Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Legends of Western Cinema Week 2019: The Tag

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There’s a blogging event going on this week that you know I just couldn’t miss: Legends of Western Cinema Week, hosted by Hamlette of Hamlette’s Soliloquy, Olivia of Meanwhile, In Rivendell, and Heidi of Along the Brandywine—a week-long celebration of anything and everything to do with Western film. I’ve got at least one more fun post coming up later in the week, but today I’m kicking off my participation by answering the event blog tag.

All three event hosts are having giveaways too, and you can visit any of their introductory posts (linked above) to find the ongoing list of participants’ posts.

Now, let the games begin!

– the tag –

1) Do you tolerate, like, or love westerns?

Love, of course! Read ’em, watch ’em, and write ’em.

2) What do you enjoy about them and, more broadly, the west itself (e.g. the history, accompanying paraphernalia, etc)?

Aside from all the horses, which I think were one of the first big draws when I was a kid, I guess my original reasons for enjoying Westerns were the sense of adventure involved in the storylines, and…well, the romance of the wide-open spaces, if you want to indulge in a cliché. But I think the history was always a big part of it too, perhaps more than I realized at the time. Looking back, I can recall that I always enjoyed stuff about the American frontier, from the Little House series and the “Kirsten” American Girl books to the Oregon Trail computer game. And that interest has only grown as I’ve grown older. I find the logistics and details of ranching, homesteading, and railroading fascinating in themselves; and in a broader sense, I think it’s still that sense of adventure and unpredictability in the partly-settled West that still appeals to me—that, and the colorful variety in its landscapes, characters, and events.

3) What’s the first western you can remember watching?

You know, I honestly don’t know. I guess it was too early to remember. It was probably either a John Wayne film or an episode of Bonanza.

4) Who are your favorite western stars, the ones whose presence in a western will make you pick it up off the shelf?

To be honest, I don’t typically pick out movies based on the top-billed stars. These days I’m more inclined to go for a new-to-me film based on the director or the amount of good character actors in the supporting cast. But I will say that when it comes to Westerns, Ben Johnson is always a plus. With his Oklahoma drawl and splendid horsemanship, he’s the closest thing to a real-McCoy cowboy on the screen, and his characters always seem to be among the most believable, too, whether he’s playing a good guy or a bad guy.

5) What’s your favorite performance by an actress in a western?

Olivia de Havilland as Linnet Moore in The Proud Rebel. Partly because I like the character, but I think de Haviland’s performance is wonderful, too, as she gradually transforms from seeming rather tough and brusque to showing her character’s caring and gentler side. It’s not so much a dramatic character change as it is a portrait of a woman who’s been used to fighting all her own battles, learning to let her guard down and let her whole personality blossom once she has a friend to stand by her. Plus, Linnet just seems to me like a more generally realistic portrayal of a frontier woman than a lot of the female characters in Western movies.

(Runner-up: Jean Simmons as Julie Maragon in The Big Country. Even though it’s not one of my personal favorite movies, I loved her character.)

6) What is your ‘go-to’ western, the one you’ll typically reach for?

Rio Grande (1950). Most others I have to be in the right mood for, but Rio Grande is my longtime personal favorite and one that I’ll nearly always be willing to watch.

7) Do your family/friends share your interest in westerns, or are you a lone ranger (pun completely intended)?

My immediate family are all usually game for watching a good Western if they happen to be in the right mood for it, though I don’t think any of them have as lively an interest in the genre/era for its own sake as I do.

8) Pick one western to live inside for a week, and explain why you chose it.

I think I would have to say Shane, simply because of the Wyoming setting. It would almost be worth dodging a few gunfighters to spend a week in the Grand Tetons. And in their more peaceful moments the settlers in Shane seem to have a friendly, close-knit little community among themselves, which is something I’d like being a part of.

9) What are some of your favorite lines from western movies? Are there any you quote regularly?

“That ain’t in my department” from She Wore A Yellow Ribbon is one of my go-to lines. Also for some reason, “We’re gonna have ’em all wore out passin’ ’em back and forth!” from Red River gets a surprising amount of mileage in everyday situations.

The Way of the Western, Part IV: “Yellow Sky” (1948) and the Ambivalence of Film Noir

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Watching Yellow Sky (1948) was an odd experience. For the first time I could remember, when I reached the end of a movie I couldn’t decide whether I actually liked it or not. I recorded some extensive musings in my journal at the time (March 2016) on why that was—most of this post is drawn from those journal entries where I put down thoughts as they came, so any sense of meandering or following tangents here is likely owing to that.

The Plot

After a successful bank robbery, an outlaw gang led by Stretch (Gregory Peck) shakes off a posse’s pursuit via a long, harrowing journey across a barren desert. Nearly dead of thirst, they find refuge and water on the other side in the abandoned mining town of Yellow Sky, whose sole inhabitants are a lone old man (James Barton) and his tough, tomboyish granddaughter (Anne Baxter). Before long the outlaws tumble to the fact that the pair must have a reason for living out here, and that the reason must be a hidden stash of gold. They promptly decide they’ll have a share of that too, and set out to force the old man and the girl into revealing its hiding-place.

