Nicholas Ray | Johnny Guitar / 1954

women who rule the west

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phillip Yordan, Ben Maddow, and Nicholas Ray (screenplay, based on a novel by Roy Chanslor), Nicholas Ray (director) Johnny Guitar / 1954

 

A few days after seeing Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, I happened upon a television broadcast of Johnny Guitar, a movie I'd seen once or twice previously, which I suddenly saw in a new way within the context of Sirk's movie. Like Sirk, Ray has often been praised (and criticized) for locating his films in the context of popular genres (in Ray's case most often in teenage melodramas such as his Rebel without a Cause) and for his oversaturated color prints. In this work of 1954 Ray attempts a Western—if you can call it that. For Ray's "western," as François Truffaut has described it, is "phony"; or, if it is a western, it's "the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream."

     As most commentators have noted, in Johnny Guitar the standard gender roles are reversed: the two major male figures, Johnny Guitar (played by a laid-back Sterling Hayden) and the Dancing Kid (Scott Brady), are in thrall to the powerful saloon-keeper Vienna (Joan Crawford). Guitar, her first love, does not even wear guns, having put them aside in an attempt to alter his life. Vienna's current lover, the Dancing Kid spends most of his time with his all-male gang, only occasionally returning to Vienna's isolated saloon for entertainment. Brooding over her male customers is the simmering, glowering, wise-cracking Crawford, wearing various colors of blouses and pants, generally topped with a bright red scarf tied round her neck. Her lips are the reddest lips in the world.

     A savvy business woman, Vienna has purchased her saloon on land that is destined to become part of the railroad, and she plans to sell it and her property as a railroad stop for a hefty price. The problem is that the bar lies in the territory of local ranchers who want no railroad junction in their open lands, no new development that might bring settlement fences with it. Led by an equally powerful woman, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), the ranchers are determined to rid their territory of the Dancing Kid and his followers, along with Vienna. As the movie opens, robbers have hit a stage coach, killing Emma's brother, and Emma and the ranchers arrive at Vienna's saloon to arrest her and the gang.

     The heart of this battle, however, is not really financial, but psycho-sexual, for the Dancing Kid has also caught Emma's eye, teasing her with his nightly dances and sexual energy. Emma, dressed almost throughout the film in black, is a closet Puritan, longing for his company while, out of her guilt, seeking his punishment through his death.

      In this very first scene, Ray lays out the entire story: Emma and her men will ultimately kill Vienna, unless Vienna kills her first.

   The power of the film lies in its dialogue, witty, fast-paced, rarely allowing for a sentimental moment. Hayden and Crawford, in part because of their absolutely opposing temperaments, are near perfect in their dueling tangle of words. In the following dialogue, it is useful to note how Hayden speaks the lines which in most movies a woman might speak, Crawford responding more like a stereotypical male:

 

Johnny: How many men have you forgotten?

Vienna: As many women as you've remembered.

Johnny: Don't go away.

Vienna: I haven't moved.

Johnny: Tell me something nice.

Vienna: Sure, what do you want to hear?

Johnny: Lie to me. Tell me all these years you've waited. Tell me.

Vienna: [without feeling] All those years I've waited.

Johnny: Tell me you'd a-died if I hadn't come back.

Vienna: [without feeling] I woulda died if you hadn't come back.

Johnny: Tell me you still love me like I love you.

Vienna: [without feeling] I still love you like you love me.

Johnny: [bitterly] Thanks. Thanks a lot.

     In truth, Vienna has sent for Johnny Guitar to help her in her fight against the ranchers. She seems so self-sufficient, however, so able to keep the ranchers and sheriff at bay, that both her male suitors are almost insignificant. As she puts it to those who would take her off to jail, standing, as she does for much of the early parts of the movie, at the top of a staircase: "Down there I sell whiskey and cards. Up here all you can get is a bullet in your head."

     Ray's male characters, like most of Sirk's figures, are ghostly like beings in the real world, living as dreamers determined to mold their realities around an imitation of art: music in Johnny Guitar's case and dance for the Dancing Kid. The script suggests, given the social views of the day, these men are more feminine than masculine, choosing art over what both Vienna and Emma are in search of: money. Consequently, their inner beings are as unidimensional as the names they have created for themselves.

