Shane [George Stevens, 1950]) or emphasizing collaboration across generations (Rio Bravo [Howard Hawks, 1959]). For more complicated intrafamily dynamics, see Duel

226  b r oo k s e . he f ne r in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946), and Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947).   2. In what has become a critical tradition with Boetticher’s work, Jim Kitses has grouped Seven Men from Now—made under John Wayne’s Batjac Pictures—with the Ranown pictures. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 175.   3. Lee Russell [Peter Wollen], “Budd Boetticher,” New Left Review 32 (1965), 79.  4. Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (History of American Cinema, vol. 7) (New York: Scribner, 2006), p. 232; Kitses, p. 44. Paul Schrader, “Budd Boetticher: A Case Study in Criticism,” Cinema 6.2 (1970), 24.   5. André Bazin, “An Exemplary Western,” Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 172.   6. Other critics have noted the similarity between Scott and Hart. See Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), p. 188; and Paul Schrader, “Lost & Found,” Film Comment, September 2000, 21.  7. Kitses, Horizons West: Directing, p. 178.  8. Foster Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 294.   9. Pauline Kael, “The Glamour of Delinquency,” in I Lost It at the Movies (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1965), pp. 44–62. 10. Graham McCann, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 6, 14. 11. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, revised edition (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 93. The standard history of the social phenomenon of dangerous youth in the 1950s is James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For a discussion of these films’ engagement with the emergence of social and psychological notions of identity, as detailed in the work of Erik Erikson and Robert Lindner, see Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 12. For a discussion of AIP’s success with I Was a Teenage Werewolf, see Doherty, pp. 131–7. 13. McCann, p. 15. 14. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1992), pp. 588, 586. 15. Ibid., p. 587. 16. Ibid., p. 586. 17. Ibid., p. 590. 18. Ibid., p. 589. 19. Dibb, p. 162. 20. Kitses, p. 175. 21. Russell [Wollen], p. 79. Wollen differs from Andréw Sarris on the films’ relationship to morality, seeing the films structured by “philosophical integrity” (81) rather than by “moral certitude.” See Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968), p. 124. 22. Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr, Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), p. 217. 23. Doherty, pp. 106, 107. 24. Kitses, p. 182.

ge ne ration al con flict  227 25. Ibid., p. 182. 26. Kitses also notes the power of language in Boetticher’s films, writing that “the hero knows that language can be dangerous.” Kitses, Horizons West: Directing, p. 181. 27. Mailer, p. 594. 28. Best’s snickering also anticipates his portrayal of Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in the television series The Dukes of Hazzard (CBS, 1979–85). 29. Powe, review of Ride Lonesome, Variety, February 18, 1959, 6. 30. The Gunfighter anticipates the generational concerns of the Ranown cycle. Richard Slotkin highlights Bromley’s “arrogant sneer” and calls him “the dazzled spectator who can’t see the difference between the play and the real world.” Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), p. 387. 31. David Garfield, The Actors Studio: A Player’s Place (New York: Collier, 1984), p. 108. 32. Garfield, p. 109. 33. Hirsch, p. 253. 34. John Chapman (ed.), Theatre ’56 (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 189. 35. Hirsch, p. 317. Of course, the simple association of the Method with psychopaths and juvenile delinquents is a gross distortion of the larger goals of the Method; in the 1950s, though, the overlap between the Method itself and the kinds of roles in which Method actors found themselves cast made for some broader caricatures of the Method’s meaning. 36. For a discussion of cross-racial identification in Blackboard Jungle, see Medovoi, pp. 150–4. 37. Lev, p. 246. 38. Dibb, p. 164. 39. This conclusion also echoes the final shots of William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges (Swickard, 1916) in which a future for Hart’s Blaze Tracy and his love Faith is dependent on the destruction of an entire town of sin and debauchery. 40. Dibb, p. 164.

ch apter 13

The Box in the Desert: Budd Boetticher, Breaking Bad, and the Twenty-first-century Western Robert Guffey

I

once had a girlfriend whose stepfather lived in Riverside, California. My girlfriend had lived there until her early twenties when she moved to the coastal city of Redondo Beach, California. Once she had experienced the laidback atmosphere of Southern California, she never wanted to return to that forsaken desert city known as Riverside. The first time I visited Riverside was in my girlfriend’s company. As we passed the city limits, I saw scrawled on the side of the freeway the following piece of graffiti: HOMICIDE SUICIDE MATRICIDE PATRICIDE INFANTICIDE RIVERCIDE

When I met my girlfriend, she was twenty-five. The high school friends she had left behind in Riverside were roughly the same age. It seemed as if every single one of them desperately wished to escape the confines of their native city and move to fabled Los Angeles which was only about an hour away but, for some reason, very few of them could figure out how to accomplish this simple task. They seemed to be trapped there as if by some siren’s spell outsiders could not hear. My girlfriend was one of the few who had (somehow . . . through sheer force of will?) made it out alive. Perhaps owing to Riverside’s freefalling economy, everyone from the age of sixteen to twenty-nine had little to do except smoke methamphetamine; it seemed as

the box in th e desert  229 if almost every one of them was either addicted to meth or recovering from it. Given my personal experiences with this city, it did not surprise me when, in the latter months of 2013, I happened to stumble across an interview with television writer/director/producer Vince Gilligan in which he offhandedly mentioned that his hit television series, Breaking Bad (2008–13), a five-season crime drama about a chemistry teacher named Walter White (Bryan Cranston) who resorts to cooking meth in order to pay for his cancer treatments, had been set in Riverside, California in the first draft of the pilot episode.1 Upon selling the series to AMC, Gilligan intended to film all five seasons in Riverside. The only reason this did not occur was a financial one; these days, the cost of filming a television series in California is far too high. After scouting around for different locations which might match the soul-deadening desolation of Riverside, Gilligan discovered that New Mexico would offer the show a substantial tax break if he chose to relocate the plot to Albuquerque. In several different interviews, Gilligan has stated that this major alteration was ultimately to the show’s benefit because the state of New Mexico became another character in the show.2 What did Gilligan mean by this? At the beginning of Season 3’s final episode, “Full Measure,” Walter is about to have a meeting in the middle of the desert with his employer, Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), a ruthless drug lord. As Walter strides through the sparse New Mexico landscape, the background music redolent of Ennio Morricone’s scores for such Sergio Leone Westerns as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), one cannot help but realize that the writers of the show are drawing a parallel between the blood-drenched planes of the Old West and America’s current state of affairs at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Unlike Riverside, New Mexico is a land steeped in the mythic history (and historical myths) of the Old West: the Battle of Blazer’s Mill of 1878; the Variety Hall Shootout of 1880; the Frisco Shootout of 1884; the legendary exploits of lawmen such as Elfego Baca, James W. Bell, Sam Bernard, Mariano Barela, “Longhair” Jim Courtright, Pat Garrett, Dave Mather, Herbert James McGrath, Bob Ollinger, and John Joshua Webb. These were the men whose real-life adventures spilled over into the pulp exaggerations of a thousand fictional gunslingers whose “rugged individualism” continues to resonate in the shrinking frontier known as the twenty-first century where the concept of true freedom seems to die a little bit with each passing day. Only a few generations ago, the twenty-first century was the traditional setting for a slew of optimistic science fiction epics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in which the human race has gotten its act together and launched out of the nest to begin a bold exploration of other worlds, other galaxies, pushing the frontier of the Old West into the furthest reaches of

