3 Westerns I Watched This Weekend

GOOD - Western Union (Fritz Lang 1941)

This is one of Lang’s first color films. He shot it in Arizona's Painted Desert with special attention to the natural scenery, and the three-strip Technicolor cinematography is quite beautiful to look at it, even today. It must have bowled over audiences in 1941.

The surprising thing about this film is how comparatively unLangian it is. For the first two-thirds of the picture, we get almost none of Lang’s characteristic Germanic fatalism. Instead, we get an optimistic celebration of America’s westward expansion, in this case, by means of the telegraph line. (With regard to filmic celebrations of westward expansion, Ford’s The Iron Horse would be an obvious predecessor. A later example would be How the West Was Won.) Not that Lang hadn’t trod similar ground before. His Woman in the Moon (1929) is also about the exploration of a New Frontier - but with studio sets instead of Western Union’s location shooting - and both that film and this one feature a romantic triangle. (In Western Union, Randolph Scott and Robert Young compete for the hand of Virginia Gilmour, the boss’s sister.)

Lang, who was always attracted to myths and legends, saw the American West as a kind of noble myth. Finally, after an hour of romance and very unLangian light comedy, things turn darker, visually and thematically. Native Americans attack – seen by Lang as agents of chaos, the ultimate horror in Lang’s world – and someone must make a sacrifice (again, as in Woman in the Moon) for the benefit of *progress.*

BETTER - The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann 1953)

Here is a Western that has nothing to do with community or Western expansionism. It’s basically a five-character drama in the form of a journey. James Stewart plays a dispossessed rancher, desperately in need of money, who hunts and captures grinning outlaw Robert Ryan for the reward. Millard Mitchell plays a grizzled prospector and Ralph Meeker a dishonorably discharged army officer, both of whom join Stewart on his journey intending to claim their share of the bounty. The remarkable Janet Leigh plays the outlaw’s conflicted gal. None of these characters are entirely sympathetic or trustworthy.

The journey, as in many of Mann’s films, is filled with physical and psychological obstacles that are embodied in the landscape. However, The Naked Spur is unique in that it was the only film Mann ever shot in 3-D. Not that you can see it that way. (A complete 3-D print - which would actually be two complete prints, one for the left eye and one for the right eye - may no longer exist.) Regardless, even in two dimensions, we can observe - as in the frame above - how much attention Mann paid to in-depth composition. And there is a landslide early in the film for the benefit of 3-D viewers, with boulders tumbling toward the lens.

BEST - Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur 1946)

Tourneur could be an uninspired journeyman director, but at his best, as in Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Out of the Past – or this film – he could be great.

Canyon Passage is one of the first true community Westerns, a drama in which the ensemble of characters who make up a budding Western community - and the idea of community itself - is as important as, if not more than, any single character. Significantly, the other groundbreaking Western of this type, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, was released the same year. The finest subsequent examples of this fascinating subgenre are Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and HBO’s Deadwood. Ideally, there are no extra players in a project like this – everyone we see has an individual life of his or her own, and the camera could potentially follow any one of them.

A central sequence in both My Darling Clementine and Canyon Passage shows a group ritual in which community is celebrated and affirmed. In My Darling Clementine it is a Sunday dance on the floor of a half-built church. When Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp joins the dance, it is a sign of his assimilation into Clementine’s community. In Canyon Passage, everyone assembles to build a cabin for a pair of young newlyweds. It is during this unusually complex cabin-raising sequence that nominal lead Dana Andrews proposes marriage to the innocent country girl he thinks he loves. Later, he will realize that "city girl" Susan Hayward (above) is more his type. Remarkably, however, the joyous cabin-raising sequence is followed by a scene in which the town nearly lynches a man accused of murder – a sequence that shows community’s darker side – just as in an earlier sequence, the community virtually forces Andrews and the town bully (Ward Bond) into having a public brawl for its own amusement. Native Americans are a threat to the community, but Tourneur’s attitude toward them is nothing like their one-sided portrayal in Western Union. The reason they attack is because Bond’s character has raped and killed one of their women.

Canyon Passage deserves a far more detailed analysis than I will attempt here. It confirms Tourneur as a master of gray areas and the in-between. (Rather like the musician character played by Hoagy Carmichael, below, an ambiguous artist figure, attached to no particular man or woman, but an observer of everyone. If ever there was a character who stood in for Tourneur in one of his films, it is this guy.) Tourneur is among the subtlest of auteurs, a director highly sensitive to individual differences, who views every character and event he sees as a complex mixture of good impulses, bad ones ... and the unexplained.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Western Union and The Naked Spur were screened on TCM last Saturday. Canyon Passage was watched on DVD. Naked Spur image courtesy of DVD Beaver. Canyon Passage images courtesy of Dave Kehr, DVD Talk, and Lost in the Frame.