Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle | The Cook / 1918

smooth operators

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (screenwriter and director) The Cook / 1918

 

Using a great deal of his material from The Waiter’s Ball (1916), Arbuckle turns his cooking methods into even more deft and amazing feats as he not only flips griddle cakes, tosses his heavy knife over his shoulder to have it land perfectly upon the cutting board behind him, but throws plated orders through the air to have them land expertly into the waiter’s (in this case Buster Keaton) hands.

     Equally masterfully, Keaton serves up food to the Bull Pup restaurant customers so effortlessly that he’s turned it into a true art. At one moment in particular, asking a beautiful woman for her order, he awaits her words so intently that the always good-looking Keaton suddenly attains the look that is so beautiful that he attains something close to the glamour of the male matinee favorites like Clark Gable and Cary Grant.

 

     Similar to Al St. John in the earlier movie, Keaton also yells out the orders in a coarse restaurant lingo, but even his choices of names for common dishes are wittier than in the 1916 film.

     The only awkward moment is when the restaurant manager, finding his waiter intensely talking to the Cashier (Alice Lake), pushes him toward the customers so hard that Keaton is sent spinning onto the kitchen chopping block at the very moment when the cook is swinging down his large cleaver to chop up the mutton into pieces. Together they carefully inspect his body to make sure the knife missed it. Fortunately, he’s all intact.

      A few minutes later, a belly dancer begins her routine. Keaton is so caught up in the music and the sensation of the routine that he begins to imitate it and dance along, turning the convolutions of the dancer’s body into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

       Dancing into the kitchen, the waiter even begins to affect the cook as Arbuckle, caught up in the light-footing, jabs a flower onto a strainer and fits it atop his head, appending small pans and lids to his ears and breasts and a whisk pan to his lower stomach that bears a close resemblance to Theda Bara in her film Salomé (1918), Keaton bringing in John the Baptist’s head of lettuce. Eventually grabbing up a few links of sausage and holding it out like the adder Arbuckle shifts to portray Bara in her Cleopatra (1917) before putting it to his breast. Both films are now lost.

       If we can’t precisely describe this as drag, it is at least a stunningly delicate parody of female impersonation that only Arbuckle could have so cleverly pulled off.

       Throughout this highly entertaining scenes Arbuckle and Keaton have worked as a team of remarkably smooth operators. Would that the rest of the film were so inventive.

       The only narrative link between events comes in the form of the “tough guy” (Al St. John) who, suddenly appearing in the café, grabs the cashier and pulls her into an apaché dance. Keaton grabs a bottle of wine as if he might slug the villain over the head, but the tough guy merely takes it out of his hand breaks off the top and drinks, spitting out the excess glass.

       When the manager takes up a knife, St. John’s character grabs that away from as well and threatens mayhem. But there is one left to save them, the bull dog (Luke) who grabs onto the bad guy’s leg and won’t let go. When the tough guy finally breaks away and runs, Luke is on his heels, an adventure that continues into the next day when, finally, in an attempt to truly escape him, St. John climbs a ladder to the restaurant roof.

        Below we have just been entertained by a long skit of different methods of eating spaghetti, Keaton gathering up into a cup and cutting away any unsightly overhanging “threads,” before slurping it up like coffee. The cook winds it around his finger and feeds the coils into his mouth, later sucking it up along with his necktie. At one point he seems to be knitting a pattern out of its threads. But the manager and the dishwasher, sitting at opposite ends of the table, pull the swallow the strands by pulling and sucking, at one point each of them attempting to process the same long thread spanning the long end of the tabletop before Keaton and Arbuckle put a scissors to it, both falling back in their efforts. And at the same moment, the crook comes crashing down upon the table top, Luke chasing him once more off.