     As the plot meanders toward its expected conclusion, contrarily we suddenly see a different side of Vienna, a woman still very much in love with Johnny and a figure terrified by the difficulties she must face. She is the only one with any depth.

      With their mine panned out, little money left, and accused of committing a robbery and murder of which they are innocent, the Dancing Kid and his gang determine to rob the small-town bank at the very moment that Vienna has decided to withdraw her money. The coincidence makes it seem as if she has been involved, particularly since the Dancing Kid kisses her as he rides off with Emma's and the ranchers' savings.

     Facing the inevitable, Vienna awaits the posse—quickly rounded up while still in funeral garb for the burial of Emma's brother—dressed in a full cut white dress, revealing an entirely different possibility in her life. The scenes which follow, the vengeful burning of her "estate" by the now near-mad Emma, Vienna's near death by hanging, and her nighttime run are made even more strange and absurd by her costume. Dressed as she is, there is no way to hide, let alone escape.

     Quickly changing back into blouse and pants, she leads Johnny into an underground passage that takes the two to their destiny: the hideout of the Dancing Kid's gang and the long-expected duel between the two women.

     Determined to settle the battle, Emma fires up the ranchers with hateful statements similar in style to those made by the right-wing during the House on un-American Activities trials, a parallel recognized by many critics and admitted by Ray.

     Yet even here, the film does not rest in its Freudian implications, as the posse, sickening of the violence, leaves Emma to herself. She kills the Dancing Kid, the only man she has apparently loved, before turning the gun on Vienna (the name, one might note, of Freud's home city). Vienna shoots Emma dead. Love and life win out over hate and Emma's cult of death. Yet McCambridge leaves on in the imagination as a woman who could almost cut Crawford down to size.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2009).

George Stevens | Shane / 1953

don’t go

by Douglas Messerli

 

A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher (screenplay, based on the novel by Jack Schaefer), George Stevens (director) Shane / 1953

 

Quite by accident, I ordered two films from Netflix back-to-back that I would never have thought to pair, but which share the same narrative structures: George Stevens’ 1953 classic, Shane and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 movie, Teorema.

     On the surface these films are obviously quite different; there is no real sex, for example, in Shane, while Pasolini’s Visitor has sex with nearly all family members, including their maid. Shane, moreover, is clearly without the Marxist and Roman Catholic messages of Teorema. But for all that, the films are similar in their plots and significance.

      As in the Pasolini work, a visitor (Alan Ladd) appears out of nowhere and is quickly welcomed to live with the family, in this case working as a hired hand.

     Almost as in Teorema the young boy, Joey (Brandon deWilde) immediately takes a liking to the handsome stranger crossing his family’s land, as does Shane to the boy. Clearly, there is no sexual relationship between the two, but it is equally obvious that Shane is absolutely worshiped by Joey, and, at one point, he tells his mother even that he “loves” the stranger. Perhaps it is just their good acting and the easy comfort in one another’s company, but Ladd and deWilde do seem absolutely delighted being together, winking and smiling every time their eyes come to rest on each other. Joey’s mother (Jean Arthur), knowing that one day Shane will have to leave, warns her son not to love him too much.

    Even the fact that it is Shane’s ability to use a gun that most attracts the boy, the obvious Freudian implications of that make it clear that it is the Shane’s western masculinity that draws the boy to him. One of my friends recently suggested that the relationship is so close to sexuality (which in this instance, I might remind the reader, would be pedophilia)—the boy, dressed only in his night shirt, even visits Shane sleeping in the barn early one morning—that it is amazing that the director “got away with it.” It might have been even more interesting and controversial had Stevens been able to cast Ladd’s role with his first choice, Montgomery Clift, a gay actor.

     But Joey isn’t the only one who immediately seems to fall in love with Shane. Joey’s mother, Marian Starrett, lights up in his presence, immediately serving up a meal that her husband describes as “fancy.” It is at her urging that her husband asks Shane to stay with them. She dresses up in her “wedding” dress, primarily for Shane, it is made clear, when the hired hand joins the family for a trip into town. Although, once again, the two do not have sex, Shane’s very presence clearly provides her a sexual frisson. At the memorial celebration, she dances more with Shane than with her own, quite clumsy husband.

