The Western List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[Lighthouse]

I can understand what makes the other 2 films westerns, even if I personally don't consider them to be real westerns.

I have never seen We Were Strangers, but what does it make a western in your opinion?

[zedz]

In the Land of the War Canoes was discussed a few pages back, but it is a 1914 "documentary" presaging the likes of Nanook of the North and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. The Invaders is the early Francis Ford and William Ince short. I'm assuming zedz did the voting here.

I voted for In the Land of the War Canoes, but not The Invaders, though there ought to be some discussion of that film in connection with the Early Cinema list, as I recall it being well -regarded there.

In the Land of the War Canoes (a.k.a. In the Land of the Head-Hunters) is a film directed by Edward S. Curtis, the photographer who is in large part responsible for the iconography of the Western as we know it. To wit:

Here - didn't realise how huge this file was when I linked it!

The film is more in the line of a standard ethnographic record of Native American rites and rituals, but Curtis grafted a rudimentary narrative onto it, and in doing so created one of the most influential films in cinema history. When Flaherty first publicly screened his original (pre-Nanook, soon destroyed) Inuit footage, it was shown alongside Curtis' film, and was by all accounts a comparative flop, which convinced Flaherty that he needed to go back and try again with a narrative framework, thereby giving birth to the modern documentary.

Curtis' film is limited by the severe aesthetic and technical constraints of the time, but it contains so much remarkable footage I couldn't leave it off my list.

[Lighthouse]

Then these 4 are still a bit unclear:

Wagon Train
From Hell to Eternity
the Purple Plain
Carne de horca

[domino harvey]

Re: We Were Strangers-- you'll excuse me if this thread has turned me off defending/defining anything related to the western for the rest of my days. It is one for me, I like it, The End. Roll credits.

[Lighthouse]

You need not defend it, I was only interested in what it makes a western for you.

[zedz]

Fort Apache

This film didn't attract a lot of comment before the voting closed, as I recall, but I rewatched it just before last call and it certainly held up for me.

It strikes me that this is, in many respects, the quintessential John Ford film, with its visual grandeur, messy mix of registers, and tortured politics. It almost seems like it was calculated as some kind of summing-up work, not least because he goes to the trouble of knitting five (count 'em!) of his former lead actors into the ensemble cast.

It's also a film that stakes out much of the thematic territory Ford would explore over the following two decades. We see, for example, the seeds of the grappling with racism that would form the heart of The Searchers, and Ford's ambivalence about colonialist expansion is strongly expressed (for the first time?), to the extent that we're actually rooting for the Indians to slaughter Fonda's martinet colonel in the climactic battle. It's Fonda who actually demonstrates the belligerence and bad faith that he accuses the Indians of. And the film's coda offers a much more bitter and pointed iteration of Liberty Valance's "print the legend" bromide, which makes it clear where Ford stands on the issue of historical falsification (as he sees it).

After sitting through the film's dark ending, it's easy to forget that, for the first hour or so, the film plays pretty much as a comedy of manners, and you half expect that the film's major conflict will turn out to be no more than whether or not Fonda will loosen up enough to allow his daughter to hitch up with the son of a lower-ranked family. This material is sweet enough, but I've never been much of a fan of Ford's broader, folksier strain of humour, which is also thrown into the mix here in the scenes focussed around Victor McLaglen, though in Fort Apache I think it works better than usual because it makes the dramatic rug-pulling of the second half that much more effective. The mix of moods and registers would probably sink the film if it weren't all held together by Ford's assured visual sense and the cohesiveness of the acting ensemble. Both of these things help to convince the viewer that all of the disparate elements are plausible as facets of a single community.

I've also received, too late, the last dribs and drabs of a couple of amazon orders, so I'll post thoughts here if anything strikes me. These Thousand Hills struck me as a bit of a dud. The lead actor (whatsisname) was too bland to carry the film for me, and the evolution of his character seemed very jerky and rushed. I also resented how the film smugly assumed the ethics of its audience. Even though we're supposed to empathise with Lee Remick's (extraordinarily chaste!) whore to a point, we're certainly not expected to believe that she might have made a better choice of wife for Our Hero. Good heavens, no! What a relief for all concerned when she can be safely tidied away in the final reel as the plot device she was always destined to be. (Adding insult to injury is the fact that Remick is about ten times more interesting than any of the other actors in the film.)