       The next day, a day off, the cook decides to go fishing with a rod as long as vaulting pole, while the cashier and the waiter take in what seem to be the rides on Coney Island, beginning with a goat cart. The tough guy shows up again as the cashier attempts to enjoy a ride, and in her bid to escape she crawls to the very top of ride and dives into the ocean where she spends nearly the rest of movie in distress as Keaton and Arbuckle attempt to find a rope, a life buoy, or any other means of saving her without success. Of course, ultimately they fall in themselves, along with the villain; but as the intertitles explain the three survive while the villain drowns.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 31, 2023)

Aaron Rookus | Woensdagen (Wednesdays) / 2011

a strange request

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aaron Rookus (screenwriter and director) Woensdagen (Wednesdays) / 2011 [9 minutes]

 

8-year-old Kris (Tyn Hageman) is fortunate, so it appears, to have an older 28-year-old friend Willem (Viktor Griffioen) to regularly accompany him, with his parent’s permission, to somewhat distant indoor swimming pool, where they cavort with rough-house antics before sliding down the water slide and chowing down an order of fries. They shower, with the attentive Willem washing the younger boy’s hair, dry-off dress, and return home, Kris reporting his enjoyment of the event.

 

    And this Wednesday seems to be no different. They go through the same series of events—except this time after they’ve showered, Willem bends down to speak with his young friend, asking, rather casually, “Can I put your willy in my mouth?” Surprised by the question and confused, Kris shakes his head “no.” But his good friend persists. “But I would like to.”  Again,

and almost continuously from now on Kris shakes his head back and forth in the negative. “It will be our little secret.” “It will be only briefly.” Kris continues with his head gesture. “Promise,” declares Willem.

      Willem stands and continues drying off. “You had a nice day?

      This time Kris nods yes, to which Willem suggests, “Good. Tell them at home.”

      The drive home is a quiet one, with neither speaking. But when they pull up near to the house, when Kris seems in a bit of hurry to leave the car, Willem reminds him of what appears to be their usual routine. “Kiss.”

      Kris turns toward his “friend,” and out of site of the camera turns in for what seems like an extraordinarily long kiss—and lower that what might appear to be the lips. Clearly, Willem has been slowly accommodating the boy to the pedophilic abuse he intends to introduce over their future Wednesdays. That is, if Kris, now having willfully denied Willem’s request, is not a bit wise about what might be expected of him in return for the enjoyable middle-of-the-week events.

      We have no idea whether he might share with his parents what has happened. Children often remain silent about such situations, fearful more for what it says about them more than the aggressor. And Kris knows, surely, that if he tells his mother or father about what Willem has asked him to do, there will be no further Wednesday swims, no ride down the slide, no French fries in the future. Willem clearly seems unphased by the direction of events. Slowly, he may find a way to introduce the act as a kind of natural enjoyment or even impose it on the boy as he seems to have with the regular “kiss” of appreciation.

 

     This is Kris’ warning. Whether an eight-year-old can heed it is impossible to tell. He may simply chalk it up as another strange request from his adult friend. And adults are strange, always, to 8-year-old boys. At one point we see Kris stare at a group of three teens talking at the side of the pool, and we recognized in his face almost a sense of longing and wonderment. He desires to be like them, perhaps to join them. And just perhaps he may finally see Willem as a route into that strange adult world which boys like him both fear and desire so intensely.

      Dutch director Rookus has brought up all these issues so casually and flawlessly that it almost comes as a shock, but also as something inevitable, surely, that the parents haven’t bothered to ask about: “Why is a 28-year-old man so engaged with their young son?”

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

 

William C. deMille | The Widow’s Might / 1918 [Difficult to obtain]

calender girl

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marion Fairfax (screenplay), William C. deMille (director) The Widow’s Might / 1918 || difficult to obtain

 

Although I review Fred. J. Balshofer’s The Isle of Love (1921) starring the noted cross-dresser Julian Eltinge, his earlier films, some of them still apparently available, are difficult to obtain, and impossible to purchase on DVD. It appears that TCM may have some of his works from the late teens of the early 20th century, but they obviously don’t show these silent works regularly or upon request.

     Accordingly, I am left with no other alternative but to provide as detailed description and analysis as I can for several of his unobtainable films without having seen the films themselves.

