YELLOW SKY (William A. Wellman, 1948)

The two best westerns of the 1940s that John Ford did not direct both came from the writing-directing team of Lamar Trotti and William A. Wellman: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Yellow Sky. The former is an acknowledged masterpiece, although its anti-vigilantism has led to debate in some quarters as to whether such a clear, provocative social message corrupts the purity of the western form. Yellow Sky isn’t so well remembered, perhaps because it doesn’t have Henry Fonda in the lead role, as The Ox-Bow Incident does, perhaps because in the period immediately following World War II and during the Korean War war films, not westerns, were the principal “actioners,” and perhaps because the film is a work of considerable tonal complexity, in anticipation of Ford’s The Searchers (1956). In its time, though, the merits of the film scarcely went unnoticed; the Writers Guild of America honored Trotti’s script, and Wellman was named best director at the Locarno International Film Festival.

The film is that good, something of a marvel, in fact. Gregory Peck, in one of his more tolerable performances, plays ‘Stretch’ Dawson, the leader of a gang of bank robbers. It’s post-Civil War Arizona, in the last quarter of the 1800s, and the imprint of the war is seen in the men’s uprooted, restless, criminal lives; the American Southwest, a region that didn’t participate in the war, has become a gathering hole for the twisted, blighted souls who did. (Incisive irony: the one saddletramp who is too young to have had anything to do with the Civil War is a member of the gang precisely because he feels cheated of the chance that the war would have given him to prove himself a man.) “The fastest growing town in the territory” has turned into a ghost town. On one level, this is symbolic of the traumatic effect that the war had on the other half of the nation, to the East; literally, it represents the collapsed hopes of those who came prospecting for gold in the surrounding hills and found instead only sand.

The town is, or was, Yellow Sky, named for the gold that seized the imaginations of those who settled it, driving them to their delirious destiny in the desert, with only a local spring to cool their fever. Stretch and his gang have come there, by accident, across Nature’s killing fields, the parched Arizona saltlands, after robbing a bank and, in effect, in flight from civilization, as embodied by the U.S. Cavalry. They are the distorted mirror-images of the latter group. The cavalrymen old enough to have fought in the war are still military, having assimilated their war experience into this new phase of their lives in an “approved” way, whereas the gang members, warriors and outlaws, have not. The cavalrymen are clean, shaved and uniformed; Stretch and his men are filthy, unshaven, unkempt and any-way clothed. The cavalrymen have “missions”; the gang pulls off “jobs.” The cavalrymen are exalted by the group to which they belong; the gang members are diminished by their group. Neither group is any more “America” or “America’s future” than the other, but the soldiers know better than to risk their lives and the lives of their horses by pursuing the criminals into the saltlands. Both groups live at the edge of death, but, whereas Stretch and his band seem blind there, that is, purely instinctual, the soldiers, guided by the formal military hierarchy in which at the lower rung they participate, have their wits about them. Let the criminals go; the desert, one officer opines, “will save us the trouble of hanging them.” And, after all, the criminals are, like the soldiers, white—like the saltlands itself.

Stretch and the men are a contentious group; Dude (Richard Widmark, good as a flat-faced snake)—the nickname itself exposes the uprooted nature of his existence—hankers to assume the gang’s leadership. Dude had counseled against crossing the saltlands; Stretch insisted on doing it, reminding Dude that he could cut out with his share of the bounty from the bank. A bone of contention while they all are crossing the saltlands is water. One member, Walrus, had preferred to fill his canteen with whiskey; now he is desperate to quench his thirst. He steals water from someone else’s canteen—a thief vis-à-vis the group as well as vis-à-vis the outside, settled world. In truth, their water doesn’t last long, and the whole adventure—Dude would say, misadventure—is mired in an aura of almost certain death. The sun blazes. In extreme long- shots that surely counted heavily in Wellman’s prize at Locarno, the men are black dots in the distance gaining only very, very slowly on the expanse of seemingly endless crystal before them. The horses lose their footing in the salt and the sand, and, so, the men have to dismount and walk the distance, guiding and helping their horses as best they can. One horse, Half Pint’s, breaks a leg; the shot that kills the horse pierces the silence of this gorgeous, hallucinatory, deadly landscape out of a horrible dream. All the men are dying of thirst and hunger, their bones nearly ground into dust by the enormous effort it has taken to keep moving across the saltlands, when Stretch sees something in the distance. A subjective shot shows something shimmering beneath the hot sun—a line of buildings that goes in and out of focus. Is it a mirage? Stretch cautiously opines that it’s a town, with food, water and rest awaiting them. This is Yellow Sky. It’s their destiny, as Wellman’s imagery discloses: the subjective long-shot of the town mimics and replaces the earlier, objective long-shot of the men crossing the desert. Nearly ghosts themselves, the men reach the “town,” only to discover that it’s (apparently) utterly abandoned, a place as ravaged as their souls and their bodies. They collapse like corpses on ground and steps.