[Perkins Cobb]

The Purple Plain was my fault. A subconscious attempt to vote for The Wonderful Country twice, I guess.

[Lighthouse]

The Wonderful Country is a beautiful film and would have deserved the extra points.

I too think that Fort Apache is comparatively underrated. For me one of Ford's 3 best westerns.

[the preacher]

Carne de horca is not Vajda's most prestigious film (The Miracle of Marcelino, It Happened in Broad Daylight) but it's an excelent movie "de bandoleros", the Spanish equivalent to American western. Also a mix of adventure, historical and criminal film set in Andalusia in the nineteenth century.

[Lighthouse]

Interesting.

Is the Carne de hoca from 1973 then a remake?

I only know Vajda from some of his German films, especially It happened in Broad Daylight.

[the preacher]

Don't know the Mexican Carne de horca, probably not related.

[zedz]

Caught up with the late-arriving Yellow Sky over the weekend and loved it. This would have easily made my top 30. Great hook, fine performances, fantastic use of landscape and location, with Wellman managing to work both threatening blankness on the salt flats and noir-lit claustrophobia in the ghost-town into his tense dramatic patterning. Oh, and now I know where Kitano cribbed the climax of Sonatine from. That scene is way more artsy than you'd expect from Wellman -

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a shootout played out in the shadows of panicky horses projected onto the outside of a derelict saloon!

- but it nevertheless works beautifully, without seeming out of place.

Throughout, I was wondering why the actor who played Walrus seemed so familiar. He's playing a common enough western 'type', and seemed like the kind of character actor who would have been a western mainstay, but I couldn't recall specific examples. It turns out he was Charles Kemper, who died soon after shooting this film, having only enjoyed a five year career in feature films. But he managed to chalk up a pretty impressive resume in that brief span: The Southerner, Scarlet Street, Yellow Sky, Wagon Master, Stars in My Crown, Where Danger Lives, On Dangerous Ground.

[Lighthouse]

What about the ending of Yellow Sky? It seems like it was shot afterwards, like it wasn't planned from the beginning on, like one of those compromise endings added by the producer. The only weak part of an otherwise fantastic and underrated film.

That it did made here the top 20 is the only real surprise for me of the first 20. And Day of the Outlaw the only surprise of the next 10. Both deserve it from my point of view.

Btw I'm still interested which films are these 2:

Wagon Train (40's film or 50's series?)
From Hell to Eternity (?)

[zedz]

That ending does indeed seem like a Hays Code figleaf, but I can accept it as the price you have to pay for the rest of the film.

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Since there's no way they could allow a bunch of bankrobbers to walk free at the end, the only other option would have been for everybody to be slaughtered or for them to turn themselves in

and I think either option would have been lamer. The ending as it stands does at least make some kind of tortured psychological and logical sense, since

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they don't need the money any more and they certainly don't need a price on their heads.

[Lighthouse]

Yes, of course, it is meanwhile one of my 10 favourite westerns

[domino harvey]

Brief thoughts on scattered Westerns I've seen since the list's close of business

A Man Called Horse (Elliot Silverstein 1970) The last Western I watched before I submitted my list, and though I knew even as I watched that it wasn't nearly as bad as it seemed, my excruciating viewing experience told me it was time to take a sabbatical from the genre.. which only lasted a couple weeks, haha. I doubt I'll ever bother a rewatch, but maybe the praised sequel will brighten my mood on some distant afternoon.

Drango (Hall Bartlett and Jules Bricken 1957) A well-made but ultimately too serious social problem western so overwrought that it makes High Noon look subtle. Here a town of genuinely petulant Georgians reject Jeff Chandler's Yankee muckity-muck sent to help them rebuild post-Sherman's March. The townspeople are so uniformly horrid to this supervisory interloper that after a while it's hard to care whether they all starve to death or not-- for this kind of movie to work, the audience shouldn't be questioning the "victory" of the film's happy ending, haha.