      Regarding their value to the LGBTQ community, however, the focus is simply on how convincingly Eltinge plays the female for which a various number of reasons, depending on the different films’ plots, the transformation is demanded of him. Usually, he is quite successful and is able to bring justice to bear and return order to a society that is filled with bullies and those who have gotten in the way of fair play, a sort of “superman” for the weak male who has no other recourse to normative justice. But instead of dressing up as caped man in tights, Eltinge puts a dress over the tights and drapes the cape over his female attire.

      William C. deMille’s 1918 film The Widow’s Might is a typical example. DeMille, the older brother of Cecil, and his writer Marion Fairfax have whipped a typical “city boy” gone West situation, usually reserved for males who are a bit too sissified to survive their new environment.

     In this case Dick Tavish, a young New Yorker, is convinced that he can become wealthy by raising cattle, and accordingly buys a western ranch, which at first is somewhat pleasurable and rife with comic possibilities; but soon it becomes so boring that he can longer bear the conditions which he must suffer.

       He quickly finds love, in this case with the girl in the kitchen calendar, who intrigues him, particularly when he discovers the girl is real and lives nearby. No matter that her uncle was the one who swindled him over his purchase the ranch. He can take care of that. Besides, other local ranchers also discover that the girl’s uncle, Horace Hammer (Gustave Von Seyfferitz) has swindled them as well, and they chose Dick and his friend Red (James Neill) to get their money back.

      Dick takes on the challenge if for no other reason but to be close to Irene Stuart (Florence Vidor), but when he brings up the matter with Hammer, threatening him with action, the crook simply laughs at the weak city boy. The young man determines to check out Hammer’s safe to regain the swindled money, but Hammer interrupts his activities and he’s forced to go on the run.

      In order to return, he must disguise himself—and all those in the audience who knew of Eltinge’s fame were surely waiting for this moment—masquerading as a woman, half of the men in a fashionable resort falling instantly in love with him. As a beautiful widow he rights the situation and wins Irene’s hand in marriage.

 

Los Angeles, September 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle | Good Night, Nurse! / 1918

cross-dressing heaven

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (screenwriter and director) Good Night, Nurse! / 1918

 

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s 1918 short of 26 minutes is a kind of rag-tag series of comedic mini-skits which don’t entirely dove-tail into a coherent whole, but nonetheless do provide some excellent comic moments, particularly given that Arbuckle’s central comedic opposite in this work is the great Buster Keaton who plays, in the first “skit,” a woman with an umbrella swept back by the horrific winds of a rain storm into Arbuckle’s post outside of a store where he is no longer allowed access to fulfill his need for liquor; and in the second major “skit,” he performs as a mad surgeon who heads the No Hope Sanitarium which contains numerous insane men and women as well, supposedly as recovering alcoholics—which is the reason why Arbuckle’s wife has sentenced him to the place where surgery appears to be the final solution to all ills.

 

    Keaton would in later films play a sufferer of several storms, but here, dressed as a woman who braves her way against the winds of such tempestuous force that they keep her flying backwards into Arbuckle’s arms and apparent protection, she is also seemingly abused by the giant roadblock, as he attempts momentarily to make use of her inverted umbrella as a cover to light a cigarette and, later, as holding onto her dress as the pushes her in the other direction, in the process helping, along with the winds, to nearly strip her of her clothing.     

   The scene also concerns a passing policeman, who seems to see Arbuckle completely innocent in a world where, in fact, he is represented of taking advantage of anyone who sails by, as well as being a truly inebriated gentleman of the gutter who briefly commiserates with the distressed female over the existence of endless water without a drop of alcohol, and, almost inexplicably, communicates similar feelings to a passing organ grinder, his monkey, and female assistant—the trio of whom Arbuckle invites home, which for his wife becomes the last straw as she forces him into the care of the Sanitarium.