230  r ob e r t guf f e y space. Instead, when the real 2001 arrived, we were still so ensconced in tribal warfare that 2,977 people died in New York in a single day, mainly due to religious superstitions that date back 1,400 years. Rather than wielding spears and clubs and flaming arrows, we choose instead to use flaming missiles made of metal. We launch them into buildings far taller than Mount Olympus and watch the final fate of tiny, frightened gods falling from a sky choked with fire. And we mourn and strike back in anger and thousands of innocents die. And sometimes, to get our minds off the madness, we put our feet up and watch television, perhaps an old “Cowboys ‘n Indians” flick in which massacre piles upon massacre, and the love of land and money almost always overshadows all the supposed civilized traits of Western man. And we make no connection to recent events, to Mexican standoffs in the United States Congress, to dozens of influential bankers taking their own lives under mysterious circumstances, to zombie banks bilking their customers out of fortunes, and to whole countries being bombed into dust in a futile attempt to search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in order to rake in substantial profits for American munitions manufacturers. Though we love to think of the human race as a constantly evolving species that learns from its many mistakes, the truth is that we are still living in the nineteenth century. The dead myth of the Old West was never a myth, and it never even died. In fact, we are all living the myth right now. In the middle of watching all five seasons of Breaking Bad, it just so happened that I also began revisiting the films of Budd Boetticher, with a special emphasis on the now famous Westerns he made in collaboration with Randolph Scott in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Halfway through this cycle, while also in the middle of season three of Breaking Bad, I suddenly realized that Vince Gilligan’s contemporary crime drama was—at its core—a twenty-first-century Western. It did not surprise me later when I found an online interview with Gilligan in which he commented that, for him, Breaking Bad had always been “a modern Western.”3 I think we can be a little more specific and state unequivocally that Breaking Bad is a modern Budd Boetticher Western. Though obscure when they were first released, since the late 1960s Budd Boetticher’s films have acquired greater and greater critical acclaim. Breaking Bad’s substantial debt to Boetticher’s sixty-year-old films is a testament to their impressive staying power in a society that often discards the artifacts of popular culture like dross. The most significant quality that Boetticher’s best films and Breaking Bad share is the refusal to insult the intelligence of the audience. Each allows the viewers to experience a wide array of emotions that are often contradictory. The common conception of a “good guy” and a “bad guy” is far more nuanced in both the Old West of Budd Boetticher and the New West of Vince Gilligan. The loyalties of the audience shift as the respective stories unfold. I suspect

the box in th e desert  231 this is a valuable lesson Gilligan learned from watching Boetticher’s Ranown Westerns. The Ranown Westerns include Seven Men from Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1959), Ride Lonesome (1959), Westbound (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). In almost all of these films, the supposed “bad guys” are by no means cardboard cutouts as they so often are in the traditional Western narrative. In Boetticher’s films, which benefited from strong scripts by Charles Lang and Burt Kennedy (who later went on to direct his own Westerns, such as 1969’s Support Your Local Sheriff!), the characters—even the supporting players—are all driven by motivations with which we can all sympathize. In Ride Lonesome, for example, Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts) and his friend Whit (James Coburn) intend to murder the protagonist, Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott), in order to win amnesty, to be free. These two characters are so finely drawn, so utterly human, that the audience understands and likes them, even if they might deplore the act the duo is preparing to commit. Even the far less likable Frank (Lee Van Cleef), the central antagonist of the film, wins our sympathy with the palpable expression of pain and worry on his face as he watches the hero threatening to snap his little brother’s neck from the dead branches of a hanging tree. The detestable Ben Lane (Claude Akins), the antagonist of Comanche Station, also challenges our expectations of the traditional Western narrative when he goes out of his way to save the protagonist, Jefferson Cody (Randolph Scott), from an attacking band of Comanches. By letting Cody die, Lane could kidnap the woman Cody has saved from the Comanches in order to claim the five-thousand-dollar reward that has been offered for her return. Despite this, Lane will not allow Cody—a man he respects—to die in such a savage manner. As Lane says to Cody, “I never could’ve enjoyed spending that five thousand dollars if I done you that way.” This line is mirrored in Ride Lonesome when Sam Boone saves Ben Brigade from being killed under similar circumstances. Boone tells Brigade, “Never would’ve enjoyed being a free man if I done you that way.” This echoes an even earlier line of dialogue in the very first of the Ranown Westerns, Seven Men from Now. Near the conclusion of the film the antagonist, Bill Masters, explains why he didn’t kill the protagonist, Ben Stride (Randolph Scott), when he had the chance: “I never could enjoy spending this twenty thousand if I done you that way, Sheriff.” These little moments of humanity set the antagonists in Boetticher’s films far apart from the onedimensional villains that populate most of the Western fiction that emerged from the pulp landscape of America in the late 1800s. As film director Taylor Hackford has commented, “Budd Boetticher introduced the sympathetic bad man in American film.”4 Vince Gilligan’s sui generis television drama, Breaking Bad, similarly warps the traditional notions of hero and villain. Over the course of five seasons, our