Great Day in the Morning (Jacques Tourneur 1956) By far the strongest of the Tourneur westerns, this one benefits from a strong, tight script rife with several appealing conflicts (it's another "better to pick a side than no side" Civil War pics, but it's one of the superior ones) and a grand central performance by Robert Stack. I'll CC: my earlier comments on Ronald Reagan to Stack: His persona lends itself so naturally to this genre that it's hard to understand why he didn't do more of these films.

the Romance of Rosy Ridge (Roy Rowland 1947) Pretty much exactly like you'd expect a movie starring Van Johnson as an affable (could he play it any other way?!) wanderer who takes up on ex-Reb Thomas Mitchell's farm, despite having secretly been a member of the Union. Hope this doesn't spell trouble for his romancin' Janet Leigh in her film debut!!!!!! This is silly Hollywood hokum, but, uh, it's also really well-crafted and enjoyable entertainment, and features an extended action sequence wherein hay is speedily carried into a barn.

Allegheny Uprising (William A Seiter 1939) A novel western that trades cowboy hats for tri-corner ones. Set sixteen years before the Revolutionary War, John Wayne and his trapper pals want to teach the British a lesson about allowing trade with the indians. Brian Donlevy shows up to twirl his mustache as the standard capitalist heavy, George Sanders is the same effete egalitarian he seemed damned to play this early in his career, and Claire Trevor has a running gag about her being a dern fool woman who wants to do menly things! This one's actually pretty fun entertainment, even if does have a mind-blowingly stupid deus ex machina ending.

Station West (Sidney Lanfield 1948) The only existent copy of the film runs almost a reel short, so I'm unsure how much of the choppiness is inherent in the material or a product of overzealous edits after the fact, but this noir-ish Western makes less dramatic sense the longer it runs, going from a promising start with Dick Powell swinging his dick around in a new town to impress Jane Greer's saloon magnate to, uh, Agnes Moorehead drawing a pistol larger than her forearm on Powell and stealing back her own gold. What? I don't know, the plot barely matters in most films but here it really makes no sense. Burl Ives has a funny little bit part as a hotel operator who sings an off the cuff song about how Powell's going to be killed the moment he walks into his establishment.

[Cold Bishop]

Ramrod (André De Toth, 1947)

In this project, one thing I have noticed is that many of the great Westerns share a common element, namely the ability to make palpable the precariousness of civilization. Situated on the edge of the wild, they find the nascent frontier community, its social structures and systems of order, as being built on the most flimsy and tentative of social contracts, seemingly nothing more than an unspoken agreement by all parties to follow the rules of civilization. And they often find that all it takes is for one party to make a single transgression for the entire system to begin to crumble. This makes the Western an ideal template for André De Toth, and not just for his talent at identifying the carnality and baseness simmering under the surface of society. André De Toth, perhaps above else, had a talent at identifying the connectivity and unseen interdependency among people. He never made what one could call an ensemble film, and one is hard-pressed to imagine him making a "web of life" film that were so in vogue the last decade; he keeps his films small, compact, tight. Nevertheless, his direction has a knack for delineating and emphasizing the interrelation between his cast of characters, the way actions cut across the social fabric of his films, even as the characters he depict, often rugged individualists, fail to grasp their significance. The primary mode of his films are a web of deceit and treachery, the image of the group in "collective trouble" (as Michael Grost puts it), with the moral failing of even one character enough to initiate the trouble until, by the end of the sordid mess, everyone emerges with a varying level of culpability for what has transpired. De Toth directed several Westerns, usually very good (Springfield Rifle, Last of the Comanches). But it was his two westerns, Ramrod and Day of the Outlaw, made a decade apart, that stand out. They do so precisely for the way they merge this element of the Western with this element of De Toth's style and vision. Ramrod is one of the most savage of 40s Westerns, filmed with De Toth's signature stylistic curtness and unflinching eye for brutality. It's also a textbook De Toth film: one act of deceit or violence begets another until the entire group has been thrown into chaos. The web of drama is vast enough that the film can hardly contain it: the film begins unapologetically in media res, and a viewer could be forgiven if, for the first ten minutes of the film, he feels two steps behind the drama. The various interests and actions of its characters accumulate, intertwine and conflict until - unbeknownst to them - the final cocktail of ego, ambition and animosity conspires to destroy them all.