      Once in the sanitarium, from which Arbuckle is seen constantly attempting to escape, the new patient witnesses the mad Dr. Hampton, Keaton again, in a blood-splattered white coat exiting an operating room. Witnessing, soon after, a truly mad woman (Alice Lake) who jumps into his arms, tempting him to kiss her, Arbuckle is absolutely certain that this is no place in which he wants to stay. About to be given a basic physical, the sizable oaf places an alarm clock under his shirt to serve as his heart, and begins to chew on the thermometer, an act that, when the doctors perceive that he might have consumed mercury, truly demands an operation.

     Arbuckle fights back with all his might, but the doctor and his assistants finally do strap him down and douse him with ether.

     He awakens sometime later and decides once again to escape from the sanitarium, bumping once more into the female patient from his earlier escape attempt. She tries to convince Arbuckle she is not crazy and that she has been mistakenly committed. Pursued by doctors into the communal patients’ ward, a mass pillow fight breaks out between the inmates and the guards, allowing Arbuckle and the girl to finally go on the run. Once in the clear, Arbuckle asks the girl if there is anything else he can do for her. She asks him to help her get back into the sanitarium.

      Realizing the girl is genuinely crazy, Arbuckle ditches her by jumping into a nearby pond and pretending to drown, forcing the girl to go running for help. Doctors give chase and while attempting to flee, Arbuckle finds himself back at the sanitarium.

     Once there he observes the hefty head nurse (Kate Price) removing her uniform and putting on civilian clothing for a brief trip away from the clinic. Arbuckle quickly dresses in her uniform and begins a voyage down the long hall to freedom once again, but almost immediately encounters Hampton. To maintain “her” cover, she waves flirtatiously at him only to discover the doctor returning his flirtations.

     Indeed, in one of the most charming scenes in this short, Keaton and Arbuckle slink down the walls of the hospital gesturing back and forth with sly insinuations of love that match those of Chaplin. Arbuckle, as we have seen previously in his 1915 work Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers, is a quite excellent drag artist, and Keaton is just so lovely to look at that you almost want to the two to run away together and live happily ever after; if nothing else they’d be happier with one another than Arbuckle is with his current wife and Keaton with his hospital loonies.

 

     But the real nurse returns, blowing his cover, and Arbuckle is forced to race away, pursued by Keaton and his minions across a farm and onto a track where a sponsored race is already midway.

So desperate is the escaped patient that he manages to beat the other runners to the finish line and is declared the winner. He is awarded the prize money of $2,000 which he realizes he can use to buy a great amount of alcohol, but the doctors track him down once again. Arbuckle attempts to run off one last time, but is wrestled to the ground by the doctors.

      The scene suddenly shifts back to the hospital bed with the doctors shaking Arbuckle awake after his operation, revealing the whole escape attempt to have been nothing more than a dream.

      In this film, accordingly, we have two great silent era comics both turning to crossdressing for comic results; but whereas for Keaton being female is merely another situation which he must endure to get through the day, for Arbuckle it actually provides him with new possibilities, a world of desire and love that appears unavailable to him much like the liquor he’s denied by the shop clerk in everyday life. No wonder that even in his ether dreams, Arbuckle imagines himself in cross-dressing heaven.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Orson Welles | The Lady from Shanghai / 1947

a double language

by Douglas Messerli

 

Orson Welles (screenplay, based on a novel by Sherwood King, with William Castle, Charles Lederer, and Fletcher Markle as uncredited contributors), Orson Welles (director) The Lady from Shanghai / 1947

 

After a very pleasant dinner at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Ray's restaurant, and sitting for an hour transported in time by Christian Maclay's marvelous The Clock, I attended a showing at the Bing Auditorium of Orson Welles' film noir The Lady from Shanghai.

     I had seen this film several times years earlier, particularly when I taught as a teaching assistant in film at the University of Maryland, where then-professor Joe Miller included the Welles film in his course. I remember it well for its marvelous images—clearly the reason why Miller taught it, since he eschewed all talk of story in favor of camera techniques—but I could never quite figure out the story, or, at least, the motivations of the characters for their complex maneuvers in trying to outwit and/or destroy one another.