232  r ob e r t guf f e y protagonist, Walter White (an average Joe just trying to make ends meet), gradually morphs into the antagonist. Though at the beginning of season one, the emotions of the audience are firmly invested in seeing Walter succeed in his extralegal schemes, ever so slowly, we begin to back away from him as his actions become more and more questionable. Characters who at first appear to be mercenary, possessed of very few positive qualities, win our sympathies owing to the slow unveiling of their true natures. Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a hired thug, is a perfect example. In season three, Mike is cast in the role of an antagonist whose job it is to eliminate the ostensible “hero” of the show, Walter, but our expectations and emotions are turned upside down as this dynamic is reversed suddenly and quite unexpectedly later in the series. Gustavo Fring, the kingpin of a vast drug empire, appears to be devoid of all emotions. Later, however, as the layers of his back story are peeled away, we begin to understand his motivations and even root for him to succeed in a decades-long revenge scheme. Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), Walter’s brother-in-law, is a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent whose ultimate goal is to arrest the manufacturer of the powerful new brand of methamphetamine now poisoning the Four Corners of the Southwest. Throughout Breaking Bad’s five seasons the audience knows that, at some point, Hank will realize that the man he is looking for is his seemingly meek brother-in-law, Walter. This notion of the relentless pursuit is a tried and true aspect of popular television narratives that can be traced at least as far back as The Fugitive (1963–7). Distillations of this well-worn theme can be found, to varying degrees of success, in later television shows such as The Invaders (1967–8), The Man from Atlantis (1977–8), The Incredible Hulk (1977–82), and Werewolf (1987-8). What makes this aspect of Breaking Bad infinitely more than just another television cliché, however, is the point of view from which the tale is told. Thirty years ago, the protagonist of Breaking Bad would have been Hank. The viewers would have been expected to root for him and him alone. Any deviation from this norm would have been considered perverse but, because this particular tale is told from Walter’s perspective—because we have been riding around inside his mind every step of the way and have experienced how much hardship he has gone through to reach his seemingly impossible goal—we root instead for what would otherwise have been considered the antagonist in almost any other ­television narrative. Budd Boetticher and his screenwriter, Charles Lang, brilliantly executed upsetting the traditional expectations of the viewers in regard to the motivations and likeability of the protagonist in Decision at Sundown. Of all of Boetticher’s Westerns, this is the one that most resembles the central themes of Breaking Bad though perhaps not in a way that would be obvious to the casual viewer. The plot of Decision at Sundown involves a pair of gunsling-

the box in th e desert  233 ers, Bart Allison (Randolph Scott) and his friend Sam (Noah Beery, Jr.) who assault the frontier village of Sundown in order to kill a single man: town boss Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll). Allison seeks revenge against Kimbrough for having an affair with his wife. (As the movie poster puts it, “Now he was faceto-face with the killers who had dishonored his wife!”) Allison’s wife, Mary, has recently committed suicide, and Allison blames Kimbrough for this. This appears at first to be a straightforward Western movie plot: intrepid gunfighter seeks justice for the death of his wife. This nine-word sentence could just as easily describe the aforementioned Seven Men from Now and Ride Lonesome. Decision at Sundown, however, differs from almost every other Western in this sense: our sympathies change throughout the film, at last dissolving into utter uncertainty. At the beginning of the film, we are led to believe that Bart Allison is in the right. His wife has been “dishonored” and vengeance is a must. There is no doubt in the minds of the viewers that Kimbrough will be dead by the end of the last reel. But that is not what happens. As the story unfolds, the other characters begin to question Allison’s motivations. Even his best friend, Sam, tries to talk Allison out of this suicide mission. Bit by bit, we learn more about Allison’s late wife or, rather, we learn more about how others perceive her. Like a B-grade version of Akira Kurosawa’s Roshomon (1950), no objective reality exists in Decision at Sundown. All we have to measure the truth of the situation are conflicting points of view. According to Allison, his late wife was a saint of a woman whose honor was stolen from her by Kimbrough. According to others, Allison’s wife was the exact opposite. Even Allison’s best friend, Sam, implies that he himself had had an affair with the late Mrs Allison, and further suggests that Allison’s wife was the aggressor in the situation. Unlike in Rashomon, we are never privy to the perspective of the dead. What would Mary have to say on her own behalf? The audience is not limited only to two options: saint or whore. There is another possibility: that Allison’s wife was simply independent-minded and far ahead of her times, a quality that would no doubt brand her as a “no-good whore” in the late nineteenth century. Even by the end of the film, we are not quite certain about the truth of the situation. Neither is Allison. He begins the film absolutely certain of the righteousness of his violent actions. By the end of this film, he’s so confused that he agrees to let Tate Kimbrough ride out of town, with Kimbrough’s new girlfriend in tow. I cannot think of any other Western in which the inevitable final showdown never occurs and the “bad guy” simply leaves town at the end. The title of the film is no doubt meant to be ironic. The film could just as easily be called Indecision at Sundown. The central theme of the film concerns itself with the dissolving of what psychologist Timothy Leary once referred to as “reality tunnels,” those shaky frameworks of perception that guide our daily journeys through the illusory social construct we think of as the objective

234  r ob e r t guf f e y universe. When we allow this framework to collapse, even for a moment, the subjective and ephemeral notions that have controlled the consciousness of Western humanity for so long begin to soften and melt away. Suddenly, our normal justifications for violence no longer seem quite so important; we are left, like Bart Allison at the end of the film, confused and liberated at the same time, uncertain about not only our future but everything that has occurred in the past as well. One can only wonder what the typical moviegoer, expecting just another shoot-’em-up starring Randolph Scott, thought about the “anticlimatic” ending of Decision at Sundown. Did it frustrate them to have their God-given expectations of righteous violence stripped away from them at the last minute? Like Bart Allison, the main character of Breaking Bad is a man who appears to be certain of his goals at the very beginning of his journey. After learning he is dying of lung cancer, high school chemistry teacher Walter White decides to develop the purest form of methamphetamine in existence (we are told that his unique product is 99.9 percent pure) in order to make as much money as possible within the meager time left to him so he can leave a nest egg for his family once he’s passed on. As in a crime noir novel of the 1950s and 1960s, such as those written by Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Frederic Brown, this criminal plan quickly spirals far out of Walter’s control. Within three episodes Walter is forced to commit murder (twice) in order to cover his tracks. By the end of the final season, a train of corpses has been left in Walter’s wake. Some of these deaths are unintentional. Some of them are not. As Walter’s ambition grows more and more grandiose, the sympathies of the audience become less and less uncertain. Vince Gilligan and his writing team do not allow the audience to feel at all comfortable in rooting for a man whose moral compass grows further and further askew. Gilligan has stated that his goal was to “see how many viewers he could shake off” and repulse.5 Having built up a substantial audience out of nothing, the trick now was to see how many of these viewers would stick by Walter’s side, as the “hero’s” actions grew more depraved. This is a practice that would not be recommended or encouraged by many Madison Avenue advertising executives. The main goal of any advertiser is to grow the viewership, not frustrate them to such an extent that the viewers will be frightened away. Ironically, Gilligan did not manage to shake off anyone or, if he did, new viewers rapidly replaced such deserters. The show kept attracting more and more of an audience, so much so that DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg offered Gilligan seventy-five million dollars to produce three additional episodes beyond the finale.6 Gilligan turned down this offer. After all, Walter’s story had been told. There was no reason, beyond greed, to stick around. One could either explain this exponential growth of the viewership on the general perverseness of modern society or on the fact that—despite what the