During this time various conflicts come into play among the gang members. Cold, calculating gambler Dude (Richard Widmark) watches his chance to make a power play, especially since he has no intention of letting Stretch indulge an inclination to see that the old man and his granddaughter are left with a fair share of the gold; brutish Lengthy (John Russell) has his eye on the girl. The remaining outlaws’ allegiance wavers back and forth depending on who seems to have the upper hand at the moment. Eventually, after Stretch openly declares his intention to see a fair division of the gold, matters come to a showdown amongst them.

Again, ’ware spoilers, including for some
other movies I’ll be dragging into it.

Like 3:10 to Yuma, in an artistic sense Yellow Sky is excellent. The stunning black-and-white cinematography and the crisp direction by William Wellman (whose movies always manage to impress me in some way) are a pleasure, and the cast’s performances are all good. But as far as story goes, I had a very hard time liking any of the characters, even the leads played by Peck and Baxter whom we’re supposed to find sympathetic. The old love-hate romance angle requires thorough suspension of disbelief, and they sometimes make decisions that seem just plain idiotic (for Pete’s sake, girl, just send Grandpa to the spring for water and stay away from the outlaws!).

Of course, it was a foregone conclusion that Peck’s outlaw Stretch would reform by the end. But with the rest of the supporting cast, a curious sense of irresolution pervades the whole film. I kept waiting for a decisive moment when someone would finally show a streak of honest humanity, or when the pressure of circumstances would finally make everyone show their true colors one way or the other. But it didn’t really happen—the indeterminate lesser gang members remain in limbo, showing only weak flashes of either craven selfishness or a very slight leaning toward decency, but not enough to either wholly condemn or redeem them. [Read more…]

The Way of the Western, Part III: “Four Faces West” (1948), “3:10 to Yuma” (1957), and the Problem of the Quasi-Accurate Adaptation

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It’s very easy for bookworms to get into animated discussions over frankly and frustratingly inaccurate movie adaptations. Today, I’m doing something a little different: I’m going to examine the case of the adaptation that looks accurate on the surface, but in less obvious ways, shifts the theme or message of the story to something quite different than what the author seemed to intend. I’m sure this happens in every genre, but for the purpose of this series, I’m taking a look at two Western movies where this shift really jumped out at me when I’d both read the original stories and watched the adaptations.

Fair warning: I’ll be discussing the plots of the original stories and the movies in detail, so if you want to avoid spoilers, you’d best scuttle off and read or watch them first!

Paso Por Aqui and Four Faces West (1948)

Paso Por Aqui (which is Spanish for “passed by here” or “passed this way,” from a reference to Inscription Rock in the story) is Eugene Rhodes’ best-known work, a novella originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1926. Twenty-two years later it was adapted into a movie titled Four Faces West (the meaning of that title as applied to the story still isn’t exactly clear to me). In both book and film, a man named Ross McEwen robs a bank and flees from the law across the New Mexican desert. In the course of his flight he comes across a Mexican family suffering with diphtheria, and stays to nurse them and save their lives, ultimately meaning that pursuit will catch up with him.

The Two McEwens

In the novella, McEwen is a young man, red-headed, sanguine, on the daring or reckless side; with no apparent motive for robbing the bank except, of course, the usual one of coming away with money. Early in the story, nearly cornered by the initial posse pursuing him, he cuts his losses and dumps the stolen money, giving himself a chance to get away while the posse peels off to collect the fluttering bills. For a while McEwen plays cat-and-mouse with subsequent pursuers, keeping up a running commentary on the game and the landscape to his horse; and then finally, exhausted after a rough desert crossing, arrives at the door of the diphtheria-stricken family.

In Four Faces West we meet McEwen (Joel McCrea), who comes across as a little older and more sedate personality, robbing a bank for money to pay off his father’s mortgage. The money is sent off to fulfill its purpose rather than dumped to divert a posse.

The most flat-out deviation from the original plot is the introduction of a love interest, Miss Hollister (Frances Dee), an Eastern nurse whom McEwen meets while on the lam (a more sedate flight, by train and wagon). Miss Hollister is in fact a character in the original story, but one who has been made over to serve a totally different purpose. In Paso Por Aqui she is a side character, still a nurse (with a separate love interest of her own) whose function is to show New Mexico through Eastern eyes, who hears the story of McEwen’s robbery and initial flight told by a pleasant-mannered Mexican gambler named Monte. In the film Monte (Joseph Calleia) becomes a rather enigmatic, entertaining character who travels alongside McEwen and Miss Hollister for part of their journey, and seems to have a shrewd idea just who McEwen is but covers for him in order to preserve a source of amusement.

When McEwen eventually confesses his identity and guilt to Miss Hollister, she first pleads with him to repay the money and turn himself in, then impulsively joins him in a horseback flight across the desert, in a rather confusing montage that tracks their progress miles across a map, but all seems to take place on the same afternoon. After they are separated, McEwen’s journey mostly parallels the novella again up through his encounter with the stricken family. [Read more…]