 

   Let me try quickly to get that lumbering beast of burden out of the way, so that I can focus better on the film's achievements and failures.

    A somewhat "dumb" Irish seamen, Michael O'Hara (Welles, speaking in a brogue I am sure has never been heard anywhere in Ireland) accidentally encounters a beautiful blonde (the usually red-haired Rita Hayworth, married at the time to Welles) in Central Park. As her coach passes, he is struck by her beauty and is only too pleased to come to aid a few minutes later when hooligans attempt to overtake her coach.

     The woman, Elsa "Rosalie" Bannister, is married to the famous defense attorney, Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), a mix of a deformed and bitter old man and a rather witty and world-weary figure, who immediately recognizes the impact of having a young handsome man at her side. How Elsa and Arthur have ever come to marry is unclear, but we suspect both her greed and desire for money and blackmail, perhaps, on his part have helped in bringing them together. Her boredom and unhappiness in the relationship is all too apparent.

     The Bannisters, newly arrived in New York, are on their way from Shanghai (why they have been in Shanghai is never fully explained) to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. One suspects that the trip was added in Sherwood King's novel, on which this film was based, simply as an exotic element. But, in any event, it serves its purpose when Elsa insists that Michael sign on their yacht as a seaman.

    Almost from the moment he signs—an act he does both in reality and symbolically several times in this story—the travelers are joined by Bannister's law partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders). As Michael goes about his daily duties, he is distracted by the appearance and obvious flirtations of Elsa, and before the long the two have fallen for each other—if love in this dark prism of events can be described so romantically.  Perhaps it would be more suitable to say they have determined to play out the flirtations, despite the observing eyes of Elsa's husband. As Michael says of himself: "When I start out to make a fool of myself there's very little can stop me."

     Obviously, we guess some terrible result will come of their relationship. Yet the story moves in another direction. George Grisby, cornering Michael, proposes that the young seaman "murder" him in a plot wherein he will fake his death to collect the insurance money. He promises Michael $5,000—a sufficient amount for him to run off with Elsa—assuring him that, since he will still be alive and there will be no corpse, Michael cannot be held for murder. The rub is that Michael must sign a confession that he has committed the act.

     Although we might find the plot to this point a bit unbelievable, we can still follow its flimsy logic. But here is where we begin to digress, where the story factures at several points, leading us into cul-de-sacs that seem to trap us in plot. As the yacht reaches San Francisco, we discover that a private investigator, Sydney Broome, has been following Elsa for her husband (remember him?). Broome gets wind of Grisby's plan, realizing that he is actually intending to kill Bannister and to frame Michael for Bannister's murder with the confession in hand. Michael, unaware of these twists, watches Grisby, as planned, take off in a motorboat, and shoots a gun in the air to draw attention to himself. But, in fact, Grisby has discovered that Broome is on to him, shooting the detective and leaving him for dead.

     What we don't yet know is that Broome, surviving, has called Elsa for help, warning her of Grisby's intention to kill her husband. Michael, meanwhile, calls Elsa, startled to find Broome's voice at the other end, warning him, in his last words, of Grisby's plot to implicate him in Bannister's murder.

     Michael, who by this time has become a comical aphorist, recognizes that "Everybody is somebody's fool," yet clumsily rushes off the Bannister's office, just in time to see the police removing Grisby's body from the place. Confession in hand, the police arrest Michael as the killer.

     Ironically—and perversely—Bannister undertakes the defense for Michael, but can hardly be a fair representative, discovering as the trial moves forward, just how involved Michael and Elsa had been. He suggests Michael plead justifiable homicide, given all the evidence, although Bannister himself clearly knows who the real murderer is.