the box in th e desert  235 gatekeepers believe—the audience will often flock to the novel and the controversial and the uncertain over the tired and the comfortable and the staid. It is common for the gatekeepers to push potential audience members away by refusing to take creative risks. It takes iconoclasts like Budd Boetticher and Vince Gilligan to take such risks. Despite the fact that Boetticher died in November of 2001, eight years before the premiere of Breaking Bad, his effect on the show is substantial. There are small but significant clues embedded throughout Breaking Bad that Boetticher’s maverick spirit had a direct influence on the show’s approach to unconventional storytelling. The ways in which Boetticher and Gilligan deal with ambiguity are demonstrably similar. Both allow the audience to reach their own conclusions about certain unanswered questions involving the motivations of their main characters. In Breaking Bad, one of Walter’s major motivations for launching his drug empire is a sense of mounting frustration over having been denied the fruits of the research he conducted during his college years. Walter feels that this research was hijacked and exploited by his former college friends, Elliot and Gretchen Schwartz. Despite the fact that he helped launch the Schwartzs’ company, Gray Matter Technologies, now worth billions, Walter never made a penny from his early work. We know that Walter and Gretchen dated in college. We know that, when the relationship ended, Gretchen began dating Walter’s best friend, Elliot. Walter then detached himself from the company and the Schwartzs moved on to fame and fortune. Early on in season one, the Schwartzs offer to pay all Walter’s health-care expenses to help him fight his cancer. His extreme pride compels him to reject this offer. Later, we see Gretchen call Walter on the phone and ask him if his refusal had “anything to do with us,” meaning her and Walter. Walter hesitates at first, then avoids answering the question. To get her off the phone, he lies and insists that his health insurance came through for him after all. He no longer needs their financial assistance, he claims. Given Walter’s seemingly passive nature, we at first assume that Gretchen left him, prompting his withdrawal from Gray Matter Technologies; during season two, however, Gretchen uncovers Walter’s lie and demands to know the true reason for refusing her initial offer. The truth, suppressed for so long, erupts out of Walter in a paroxysm of anger. He feels ripped off by both Elliot and Gretchen and insists they made their billions off his hard labor. Gretchen seems stunned by this accusation. “That can’t possibly be how you see it,” she says. “You left me.” This new revelation upends our initial impression of the dynamic between Walter and Gretchen. Over the course of the show’s five seasons, we are never definitely told the true story of Gray Matter Technologies. In the penultimate episode, both Gretchen and Elliot insist that Walter had nothing to do with the founding of the company except for coming up with the name. What’s the truth of the situation? The answer could

236  r ob e r t guf f e y go either way. We know that Walter has a strong capacity for self-delusion which seems to indicate that Elliot and Gretchen’s version of reality is the correct one. On the other hand, we have also seen an equal amount of evidence that Walter is a highly intelligent and self-reliant man capable of dreaming up never-before-seen ideas and seeing them through to fruition. Therefore, this could indicate that Walter’s version of reality is correct. By the end of the series, Gilligan and his writing team do not give us a definitive answer. It is entirely up to the viewer to decide which version is the right one. In Decision at Sundown we are not certain who is telling the truth about Allison’s wife. We are never definitively told what led to Mary’s suicide or who is really to blame—indeed, if anyone is to blame at all. We’re given the subjective impressions of several different players—including Allison, Sam, and Kimbrough—but any sort of objective answer is veiled from us, just as Breaking Bad relies on the viewers to exercise their imaginations and reach their own conclusions about the reality that lies behind the actions of the characters. Another clue pointing to Boetticher’s influence on Gilligan is the visual style of Breaking Bad. As noted earlier, Gilligan has stated he was pleased that the show’s setting was diverted from Riverside to Albuquerque because New Mexico became an essential character on the show. According to New York Times reporter Emily Brennan, “Only after he arrived in Albuquerque and saw the desert stretching to the horizon [. . .] did [Gilligan] realize that the show, in that landscape, could be a modern-day Western.”7 Perhaps better than any other Western director, Boetticher knew how to use the vast desert landscapes in his films as visual poetry, not merely as a tired signifier to establish the exact nature of the film’s genre. Boetticher himself once said: What I would do that other directors didn’t do—I know every inch of Lone Pine [a picturesque area in Inyo County, California characterized by a high desert climate that has served many different film productions going as far back as The Roundup in 1920 and as recently as Iron Man in 2008] on horseback, ‘cause I went where [other directors] never went.8 Having an intimate knowledge of such remote environments no doubt invested Boetticher’s films with a unique visual style. When Boetticher began shooting his films in CinemaScope, he took full advantage of this much wider canvas to establish important character beats with nothing more than a single image. For example, at the very beginning of Ride Lonesome, the emotional state of our protagonist is subliminally laid bare for the audience when we see a ­beautiful—and yet paradoxically barren—desert landscape that threatens to overwhelm the tiny black dot off in the distance which at last emerges as our

the box in th e desert  237 hero, Ben Brigade. With a rich tableau like this unfolding before our eyes, the audience doesn’t need to be explicitly told anything about Brigade’s tragic past, at least not yet. Instead, the breathtaking images subtly reveal the emptiness at the center of Brigade’s soul. Gilligan makes similar use of the desert landscape in Breaking Bad, often contrasting its vastness—the primal sense of freedom it instills in the human mind—with the increasing sense of confinement felt by Walter as his ambitions of economic freedom lead only to a further sense of entrapment brought down on him by rival drug lords and encroaching law enforcement officers. As with the very best directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, both Boetticher and Gilligan know how to compress an array of complex emotions within a single image. Gilligan once gave this piece of advice to young screenwriters: Show your story, don’t tell it. Try not to depend too much on dialogue. Try to remember that it’s very much a visual medium and that sometimes more can be said with a look between characters [or perhaps a tracking shot of a desolate desert landscape] than a whole spat of words.9 Further connections can be drawn between Boetticher and Gilligan. Whether intentional or not, one theme that so often winds its way through Western fiction is that of the primal brutality of social Darwinism, the dog-eat-dog harshness of a capitalistic system run amok. Whether it’s Joseph H. Lewis’s Terror in a Texas Town (1958), Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), or even a simple farce such as Edward Buzzell’s Go West (1940), starring the Marx Brothers, the plots often revolve around the destructive consequences of greed. In his October 2013 interview with Karen Herman, vice-president of the Archive of American Television, Gilligan has gone on record as stating that his original intention behind Breaking Bad was to explore complex characters rather than make any overt moral or political statements about the United States, and yet one cannot help but see an implicit critique of the crumbling American empire in the image of a beaten-down Walter White rolling a single barrel of money through the unforgiving desert landscape in the sixtieth episode of the series, “Ozymandias.”10 For me, this bloodstained barrel evokes cinematic memories of Seven Men from Now, Boetticher’s personal favorite of all of his films, and vivid memories of Bill Masters (Lee Marvin) standing over a Wells Fargo box in the middle of the desert, with his eager hands reaching for the guns strapped to his hips, ready to give up his life for the contents of that precious box: twenty thousand dollars in stolen gold. Though Walter’s barrel contains considerably more loot than twenty thousand dollars, the emotion evoked by the image is very similar. Inflation may alter the specific digits involved but the consequences of blind ambition remain unchanged. Early in season five