This is apparent in the title. Ramrod: the ranch foreman, the leader of the entire outfit, a title that connotes a certain image of authoritarianism and tight discipline. It's a position of power, and this film outlines a struggle for power, a bitter fued between Veronica Lake and Preston Foster's rival ranchers for the very future of their land, and from which all the rest follows. It's a name that connotes a certain degree of brutality. It doesn't just bring up the image of the ramrod used for loading pistols, but also an image of more blunt, direct force of violence, a name consisting of two verbs which together give one the image of a violent scuffle or melee. This is a film that navigates the release of out-of-control violence, and doesn't shy away from the cruelty it entails. Furthermore, the title gives one a sense of sexuality, particularly a violent sexuality, phallic in nature. To the raging testosterone and rival masculinity already present in the premise, De Toth introduces Veronica Lake, a Western femme fatale, bringing a spark of seduction and l'amour fou to the proceedings, and disrupting the structures of power by reversing the roles of gender. It's no coincidence that the film opens with the complete emasculation of a character, Lake's husband and first ramrod, who is instead broken and driven out of town. He may not have been "man" enough, but the rest of the film finds the cast of character desperate to prove themselves otherwise, to prevent themselves from suffering the same emasculation... all to disastrous effect.

"We do it my way, or no way at all..."
Joel McCrea begins the film determined to stay out of a conflict that doesn't involve him... but when the Ivy Ranch tries to muscle him out the way they did Mr. Dickason, he instead draws himself into the conflict out of spite: he won't be emasculated. It's a rare moment of ego in a character that otherwise follows the classic McCrea persona. Although coming early in his cycle of Westerns, the persona is already fully formed: the McCrea here is noble, wholesome, firm in conviction, but in a courteous, even gentle manner that seperates him from the likes of a John Wayne. He's an essentially decent character. At first glance, it's a characterization that seems antithetical to the cinema of De Toth, enough to perhaps derail the film. But if we're presented with the traditional Joel McCrea, he's surrounded by an unconventional narrative, exploring the darker regions of the Western where he rarely ventured. A change in environment doesn't come lightly: a De Toth player is always affected by the web of characters surrounding him. As those who surround him turn more ruthless, the toxic atmosphere is enough to defile even the decency of the cinematic Joel McCrea.

McCrea's very virtue becomes his chief flaw. The titular ramrod, he wants to run his outfit straight-arrow, following the letter of the law and refusing to play dirty. He's keeps himself grounded to the foundations of civility and justice, but in doing so is unable to notice the ground beneath him as it crumbles away. His effort are constantly undone, by not just the rival ranchers, but even his own men... and his own employer. The way the actions of others can ripple through the "web" and have unintended consequences is no more apparent than in the turning point of the film:

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Lake has Foster's Frank Ivey framed for a crime he didn't commit, an act that has the unseen effect of framing McCrea; Ivey believes McCrea was behind the frame-job and sends all his guns after him.

That the Western hero is reluctant to fight, but is later drawn into a conflict is nothing revolutionary, but in De Toth's film it has a different context. The McCrea of, let's say, Wichita, can shoot a man down in the street, but the act has a moral function: the function of taming the West. That moral righteousness is nowhere to be found here. When, at the end of the film, having shed his own blood and that of others, McCrea proves himself as the true "ramrod", it's marked not by triumph but futility. His righteous fury has been built on lies and deceit. If his character grows at all, he grows more cynical and world-weary. If he has a happy ending, it's only in removing himself from the "web" that constitutes the film.