 

    Trapped by these absurd situations, Michael, feigning suicide, is able to escape the courtroom with Elsa following, arranging with her Chinese friends for Michael to hide out in a theater in Chinatown. But the friends drug Michael, taking him to an abandoned funhouse, where as he awakens to find a gun-toting Elsa within the maze of mirrors and distorting machines of reflection, as he gradually perceives that it is she who has killed Grisby, and that she and Grisby had been planning to murder Bannister and frame Michael for the crime. As Michael quips, "It's a bright, guilty world."

     The film ends in a phantasmagoric shootout in the hall of mirrors, where shot after shot is fired at images of each other, most mistakenly, some hitting home, resulting with the death of both Elsa and her husband.

 

    The surviving seaman trundles off to obscurity again, leaving a trail of further aphorisms in the space behind him: "The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I'll concentrate on that." "Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her. Maybe I'll die trying."

     What is obvious even as I was regurgitating the above story is that the twists and turns of the plot are far too complex for the 87 minutes of the film. In fact, when Welles delivered the finished product to Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn the executive so detested the film that he offered anyone $1,000 to succinctly explain the story to him. His is editors certainly didn’t help to clarify the situation by cutting an hour from Welles original.

     Most critics and even admirers, accordingly, have seriously faulted this film—whether they argue it was director's or the studio's doing—that the film is narratively incoherent, despite its often wonderful cinematic images. But then, I've never been able to coherently speak about the plot of The Big Sleep either. In both cases, it seems to me, the directors (Hawks in the The Big Sleep) purposely leave their baggy tales full of missing links, distortions, false clues, and outright disjunctions to reiterate the dark, foggy world which their characters inhabit. In such an immoral world as The Lady from Shanghai, in which every single character finds some way they can use or abuse the guileless Michael, there can be no straight lines, all is relative.

     One by one each of the characters, except Michael, speak in a kind of double language, in sentences that turn in on each other, taking meaning, like a snake swallowing its own tail, away from rational comprehension. As Bannister relates to his wife late in the film, "Killing you is killing myself. But, you know, I'm pretty tired of both of us." Or, as he tells Michael early on "You've been traveling around the world too much to find out anything about it." Or as George Grisby tells Michael as he plots his own death: "This is going to be murder and it's going to be legal."

    Michael might easily claim, as does a witness to Broome's death: "I don't speak their language, see..." As Elsa tells him "I told you, you know nothing about wickedness."

    Welles' strong images merely reiterate this play of language, doubling up hundreds of figures, presenting reality through distorting positioning of his actors and camera, cutting away so quickly the viewer is not quite sure of what he has just seen, surveying landscapes which one can barely see through (note Michael rushing past the window above or the multi-mirrored images below).

     Accordingly, while the language of this film (both its spoken words and its cinematic images) very much matters, the Macguffin, as Hitchcock would call it, hardly matters at all, is almost an after-the-fact explanation for the vagaries of the double-crossing characters.

     Perfect this movie is not. I might say that there is a sort of lumbering quality to all of Welles' films, even his best. But they are certainly fun to watch.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2001

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2001).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).

Budd Boetticher | Comanche Station / 1960

amounting to something

by Douglas Messerli

 

Burt Kennedy (screenplay), Budd Boetticher (director) Comanche Station / 1960

 

The last of Budd Boetticher’s westerns with actor Randolph Scott, Comanche Station, presents a familiar pattern for those who have seen his films. Although the movie begins with hero Jefferson Cody seeming to be captured by Comanche Indians, it soon again becomes apparent that the more dangerous enemies are the renegade cowboys. For Cody has purposely sought out the tribe to trade for a white woman whom they have captured. Although we are not told until late in the film, we discover that Cody’s wife has been taken ten years before, and during the lonely years since he has continued to seek her out, trading for the lives of many captured pioneer wives.

     It only takes a few minutes after the woman’s release before writer Burt Kennedy and director Boetticher begin a series of humorous and, at times, near-absurd dialogues that pepper their cinematic collaborations. In response to Cody’s bemused question, “All right, what’s your name?” the woman answers straightforwardly: “Nancy. Lowe,” to which Cody oddly replies, “I should have known.” A few minutes later, Nancy says, “So you came after me. Why?” “I thought it was a good thing,” wryly responds the former soldier. It is often the verbal wit of these films more than the inevitable action scenes that makes Boetticher’s works so original.