It turns out that the town isn’t completely uninhabited. ‘Mike’—Constance Mae—lives there with Grandpa, an old prospector who lives one-quarter inside his head and three-quarters outside, rendering his talk wonderfully elliptical. Grandpa is a quintessential outsider, wary of whites but a friend to Apaches, who helped raise his proud granddaughter. (This is a brilliantly scripted role, with James Barton giving a more interesting performance than Walter Huston did in John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre the same year.) Toting a shotgun, Mike points Stretch and his men to the local spring, but advises them to expect no hospitality from her or her grandfather. But Grandpa is of a different mind. Since he and Mike have worked a gold mine up yonder to a rich point of production, he is loathe to arouse the strangers’ suspiciousness by appearing dismissive and inhospitable. The men, meanwhile, haven’t seen a girl in quite a while, and Mike is beautiful. (Anne Baxter, in the finest performance of her wonderful and varied career, has never been warmer, feistier or more arresting.) In particular, Stretch and Lengthy itch for Mike. When the men discover the gold mine, however, the bone of contention between them and Grandpa and Mike, and among themselves, becomes the gold. Stretch, smitten with Mike, wants to share the gold: 50% for the pair, and 50% for themselves. Dude, though, has other ideas, and these lead to a bloodbath that, again, echoes on a tiny scale the Civil War.

Stretch in particular is haunted by that war; now that he himself is, in effect, haunting a ghost town, the irony of his self-reflective, fractured life prepares us for his capitulation to Mike’s (off-screen) demand that they start life anew by returning to the bank the stolen money. Some find his doing this farfetched. It’s nothing of the sort, because we aren’t considering here what people would or would not do in real life but, rather, how they might function in a fable with all its fabulous elements. Among these elements are Nature’s desert and man’s desert, that is, the ghost town, Yellow Sky. (The abandoned, dilapidated town is magnificently rendered by the art directors, Lyle Wheeler and Albert Hogsett.) The gang’s survival of the desert and their stumbling encounter with the town are fabulous elements, as are the spring and the gold mine. The film has been bewitchingly photographed in black and white by Joseph MacDonald (Yellow Sky boasts some of the most beautiful “day-for-night” shooting in existence), mixing comedy, danger and romance, and, during the day, the massive rock formations outside the mine, with their layers of lateral folds, seem a projection of the erotic fantasies of the men for either Mike or the gold. In long-shot, the stupendous structure of the mine, with its black, square entrance, again suggests a beckoning woman for the gang members to enter. In such a heady atmosphere, and taking into account Mike’s own rapturous beauty, not to mention the fact that the gold has made Stretch rich anyhow, it isn’t odd that, given the chance for a life with Mike, Stretch would “unrob” the bank. Yellow Sky is a fairy tale for adults.

Trotti’s script derives from a book by W.R. Burnett. The story reminds me of stories by a contemporary of the film’s characters, Bret Harte. However, Shakespeare’s The Tempest has been noted as an inspiration. I don’t see this. A grandfather giving up a granddaughter in marriage isn’t normally the same thing as a father giving up a daughter, for the latter, in its wide embrace of human elements, includes the natural and normal mutual sexual attraction between a father and daughter. (In giving up his wand, Prospero is giving up his penis as well as his magic.) Rightly so, nothing of the sort exists in Yellow Sky. But I don’t want to start a tempest in a ghost town. If someone sees Shakespeare in Yellow Sky, he or she is welcome to do so.