     If her husband, Joe Starrett (Van Heflin), demonstrates little jealousy of Shane, it may be because, he too, obviously is attracted to the man and enjoys his company. Hardly have the two met when Shane sheds his shirt and helps Starrett remove a front-yard stump that the farmer has been whittling away for years. Starrett, too, changes his whole demeanor whenever Shane appears.

     More importantly, as in Teorema, the appearance of the visitor redeems the entire family and their small farm neighbors. Along with the other homesteaders, who have been continually threatened by local ranchers headed by Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), they suddenly feel strong enough to make a trip into town to buy goods and to celebrate Independence Day nearby.

      By single-handedly fighting and beating the entire gang, Shane emboldens the Starretts and others to remain on their land. And by determining to take on the gunslinger, Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) Ryker has hired to kill Starrett, Shane saves his friend’s life. Even as Shane wrestles Starrett to prevent him from going alone to Ryker’s headquarters, it appears the two are more engaged in a sexual embrace than in a true battle, and it takes a gun (again with all its Freudian associations) to knock him out. Once Shane accomplishes the act, he immediately gets water to help the “loser” to be quickly returned to consciousness.

     Now that he has restored meaning to the Starrett’s lives, he, like Pasolini’s beautiful hero, must leave, despite young Joey’s moan of despair: “Shaaaane, don’t go.”

     Should we be surprised that Sal Mineo’s gay heartthrob in Rebel without a Cause (1955) is Alan Ladd—that is, of course, until he meets up with James Dean.

      

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2016).

Curtis Harrington | The Assignation / 1953

rendezvous with death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Curtis Harrington (screenwriter and director) The Assignation / 1953

 

Long thought to be a lost film, Curtis Harrington’s 8-minute color, silent short The Assignation (1953), was rediscovered and is now available on the DVD The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection.

     It’s an elegant one-liner that nonetheless sends a few shivers down one’s spine. One might almost describe this as Harrington’s final “coming out” film, a true saying goodbye to what I have come to describe as the “A” variant of coming out works (by Kenneth Anger, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, John Schmitz and others) dominated by the central sexually conflicted character’s attempts to dissociate himself from the female figure.  

      The film begins with an awaiting gondola into which soon settles a presumably male figure dressed in the traditional Venice carnival attire (see Jean-Daniel Cadinot’s gay pornographic film Le voyage a Venise of 1986 for a fuller rendition of these costumes) of a Bauta, a white mask with a pointed nose, and a long black cape, as he holds in front of him a slightly wilted rose.

      The heart of this film is the quiet rowing of the long boat through the maze of canals of Venice as the masked carnival celebrant, sitting rather erect, glides through Venice in a gondola manned by two gondoliers, one of them particularly handsome, the camera focusing on him from time to time.

     The sounds we hear and the images we witness are almost all from the viewpoint the man sitting deep within the vessel, with the homes and businesses seemingly shuttered from the canal side. Every once in a while, however, the camera shifts to a head-on view of the traveler, as we gradually perceive that his rose, contrary to what one might expect, seems to be reviving, becoming more erect and sturdier as it moves through the breezy canals under the gentle plash of the rowing oar. Along the way we observe several famous Venice sites such as the Campanile di San Giorgio Maggiore.

       Finally, the gondola stops and the costumed figure steps out and moves into a small courtyard. We see a woman sitting high up in a window smoking a cigarette. Seeing the man waiting below, she leaves the window and soon after begins slowly to descend the staircase, walking almost like a sleepwalker toward him. When she stands directly in front of him, the camera focuses on the single rose he has carried throughout the long voyage, whose petals suddenly drop off into a small pile at her feet.

       The duo stand looking at each other for a moment before the man gathers his long black cape and envelops her within it, obviously signifying her imminent death.

       Both the fallen rose petals and the deathly embrace intimate the director’s farewell to the female sex.

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2021

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