238  r ob e r t guf f e y of Breaking Bad, Walt references the ancient Greek myth of Icarus flying far too close to the sun to explain the untimely death of a former business associate, not understanding that the same myth could apply to himself just as well. Other Boetticher obsessions loom over Gilligan’s epic narrative. Stepping away for a moment from Boetticher’s collaborations with Randolph Scott, consider in his earlier films the recurring theme of primal secrets lurking just beneath the thin veneer of modern life. In Boetticher’s 1948 noir thriller, Behind Locked Doors, Richard Carlson stars as private detective Ross Stewart who pretends to be insane in order to infiltrate a criminal conspiracy operating behind the walls of an insane asylum baring the innocuous name of “La Siesta.” It is not hard to see the considerable influence of Behind Locked Doors on far more famous films such as Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). In Behind Locked Doors, which was Boetticher’s eighth film, a respectable doctor named Clifford Porter (Thomas Browne Henry) is working with organized crime to hide a wanted criminal from the authorities. In Breaking Bad, a respectable businessman (the aforementioned Gustavo Fring) uses his popular fast food chain, Los Pollos Hermanos, as a cover for an array of criminal conspiracies. Similarly, Walter uses his position as a high school chemistry teacher to cover up his growing drug manufacturing operation. This theme can also be found in one of Boetticher’s final films, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) in which gangster kingpin Arnold Rothstein uses his cover as a respectable businessman to run illegal liquor operations in Prohibition-era New York. Though Breaking Bad makes direct references to Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), going so far as to include a scene in season five in which Walter and his son are happily watching DePalma’s film in their living room, the gangster epic that most parallels Walter’s gradual ascent—and precipitous fall—in the criminal underworld is Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. Like Diamond (Ray Danton), Walter White uses his wife’s profession as a cover for his criminal operations, has a relative (in Diamond’s case a brother, in Walter’s case a brother-in-law) shot by a rival drug lord, seizes a gangster’s empire by observing the intricacies of his operation up close, and manages to hold on to that empire for only a brief amount of time before forces larger than himself intervene. Another clue to Boetticher’s influence on Breaking Bad could not be more overt. Season three of Breaking Bad introduces a character who is assigned to Walter as his lab assistant. This character, Gale, is a libertarian chemist who greatly admires Walter’s genius. Gale has turned his back on the confining strictures of academia and the corporate world in order to be free to pursue less orthodox avenues of chemical research. Gale considers Walter to be something of a role model. Though at first the two men seem to get

the box in th e desert  239 along quite well, eventually Gale becomes an unwitting threat to Walter’s continued existence. The cliffhanger of season three revolves around Gale’s final fate. The surname Vince Gilligan chose for Gale is “Boetticher” Like Gale, Budd Boetticher turned his back on the confining strictures of his profession in order to pursue creative freedom. He abandoned Hollywood, turned down multiple offers to make big-budget studio films and, instead, spent much of the 1960s in Mexico working on a documentary about his friend Carlos Arruza, the famous bullfighter. After almost a decade during which the filming was interrupted several times by a long series of personal tragedies, the documentary was at last released in the early 1970s under the title Arruza. Boetticher’s unflagging obsession with this project cost him his career. After 1971, he never directed another film. Like Gale (and Walter White as well?), perhaps Budd Boetticher had flown too close to the sun. In many of Boetticher’s films, the main character is a lone man who is driven to accomplish a just goal against all odds. Except for Decision at Sundown, the protagonist of the film is always heroic, sure of self, and upholds basic American values such as truth and justice. These are values Boetticher clearly believed in. The characters portrayed by Randolph Scott were living symbols of those beliefs. If we can learn anything about the current state of American life by placing Boetticher’s sixty-year-old films side by side with Vince Gilligan’s twentyfirst-century Western saga, Breaking Bad, perhaps it is simply this: that Randolph Scott’s straight-shooting gunfighter is representative of what we think we once were, and Walter White’s desperate trek through the desert behind a blood-stained barrel of cash is what we fear we have all become.

NOTES   1. Karen Herman, “The Writer’s Cut: Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan Interview.” YouTube October 14, 2013 (accessed April 2, 2014).   2. Emily Brennan, “Albuquerque’s Role on ‘Breaking Bad,’” New York Times, August 6, 2013 (website accessed April, 1 2014).   3. Kimberly Nordyke, “Conan O’Brien Interviews Entire ‘Breaking Bad’ Cast, Tries to Get Scoop on Series Finale,” Hollywood Reporter, September 23, 2013 (website accessed April 1, 2014.   4. “Taylor Hackford on Decision at Sundown,” The Films of Budd Boetticher, DVD (Sony Pictures, 2008).   5. Nordyke, “Conan O’Brien Interviews Entire ‘Breaking Bad’ Cast.”   6. Alexandra Klausner, “DreamWorks CEO Offered to Pay $75m for Just Three More ‘Breaking Bad’ Episodes (Before He Found Out How It Ended),” Daily Mail, October 9, 2013 (website accessed April 1, 2014).   7. Brennan, “Albuquerque’s Role on ‘Breaking Bad.’”

240  r o b e r t guf f e y   8. Quoted in Bruce Ricker’s documentary film Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That (Rhapsody, 2005).   9. Mike Flaherty, “The Showrunner Transcript: Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan on Season Four and his Experiences on The X-Files,” Vulture, May 16, 2011 (website accessed April 2, 2014). 10. Herman, “The Writer’s Cut.”

Index

À bout de souffle (1960), 57 According to Hoyle (1957), 94–6, 101 Adams, Julie, 83, 100 Adams, Stanley, 65 Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The (TV series), 77 Agacinski, Daniel, 104 Akins, Claude, 47, 153, 205, 216, 217, 231 Aldrich, Robert, 64 Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV series), 78 Almost Totally Fictitious Musical Hystery [sic] of Legs Diamond, The, 112–13 Allen, Lewis, 70 Allen, Peter, 113 Allen, Woody, 31 Allied Artists, 75, 99 Amos and Andy (TV series), 78 Archer, John, 2, 179 Arnaz, Desi, 78 Arness, James, 42 Arnold, Jack, 69 Arruza (1972), 1, 4–6, 10, 14, 36, 37, 115, 182, 185, 239 Arruza, Carlos, 1, 4–6, 9, 14, 36, 37, 239 Arruza, Carlos, Jr., 36 Art Linkletter’s House Party (TV series), 78 Assigned to Danger (1948), 13 Autry, Gene, 78 Aveyard, Karina, 8 Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), 203 Ball, Lucille, 78 Ballard, Lucien, 5, 44, 111, 116