"And being a woman, I won’t have to use guns..."
Lording over the web is Veronica Lake's Connie Dickason (not so subtle), whose characterization embodies the frustration that both distinguishes and limits the film. She's an early entry in the line of powerful and assertive women that would make up the proto-feminist Westerns to come: Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar, Barbara Stanwyck in The Furies and Forty Guns. But it would be incorrect to properly call her character proto-feminist: she is also characteristic of the femme fatale, manipulative, vindictive, sexual. Yet, if the fear of emasculation hangs heavy over the film, De Toth's camera seemingly de-emphasizes Lake as the castrating agent. Lake is both and neither the deceitful man-eater nor the wronged woman. She oscillates between moments of ruthless cunning and genuine contrition, so much so that the character in between often seems missing. It is an incoherent and even unsuccessful portrayal, but one which is fascinating in that is shows De Toth straining against the codes of generic convention. For the first third of the film we are completely sympathetic to the character; by mid-point, we find her venomous. Yet, everything which she inevitable does is laid out in that first third. If we're sympathetic with her, it's in her determination to break free of the confines of the patriarchy, both figuratively and literally... the very transgression that makes the femme fatale so menacing. The film is situated so that we cheer the intention, and boo the action. We despise her sexual manipulation of the male characters, even as she states the intent from the very beginning: when she tells her father she "won't need to use guns" , that as a woman, she'll have things much easier, we have no doubt which weapon she has at her disposal.

The film may posit the dark-haired, domestic Arleen Whelan as the feminine alternative to Lake, but De Toth gives even the "good" woman surprising touches of independence: 1) Whelan is not just a housewife-in-waiting, but a private business owner of the frontier, a dressmaker who supports herself and lives alone, 2) the film, without judgement, implies she's carrying on a casual, open affair with Don DeFore's character, with no expectation of marriage ("She's know I'm a drifter"). What we get from Lake is not a monstrous woman, but almost a child-like figure, toying with destructive forces that she can't control (note the way De Toth's camera emphasizes her small stature, and her pouty youthfulness). This is perhaps sexist in its own right, showing a girl shouldn't play in a man's world. Yet, if the character remains schizophrenic, existing only as a sexually active or hysterically passive being, it's that the male social environment of the film won't respond to any other mode of femininity. It's ingrained in her very position of power: she may be the "leader", but her power is entirely dependent on male agency. De Toth could damn the character, but he chooses not to:

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At the end of the film, she is not killed, nor jailed, or ruined. If her transgressions, under the auspices of the Code, are punished, it is not in any conventional manner. She in fact gets what she wants: the triumph of the Circle 66 and control of the land. Her punishment, however, is strictly emotional and spiritual: McCrea refuses to forgive her and walks away. This is only justice if we accept that she is not a monster or sociopath, but that her sorrow and remorse is genuine.

At one point, a character tells Connie that she is "like a horse or dog, or a man or any other woman... once I understand you, you're alright." The problem is that no character understands her, perhaps not even De Toth. But he at least acknowledges that deficiency. If the character is ultimately incoherent, it makes one thing clear: De Toth is unable to accept the conception of the "femme fatale", unable to accept the reactionary sexism that explains it. It would be one year before he truly took on the archetype, in Pitfall's qualification and rejection of the femme fatale, but already he is straining against it. If given the a script with a "bad girl", he can't accept the characterization at face; he has to know what makes her bad, what makes, in his own words, "a character a human being".

"I feel the way you must feel about killing Ed Burma."
"You don't know. You're just guessing."
No one escapes the web. Whether one tries to stay neutral, tries to capitulate, or tries to restore it to civility, it consumes everything in its path. Just as McCrea goes from reluctant bystander to willing participant in the range war to, by the end, standing opposed to both sides of the conflict, so does it grow to effect everyone. Charles Ruggles' Ben Dickason tries to stay out of the conflict, despite being as large a landowner as the two rival parties. Estranged from his daughter, and acquiescing to Frank Ivey, who he treats like a son, his neutrality leaves him impotent, standing back to watch as his family destroys itself. On the other side, you have Donald Crips as an aging sheriff. His character reveals himself to be of true grit, possessing the sort of moral backbone that McCrea is left only to aspire to. But like McCrea, his good intentions are spoiled by the machinations around him. He is deceived into using his moral authority for an immoral purpose, and pays for it. Of these "bystanders", none is more important than Don DeFore's Bill Schell.