     As the two ride in to Comanche Station, a way station typical of the Kennedy stories, they are met with three outlaws, Ben Lane (Claude Akins) and his younger partners Frank and Dobie. Cody has known Lane from army life of long ago, when Lane had so brutally killed Indians that Cody, then a major, testified against him, resulting in a court martial for Lane. Lane and his followers, it seems, have been on the track of Mrs. Lowe, determined to bring her back for the reward of $5,000 offered by her husband.

      It soon becomes apparent that, in order to claim the money, Lane and his boys will have to kill Cody and, in order to escape suspicion, Mrs. Lowe as well; after all, her husband has offered the money for his wife, dead or alive! But since they must first pass through the remainder of Comanche country, they now need Cody’s help, and Cody needs them to help get him and the woman back to civilization.

     In several of the films of this series, the Randolph Scott figure, in his need for temporary friendship, seems almost to admire some of the young villains he encounters, and a kinship is often established between the obviously “good” cowboy and the “bad” men. Dobie recognizes Cody immediately as a good man, a man of the type his father had wished he might become, a man who to his way of thinking has “amounted to something”:

 

                      dobie: A man does one thing, one thing in his life he could look back

                                  on…go proud. That’s enough. Anyway, that’s what my pa used

                                  to say.

                      frank: He talked all the time, didn’t he.

                      dobie: Yeah. He was a good man. Sure is a shame.

                      shame: Shame?

                      dobie: Yeah, my pa. He never did amount to anything.

 

     Unlike the other villains of this series, however, Ben Lane has no intentions of giving up his evil ways and settling down to farm life. Accordingly, he is perhaps one of Boetticher’s least appealing villains. But the other two men, particularly the young, “gentle” Dobie, who cannot abide the idea of killing the woman, offer Cody more kinship.

     Dobie would clearly like to fulfill his father’s desire. And in his profound loneliness, Cody offers him a way out that is as close to an offer of deep friendship—and an obviously homoerotic relationship—as we have seen in this genre to date.

 

                    dobie: Me and Frank were riding together up Val Verde Way. Frank was

                                alone, same as me. And we heard about this fella who was looking

                                for some guns. We’ve been with him ever since.

                    jefferson cody: You’ll end up on a rope, Dobie. You know that.

                    dobie: Yes, sir.

                    jefferson cody: You could break with him.

                    dobie:  I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about that a lot. Frank says, “A man

                                 gets used to a thing.”

                    jefferson cody: Dobie, when we get to Lawrenceburg, you can ride with me

                                 for a ways. A man gets tired being all the time alone.

                   

     The boy practically gushes in appreciation like a courted maiden. Sadly, fate determines that Dobie will not escape. While on lookout, Frank is killed by the Comanche’s, and Dobie is forced to stay with Ben. After crossing Comanche territory, Cody steals their rifles and sends them off into the wilds in order to protect the woman and save his own life.

      As we have already been told, however, Lane has a plan. Having hidden away another rifle, he insists that Dobie wait for him at a point past where Cody and Mrs. Lowe will have to pass. When Dobie refuses to participate, Lane shoots him in the back.

      The resounding murder, however, saves Cody and the woman, and the inevitable showdown ends with Lane’s death. Mrs. Lowe is returned to her husband, who we discover has not himself come to save her because he is blind. Her physical beauty, so readily observed by the other men, has meant nothing to him: like Cody, John Lowe’s love is clearly a love that transcends.

      The final view we have of Jefferson is as he passes behind a large domed rock, coming into view again at a far lower elevation from where we have just observed him. It is as if Cody, a man who once amounted to something, without wife or even someone “to ride with,” has collapsed into the landscape over which he formerly prevailed.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2008

All three essays reprinted from Nth Position [England] (October 2008).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).