Bandy, May Lea, 211 Banks, Jonathan, 232 Bare, Richard L., 79, 80, 81 Barry, Don, 138, 152 Batjac Productions, 82, 120, 127, 135, 186, 226 Bazin, André, 34, 53, 100, 135, 157, 174, 186, 202, 208, 224 Beery, Noah, Jr., 2, 90, 179, 196, 233 Behind Locked Doors (1948), 6, 13, 15, 20, 21–2, 27, 100, 238 Benedek, Laslo, 206–7 Berry, John, 67 Best, James, 53, 100, 153, 217, 221, 225 Beware, My Lovely (1952), 67 Big Knife, The (1955), 41 Black Midnight (1940), 119 Blackboard Jungle (1955), 207 Blaustein, Julian, 125 Blood and Sand (1941), 1, 29, 30, 36 Boardwalk Empire (TV series), 114, 116 Boddy, William, 63 Bogart, Humphrey, 77 Boone, Richard, 43, 47, 90, 165, 194, 199, 219 Borden, Lizzie, 67 Bordwell, David, 38, 172 Borgnine, Ernest, 92 Born to Kill (1947), 60 Borzage, Frank, 28 Boyer, Charles, 78 Brando, Marlon, 81, 83, 100, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 220, 221, 224

242  i nd e x Breaking Bad (TV series), 9, 228–32, 234–9 Breck, Peter, 108 Bresson, Robert, 29, 33–4, 37 Brewster, Diane, 94, 95, 101 Broken Arrow (1950), 82 Bronco Buster (1952), 36, 82, 119 Brooks, Richard, 207 Brown, Frederic, 234 Brown, Harry Joe, 1, 3, 40, 120, 124, 150, 202 Browne, Howard, 91 Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), 3, 4, 9, 116, 119, 120, 129, 134, 164, 188, 195, 196, 204, 231 Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That (2005), 2, 240 Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 28–39, 100 Burns and Allen Show, The (TV series), 50, 78 Burr, Raymond, 42 Burstyn, Ellen, 81 Buzzell, Edward, 237 Cagney, James, 77, 106 Cahiers du Cinéma, 40, 100, 174 Cantor, Paul A., 200 Captain Midnight (TV series), 78 Carbine Williams (1952), 41 Carlson, Richard, 22, 43, 238 Carroll, John, 179, 233 Carter, Ellis, 95, 101 Cause for Alarm (1951), 69 Chabrol, Claude, 28 Christine, Virginia, 43, 48 Cimarron Kid, The (1952) CinemaScope, 4, 76, 87, 99, 101, 125, 126, 130, 154, 168, 172, 174, 209, 236 City Beneath the Sea (1953), 13–14 City Detective (TV series), 78 Cleef, Lee Van, 4, 46, 53, 153, 217, 218–19, 231 Clothier, William H., 136 Coburn, James, 153, 171, 217, 231 Columbia Pictures, 13, 75, 78, 82, 100, 120, 124, 127, 128, 197, 203 Comanche Station (1960), 3, 4, 8, 9, 31, 47, 48, 53, 101, 119, 120, 128, 131, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 168, 182, 188, 197, 199, 203, 205, 216, 217, 221, 231 Connors, Michael (Mike), 91, 92, 93 Conrad, Robert, 79 Corey, Wendell, 41, 43, 44, 51, 67 Cotton, Joseph, 43, 44, 59 Cranston, Bryan, 229

Crawford, Joan, 81 Crowther, Bosley, 130 Custen, George, 106–7 Dante, Michael, 195, 203 Danton, Ray, 102, 106, 108, 109, 115, 238 Daves, Delmer, 203 Davies, Terence, 41 Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1955), 120 De Palma, Brian, 238 De Sica, Vittorio, 28 Dean, James, 207, 209, 210, 214, 220, 221 Decision at Sundown (1957), 2, 3, 4, 9, 39, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 91, 101, 119, 120, 126, 127, 129, 133, 164, 166, 167, 168, 177, 178–82, 184, 184, 188, 195, 196, 231, 232–4, 236, 239 Desert Fury (1947), 41 Desperate Hours, The (1955), 4, 67 Diamond, John (Legs), 105, 107 Dibb, Mike, 150, 151, 160, 204, 205, 211, 223, 224 Dimendberg, Edward, 64, 68, 73 Directors Event, The: Interviews with Five American Film-Makers, 2, 84 Disneyland (TV series), 77 Doherty, Thomas, 209, 211, 223 Donaldson, Lucy Fife, 8, 149 Donovan, King, 43 Douglas, Michael, 110 Downey, Patrick, 109 Duel in the Sun (1946), 225–6 Duggan, Andrew, 180, 195, 196 DuPar, Edwin, 86, 87 Dwan, Allan, 210 Eagle-Lion Films, 75, 100 East of Sumatra (1953), 14 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 43, 44, 45, 49, 51 English, T. J., 105 Escape in the Fog (1945), 6, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22, 100 Everson, William K., 122, 125, 130 Farnsworth, Philo T., 62 Father Knows Best (NBC/CBS television series), 50, 78 Faucette, Brian, 105, 107, 108 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 62, 63, 77 Fenin, George N., 122, 125, 130 File on Thelma Jordan, The (1950), 41 Films of Budd Boetticher, The (2005), 2

in dex  243 Fistful of Dollars, A (1964), 229 Fleet that Came to Stay, The (1945), 13 Fleischer, Richard, 60 Fleming, Rhonda, 41, 43, 61 Fonda, Henry, 81, 201 For a Few Dollars More (1965), 219 Ford, John, 3, 30, 31, 34, 38, 41, 43, 151, 158, 183, 196, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206, 226 Forman, Milos, 238 Fowler, Gene, Jr., 209 Fowley, Douglas, 23 Frontier Marshal (1939), 165 Fugitive, The (1947), 34 Fugitive, The (TV series), 232 Full Metal Jacket (1987), 45 Fuller, Samuel, 22, 29, 96, 238 Funny Games (1997), 68 Furies, The (1950), 41 Gallagher, Tag, 123 Garfield, David, 220 Garfield, John, 77 Garland, Richard, 91 Garner, James, 81–2, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100 Garner Files, The (2011), 81 Garnett, Tay, 69 Garrett, Pat, 229 Gates, Nancy, 153, 205 Gazzara, Ben, 220 Gazzo, Michael, 220 General Electric Theater (TV series), 78 Giant (1956), 120 Giler, Berne, 188, 194, 196 Gilligan, Vince, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239 Gilligan’s Island (TV series), 43 Girl He Left Behind, The (1956), 81 Glass Web, The (1953), 69 Go West (1940), 237 Godard, Jean-Luc, 28, 57 Goldenson, Leonard, 78 Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The (1966), 219, 229 Goodis, David, 234 Gordon, Leo, 85, 87, 88, 94 Grant, Kirby, 119 Gregory, Paul, 81 Greven, David, 51, 52 Grey, Virginia, 30 Guffey, Robert, 9, 228 Gunfighter, The (1950), 82, 133, 219, 227 Gunga Din (1939), 151 Gunsmoke (TV series), 130

