Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Friday’s Forgotten Books: “Under Fire” by Charles King

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I’ve wished for a while that I could find some good older Western books centering around the frontier cavalry, since I’ve always enjoyed cavalry movies. And at last I found one! I’d had this novel on my Kindle for a little while and had only browsed a few pages, which gave me the impression that the writing style was a little dry and old-fashioned. However, once I settled down and began to read it in earnest, I was quickly pulled into the story and couldn’t put it down. The plot is engrossing and some of the combat scenes are downright thrilling.

The central figure of a multi-faceted plot is cavalry lieutenant Percy Davies, a serious, devout young man who moves to active duty on the frontier after graduating from West Point, and wins the respect of officers and men alike by his coolness and courage and his care for the troopers under his command. Alas, his good judgement fails him in only one area, one which is destined to bring him much difficulty and heartache: his choice of a wife.

Davies is also unfortunate in falling afoul of the book’s antagonist, Captain Devers, who in an attempt to shift the blame for a disastrous incident in the field onto the unwitting Davies’s shoulders, takes every opportunity to discredit and disparage him. Devers is a totally infuriating antagonist and yet a masterful achievement on the part of the author, a near-perfect portrayal of a narcissist and master manipulator. I can only assume that King knew someone of this type in real life, for he nails all the tactics of the manipulator with devastating accuracy: shifting blame, twisting the meaning of other people’s words, deliberately interpreting instructions the wrong way and then complaining the result isn’t his fault, finding it necessary to express a contrary opinion in every situation, rewriting history (in Devers’ case, literally)—and always managing to work it so that he can’t be called to account for any specific wrongdoing. In Mira Davies, too, we see another style of narcissism: the kind that lives off admiration and flattery, and uses tears and hysterics as self-defense, flinging accusations of unkindness against anyone who attempts to remonstrate with her for wrongdoing.

Fortunately, there are plenty of thoroughly upstanding and likable characters to balance out the antagonists—the happily married Captain Cranston and his wife, the stalwartly just adjutant Leonard, plucky lieutenants Boynton and Sanders, the troubled but determined young trooper Brannan, and others. Another thing that I appreciated about the book is that its Christian characters are all portrayed in a very warm and positive light. The plot encompasses a large cast of characters and spans territory from West Point to Chicago and the plains of the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming, with the main threads of the story—Lieutenant Davies’ domestic sorrows, Devers’ machinations against him, and the endeavors of Davies’ friends to stand by him in both circumstances—playing out against the larger backdrop of the frontier army’s campaigns against hostile Indians.

It’s easy to detect the influence of King’s army background in the novel. He gives us a glimpse at life for officers’ wives and families on a frontier post in the 1870s, shows how crucially the character and personality of the officer in command can affect the outcome of a battle, and reveals many little practical details about Indian fighting and survival on the plains. He also shows the frustration of army men at being forced to act at the dictation of policy-makers in Washington, and reservation agents appointed because of political connections, who are totally ignorant of how to negotiate with Indians or how to fight them—consequently putting the army in the field (along with innocent settlers and army families) into unnecessarily difficult and disadvantaged situations.

Under Fire completely satisfied my hankering for a good cavalry story, and coming from the 19th century and from an author acquainted with his subject, provided that good solid feeling of authenticity that I’ve come to appreciate in older Westerns. I’m looking forward to seeing if King’s other cavalry novels (he apparently wrote quite a few) live up to its standard.

Under Fire, first published in 1894, is in the public domain and available for free as an ebook at Project Gutenberg, Amazon, et al. This post is an entry for Friday’s Forgotten Books, a weekly blog event hosted by Patti Abbot.

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…]