A character actor known for playing an affable everyman, here he's cast against type as an ammoral, trigger-happy hired-gun. It's a characterization that works precisely because he plays the role with same grinning affability and jovial high-spirits that made him a sitcom staple later in life. There's something of poor man's Dan Duryea about him, but inverted: if Duryea carried a sense of sleaze with him even when he played good guys, so does DeFore seem inherently decent even as he's convincingly cruel. He enters the film with the sort of good-natured charms that makes you think this will be another of his long line of likeable best-friend/neighbor roles. But as the film rolls on, he shows a real mean streak, culminating in the cold-blooded murder of man he reluctantly drags into a gunfight. Like McCrea's Dave Nash, he's a drifter who's dragged into the conflict. Despite being best friends, the film almost sets Schell up as Nash's double: Nash wears white, Schell wears black; Nash is chilvarous, Schell is womanizing; Nash follows the letter of the law, Schell is more than eager to use violence. If Nash can convince himself that he's doing what he's doing for Connie's sake, Schell isn't as high-minded: he just likes watching Ivey and his men squirm. When, halfway through the film, Schell starts undermining Nash and shacking up with Connie, you think he's heading to a final showdown with Nash as much as Ivey and Connie are.

But then something interesting happens. From the comic relief to a potentially ruthless heel, DeFore ends up something else entirely: the heart and soul of the film. If Nash is ignorant of what's going on around him, and if Connie is deluded into thinking she can control the course of events, only Bill Schell seems to acknowledge the web that's threatening to destroy them all. Only he's able to ascertain and accept his own culpability in it, and in his own small way, to attempt to make amends for it. And if he knows it's too late to stop the chain of events, he at least tries to soften the final violent blow. His small moment of decency is enough that even De Toth gives it special privilege. Near the final minutes of the film, where the logic of conventional narrative and the star system dictates that De Toth should keep his focus on his stars, he instead leaves them behind completely, and gives a near ten-minutes stretch to focus on Don DeFore. Not only that, but he puts all his talent to work: DeFore's stand-off in the mountain, a 4+ minute nearly wordless sequence, is perhaps the stylistic high-point of the film. Compare it with the blunt, sudden climax given to Nash, it's obvious that De Toth is acknowledging Schell's sacrifice and its importance to his narrative. It is De Toth's style, an odd synthesis of misanthropy and humanism; of acknowledging how easily the worst of people can come out, all while acknowledging that human decency and morality doesn't disappear because of it. It's an acknowledgement of the messy range of human nature. Among the oppressive determinism that piledrives through the film, only DeFore acknowledges the "web" and takes a moral stand against it. In one of De Toth's darkest films, he provides an ounce of human compassion and courage. One can say that it is quintessentially De Toth-ian that this humanity comes in the form of a sadistic bandit.

But ultimately, as a De Toth film, this is one where his misanthropy reigns over his humanism. The web is woven too complexly to break, and the out-of-control violence only ends once its exhausted itself, with no one left to die. In fact, it was probably not until his final blistering masterpiece, Play Dirty, that he would exercise his misanthropic muscle again so completely (and how!). It is this oppressive and demoralizing atmosphere that both distinguishes Ramrod as an exceptional Western, and also limits it ultimate appeal. Ramrod is ultimately a tragedy written with cigarette burns, bruised fists and sickening shotgun blasts. Over a decade later, De Toth would return with another Western about a frontier community spinning out of control. If that film is even more savage and oppressive that this one, it ultimately finds De Toth expanding its moral dimension ten-fold as well. Human courage and human depravity coexist in De Toth's cinema. By the end of this one, we're left unsure which prevailed.

[domino harvey]

the Red Badge of Courage (John Huston 1951) A compromised product, sure, but one that works on its own merits nevertheless. Huston's decision to film most of the film in extreme close-ups makes something as sweeping as the Civil War claustrophobic, and it's a good choice. This does cause some of the camera blockings to be awfully predictable, though I had fun figuring out exactly where the closest possible mark for the actors would be based on where the establishing camera shot was located. Who knows, maybe this all killer no filler 69 minute version is superior to any bloated product that Huston intended to release?

Warlock (Edward Dmytryk 1959) Three strong screen presences fight it out in a movie that can't decide which is the focus of the film: Henry Fonda's for-hire marshall? Anthony Quinn's loyal gambling house tagalong? Richard Widmark's baddie turned lawman? The focal imbalance actually works, though, as it disorients what might otherwise be a pretty trite underlying story. Certainly there's a pronounced homosexual subtext to the Fonda-Quinn relationship as well, much more explicit than you'd think for the time. It's a shame everything crumbles with a cop-out ending, because it seemed to be leading somewhere far more interesting.