Gustafsson, Fredrik, 6, 28 Guy, a Gal and a Pal, A (1945), 13 Hale, Alan, Jr., 43, 45, 59 Haneke, Michael, 68 Hart, William S., 100, 208, 211, 225, 226, 227 Hathaway, Henry, 210 Have Gun–Will Travel (TV series), 219 Havel, Václav, 37 Hawks, Howard, 28, 206, 225 He Ran All the Way (1951), 67 Heflin, Van, 119 Hefner, Brooks E., 9, 206 Hell’s Hinges (1916), 39 Henriksen, Lance, 113 Henry, Thomas Browne, 24, 238 Heritage of the Desert (1932), 210 High Noon (1954), 129, 133, 203, 219 Hill, Steven, 107 Hitchcock, Alfred, 28, 99, 237 Hodiak, John, 41, 81 Hogan, David J., 8, 75 Holden, William, 183 Homeier, Skip, 153, 165, 219 Horizons West (1952), 42, 47 Horner, Harry, 67 How to Marry a Millionaire (TV series), 78 Hubbard, John, 30, 165 Hudson, Rock, 83, 87, 100, 119 Hudson, William, 70 Hughes, Russell S., 94 Huggins, Roy, 79, 83, 84, 85, 89, 91 Hunter, Jeffrey, 206 Huston, John, 64 I Led Three Lives (TV series), 43 I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), 99, 209 Incredible Hulk, The (TV series), 232 Ingvordsen, J. Christian, 113, 114 Invaders, The (TV series), 232 Johnny Guitar (1954), 237 Jurado, Katy, 31 Kaiser, Henry, 83 Kalmanson, Benny, 78 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 234 Kay, George, 131 Kazan, Elia, 203, 207 Kehr, Dave, 97 Kennedy, Burt, 82, 120, 128, 129, 130, 135, 149, 151, 160, 188, 201, 202, 216, 231 Kennedy, William, 113

244  i nd e x Killer is Loose, The (1956), 6, 14, 35, 40–54, 55–74, 116 Killer Shark (1950), 13 King, Henry, 31, 34 King of the Coral Sea (1954), 135 Kiss Me Deadly (1955), 64 Kitses, Jim, 26, 34, 42, 52, 122, 123, 135, 148, 149, 150, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 165, 167, 168, 169, 182, 184, 197, 208, 213, 215, 226, 227 Klein, Amanda Ann, 126, 131 Kurosawa, Akira, 233 Lacan, Jacques, 68, 69 Ladd, Alan, 60 Lang, Charles, 3, 9, 129, 188, 194, 196, 231, 232 Lang, Fritz, 28, 60 Larch, John, 44, 46, 58, 175 Last of the Mohicans, The (1936), 210 Laughton, Charles, 81 Lawrence Welk Show, The (TV series), 77 Lawton, Charles, Jr., 3, 9, 120, 203 Leave It to Beaver (TV series), 78 Legs (1983), 113 Leonard, Elmore, 200, 203, 219 Leone, Sergio, 2, 3, 219, 229 Lev, Peter, 124, 221 Lewis, Joseph H., 28, 29, 177, 237 Life of Riley, The (TV series), 50, 78 Lindbergh, Charles, 66 Lindner, Robert, 210, 222 Litel, John, 18, 85, 90 Lone Ranger, The (TV series), 77 Lonesome Pine, California, 3 Lowe, Edmund, 85, 90 Lucas, Blake, 42, 44 Luciano, Lucky, 107 Lund, John, 119 Lupino, Ida, 78 Lyles, A. C., 131 M Squad (TV series), 78 Magnetic Monster, The (1953), 43 Magnificent Matador, The (1955), 6, 36, 37, 116 Make Room for Daddy (TV series), 77 Malone, Dorothy, 45 Maltese Falcon, The (1941), 64 Mamoulian, Rouben, 1, 29 Man from Atlantis, The (TV series), 232 Man from the Alamo, The (1953), 82, 119 Man of the West (1958), 43, 206

Man who Shot Liberty Valance, The (1962), 44 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 31 Mann, Anthony, 38, 43, 44, 52, 183, 185, 206 Manon, Hugh, 6–7, 55 Martin, Mary, 64 Marty (1955), 92 Marvin, Lee, 1, 4, 90, 128, 138, 148, 152, 174, 175, 182, 198, 208, 209, 211, 212, 215, 217, 221, 223, 225, 237 Maverick (TV series), 8, 75, 119 McCoy, Horace, 94 McCrea, Joel, 225 McDowall, Roddy, 119 McIntire, John, 42 McLaglen, Andrew V., 135 Medford, Harold, 44, 61 MGM, 75, 99 Ministry of Fear (1944), 60 Minnelli, Vincente, 28 Minz, Christopher, 8, 166 Missing Juror, The (1944), 13 Monogram Pictures, 75, 100 Morris, Chester, 13 Morrison, Robert E., 135 Morrow, Vic, 108 Mosby, Josh, 113 Mulvey, Laura, 25, 26, 35 Murphy, Audie, 31, 36, 83, 100, 119 My Darling Clementine (1946), 201, 226 My Friend Flicka (TV series), 78 My Kingdom For . . . (1985), 36, 37 My Little Margie (TV series), 78 Narrow Margin, The (1952), 60 Neale, Steve, 8, 123, 135 Niven, David, 78 Norris, Dean, 232 Novello, Jay, 94, 101 Oakland, Simon, 111, 116 Oates, Warren, 110 O’Hara, Maureen, 36 O’Hanlon, James, 84, 85, 89 Olsen, Christopher, 152, 190 On the Waterfront (1954), 12 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), 238 One Mysterious Night (1944), 238 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 43 Orr, William T., 79, 85 Oshima, Nagisa, 28 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 4, 165, 222 Outfit, The (1993), 113