Gunman's Walk (Phil Karlson 1958) The best Western I've seen since we handed in our ballots a few months ago. Van Heflin, doing his best Lee J Cobb impression, tries to rein in his hotheaded son, played with surprising actorly acumen by Tab Hunter. It struck me while watching this wonderfully executed morality play that one reason Westerns were no longer in vogue after the collapse of the studio system is that it was the go-to genre for psychological thinkpieces and once filmmakers could openly discuss a larger range of topics rather than coding them, the western as a genre no longer attracted the same level of interested talent.

the Hanging Tree (Delmer Daves 1959) This is an enjoyable but ultimately minor western from Daves, which at times flirts with presenting no positive characters at all but eventually relents in the end. Gary Cooper's last non-cancer addled performance is of his usual quality, and Karl Malden has a hoot as a dirty old man (talk about usual performances!). Poor Maria Schell gets slathered up in burn makeup and lusted after for most of the film, but she ends up faring better than most women in this genre. This dour film is the closest Daves has come yet in his work in this genre (that I've seen so far) to exhibiting his strengths as an auteur, as the possessiveness assorted men feel towards both women and other men (!) showcases Daves adeptness at understanding and utilizing the juvenile instincts.

[Yojimbo]

the Red Badge of Courage (John Huston 1951) A compromised product, sure, but one that works on its own merits nevertheless. Huston's decision to film most of the film in extreme close-ups makes something as sweeping as the Civil War claustrophobic, and it's a good choice. This does cause some of the camera blockings to be awfully predictable, though I had fun figuring out exactly where the closest possible mark for the actors would be based on where the establishing camera shot was located. Who knows, maybe this all killer no filler 69 minute version is superior to any bloated product that Huston intended to release?

Its a wonderful film, and one of Huston's most underappreciated classics. And you might be right about whether its abbreviated final version might be a blessing in disguise.
On a related topic I can't help speculating on just how good 'The Unforgiven' might have been if Burt Lancaster hadn't imposed that truly wretched Hollywood ending on that film, after the promise of the first 4/5ths of that Huston film

the Hanging Tree (Delmer Daves 1959) This is an enjoyable but ultimately minor western from Daves, which at times flirts with presenting no positive characters at all but eventually relents in the end. Gary Cooper's last non-cancer addled performance is of his usual quality, and Karl Malden has a hoot as a dirty old man (talk about usual performances!). Poor Maria Schell gets slathered up in burn makeup and lusted after for most of the film, but she ends up faring better than most women in this genre. This dour film is the closest Daves has come yet in his work in this genre (that I've seen so far) to exhibiting his strengths as an auteur, as the possessiveness assorted men feel towards both women and other men (!) showcases Daves adeptness at understanding and utilizing the juvenile instincts.

I think the unrelentingly bleak mood is perfect for the theme; and Cooper's pinched, pained face its perfect complement.
I hated that ending, though,

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or at least the scene on the hill, and the contrast between what was happening simultaneously in the valley.

Are they both available on DVD now?
Certainly they're both gaps I need to fill

[domino harvey]

The Red Badge of Courage just went OOP from Warners, so it might pop up in the Archives if you don't act fast. The Hanging Tree was released via the Archives, but is mysteriously absent now (I caught it on TCM)-- I know there's a French DVD

[knives]

Given that it was a snapper it might just be getting updated on that front like so many others.

[domino harvey]

Where the Boys Are was too, and look where it ended up :singletear:

[knives]

Just call me an optimist I suppose.

[matrixschmatrix]

There were a bunch of $3 copies of the Red Badge of Courage at Big Lots the other day- that doesn't say 'update forthcoming' to me.

[Yojimbo]

The Red Badge of Courage just went OOP from Warners, so it might pop up in the Archives if you don't act fast. The Hanging Tree was released via the Archives, but is mysteriously absent now (I caught it on TCM)-- I know there's a French DVD

I like the artwork on the French DVD, like a contemporary Western paperback. I particularly like the vivid reds. I've put it in my basket.

The Huston film is available, but too expensive at the mo': I have it on a converted videotape recording, which is decent enough