in dex  245 Ox-Bow Incident, The (1943), 201 Ozu, Yasujiro, 29, 33, 34, 37, 165 Page, Joy, 31 Paramount Pictures, 75, 78, 123, 131, 135, 208, 210 Pate, Michael, 43, 45, 48, 59, 195 Peckinpah, Sam, 2, 96, 183, 210, 211, 225 Peter Pan (1955), 64 Pevney, Joseph, 108 Peyser, John, 107 Point Blank (1957), 85, 91, 92, 93, 95, 99 Portrait of a Mobster (1961), 108 Powell, Dick, 78 Preminger, Otto, 28 Psycho (1960), 46 Public Defender, The (TV series), 13, 78 Public Enemy, The (1931), 106 Pursued (1947), 226 Quatermass Xperiment, The (1955), 51 Quiet American, The (1958), 31 Quinn, Anthony, 36, 37 Racket Squad (TV series), 78 Raft, George, 77 Ranown Cycle, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 40, 42, 44, 47, 48, 52, 54, 104, 119, 121–34, 149–65, 166–87, 206–27, 231 Rashomon (1950), 233 Rawhide Years, The (1955), 135 Ray, Nicholas, 40, 207, 210, 237 Rear Window (1954), 41 Rebel Without a Cause (1955), 207, 209, 214, 217 Rebel Without a Cause: the Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944), 210, 222, 223 Red Ball Express (1952), 13 Red River (1948), 206 Reed, Walter, 174, 199 Regeneration (1915), 106 Remington, Frederic, 189 Republic Pictures, 75, 100 Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The (1941), 110 Rhodes, Gary D., 1 Ricker, Bruce, 2 Ride Lonesome (1959), 3, 4, 9, 33, 46, 47, 53, 101, 119, 120, 126, 128, 134, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 173, 174, 181, 184, 186, 188, 197, 200, 201, 203, 205, 207, 216, 217, 218, 219, 225, 231, 233, 236 Ride the High Country (1962), 210, 211, 225

Rifleman, The (TV series), 78, 100, 119 Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, The (1960), 8, 14, 40, 42, 102–16, 238 RKO Pictures, 75, 127 Roberts, Pernell, 47, 153, 170, 217, 218, 231 Rojas, Manuel, 36 Roland, Gilbert, 30, 37 Rothstein, Arnold, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 238 Rubin, Martin, 2, 17, 83, 97 Russell, Charles Marion, 189 Russell, Gail, 46, 135, 174, 198 Rust, Richard, 153, 205 Ryan, Robert, 42, 119, 183 Santos, Marlisa, 6, 15 Satellite in the Sky (1956), 127, 135 Sayonara (1957), 81, 83, 100 Scarface (1983), 238 Schatz, Thomas, 185 Schrader, Paul, 6, 29, 33, 34, 38, 208 Schultz, Dutch, 105, 107, 108, 113, 114 Scorsese, Martin, 2, 3, 4, 9 Scott, Randolph, 1, 3, 4, 9, 33, 34, 37, 40, 42, 43, 82, 88, 90, 92, 100, 104, 119, 120, 124, 126, 135, 136, 137, 149, 152, 153, 164, 165, 166, 188, 196, 203, 205, 207, 208, 210, 216, 221, 224, 225, 230, 231, 233, 234, 238, 239 Screen Gems, 78 Searchers, The (1956), 38, 43, 158, 166, 174, 183, 185, 200, 201, 206 Sedgwick, John, 125 Seitz, George B., 210 Seminole (1953), 82, 119 Seven Men From Now (1956), 1, 3, 4, 8, 34, 40, 46, 47, 52, 53, 82, 100, 119, 120, 127, 128, 135–48, 150, 152, 154, 157, 160, 161, 165, 167, 173–8, 182, 183, 184, 186, 188, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216, 217, 224, 226, 231, 233, 237 Shane (1950), 100, 185, 225 Sheen, Charlie, 110 Sheridan, Ann, 77 Sherman, Eric, 2, 17, 83, 97 Sherman, Fred, 152, 191 Shock Corridor (1963), 22, 238 Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (1957), 81 Silva, Henry, 165, 219, 220, 221, 225 Silver River (1948), 85, 87, 94, 100 Singer, Robert, 1, 102 Siodmak, Robert, 28 Sirk, Douglas, 43

246  i nd e x Song of Bernadette, The (1943), 34 Space, Arthur, 65 Spielberg, Steven, 31 Stack, Robert, 1, 30, 36, 37, 101 Stack, Rosemarie, 36 Stanfield, Peter, 106, 107, 123 Stanwyck, Barbara, 41 Star Trek Generations (1994), 151 State Trooper (TV series), 78 Steel Jungle (1956), 135 Steele, Karen, 91, 92, 95, 101, 108, 153, 168, 186, 195, 200, 218 Stevens, George, 151, 225 Stewart, James, 41, 43 Stine, Harold, 93 Stoehr, Kevin, 211 Stone, Oliver, 110 Story of Television, The (1956), 62 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951), 207 Stu Erwin Show, The (TV series), 78 Sturges, John, 37, 203 Stutesman, Drake, 2, 4, 108 Suddenly (1954), 70 Sutherland, Everett, 136 Tall T, The (1957), 3, 4, 9, 31, 43, 46, 47, 52, 82, 119, 120, 126, 127, 128, 133, 150, 152, 157, 158, 160, 165, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 197, 199, 200, 203, 207, 219, 220, 221, 224, 231 Terror in a Texas Town (1958), 133, 237 This Gun for Hire (1942), 60 Thompson, Dee J., 48, 67 Thompson, Jim, 234 Three Musketeers, The (1950), 82, 100 Tierney, Lawrence, 60 Time for Dying, A (1969), 42, 119 Topper (TV series), 77 Toward the Unknown (1956), 81 Trevor, Claire, 60 Truffaut, François, 28 Tuttle, Frank, 60 Ulmer, Edgar G., 29, 60 Universal-International Pictures, 75, 78, 82, 99, 100, 131 Untouchables, The (TV series), 107

Vidor, King, 226 VistaVision, 76, 209 Wagon Train (TV series), 78, 130 Walker, Janet, 168, 183, 184 Wall Street (1987), 110 Wallin, Zoë, 8, 120 Walsh, Raoul, 106, 226 Walt Disney Studios, 75, 120 War of the Silver Kings (1957), 84–7, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94 Warner, Jack L., 78 Warner Bros., 8, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 120, 127, 129, 135, 197, 203 Warner Brothers Presents (TV series), 78–9 Warshow, Robert, 104, 182, 186 Wayne, John, 1, 30, 43, 82, 120, 135, 147, 158, 166, 186, 200, 201, 206, 211, 226 Weaver, Dennis, 42 Welles, Orson, 237 Wellman, William A., 106, 201 Werewolf (TV series), 232 Westbound (1957), 119, 129, 194 When in Disgrace (1989), 2, 51 White, John, 8, 188 Wild One, The (1953), 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 224, 225 Williams, Tennessee, 207 Winchester ’73 (1950), 82, 206 Winters, Shelley, 220 Wise, Robert, 60 Wolf Hunters, The (1949), 29, 119 Wollen, Peter, 168–9, 208 Wood, Robin, 41, 43 Wright, Will, 182 Written on the Wind (1957), 43 Wyatt Earp (TV series), 77 Wyler, William, 67 Young, Gig, 79 Youth on Trial (1945), 13 Zinnemann, Fred, 203, 218, 220, 221 Žižek, Slavoj, 69