Let us praise ‘Wild Bill’ Wellman, especially given that Chicago (see my piece about this 2002 monstrosity) recently won Oscars despite being vastly inferior to Wellman’s brilliant treatment of the same material, by way of Nunnally Johnson’s brilliant script, in Roxie Hart (1942). It’s sad to think that some people might like something as vapid as Chicago but won’t appreciate the beauties of Yellow Sky. Whereas Chicago is relentlessly in-your-face, Wellman’s western is “discreetly” shot, with the camera often catching action from behind wooden fences or by looking in from outside windows. In part, this is strategic, so that stunt doubles can convince us that they are the actors they are doubling for; more importantly, this technique creates a distance correlative to the passage of time and to our incapacity to invade the past with perfect sight and an unfettered view. Yellow Sky is fabulous and oblique, and, once we enter, we encounter characters who yet live in some region of the imagination where history and romance intersect. It’s left to Wellman to create an elastic tone as well as an elastic vision capable of accommodating such disparate elements as romance, ruthlessness, greed, echoes of war experience, low comedy, and both Nature and people testing to the limit human survival. It’s a wry and lovely tone, as when, after he has made unwelcome advances, Mike grazes Stretch’s scalp with a perfectly marked shot. On one level, of course, she is warning him: “I was raised by Apaches. Mess with me and I’ll kill you and scalp you.” It’s at that other level, where this gesture, however unconsciously, is a sexual tease and invitation, despite all of Mike’s protestations to the contrary, that the incident is miraculously transformed into another wrinkle in the fable, another element of the shimmering dream that is Yellow Sky/Yellow Sky.

WARLOCK (Edward Dmytryk, 1959)

Adapted by Robert Alan Arthur from a novel by Oakley Hall, Warlock is a minor though worthwhile western. It was directed by Edward Dmytryk, and it is informed, I believe, by Dmytryk’s own recent past.

Let us pause to recall that past. Dmytryk was one of the Hollywood Ten—Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo were the others—who in the fall of 1947 refused to answer questions posed to them by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was investigating Communist influence in the Hollywood community and in Hollywood moviemaking. The legal basis for their refusal was the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which states in part, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” The ten were silent, then, because Congress had no business coercing them to disclose their political beliefs or the beliefs of others in the Hollywood community; they were absolutely entitled to these beliefs and their free expression. The House of Representatives, disagreeing, charged the men with contempt of Congress, and the courts in the appeals process sided with Congress. Dmytryk spent a year in prison, after which, blacklisted in Hollywood, he faced financial ruin. Urged by his wife to what was (she felt) necessary for their survival, Dmytryk returned to HUAC in spring 1951, this time answering all its questions and “naming names,” that is, outing as far Leftists colleagues and associates, twenty-six in all. (The other nine of the Hollywood Ten held fast, however.) Dmytryk repudiated the Communist Party that he had joined in 1944 and succeeded in having his name removed from the Hollywood Blacklist. But none of his subsequent films matched the clarity and power of Hitler’s Children (1943), an anti-fascist film made during the war. (His most celebrated film, which is terribly overrated, was released just three months prior to his first appearance before HUAC: Crossfire, a postwar film noir assaulting anti-Semitism and graced by Robert Ryan’s sly portrayal of a murderous Jew-hater—a homophobe in the novel by Richard Brooks upon which the film is based.) Dmytryk could be a remarkable director of actors, and his one substantial claim after filing turncoat testimony is that he guided Humphrey Bogart in one of the most brilliant performances ever given by an American film actor: Captain Queeg, in The Caine Mutiny (1954). If John Wayne in Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) uncannily anticipates President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Bogart as Queeg frighteningly anticipates the paranoid president that the then-sitting vice president, Richard Nixon, would one day become.

Dmytryk’s insistence in Warlock on the justice of “law and order” is a veiled attempt to paint as righteous his self-revised politics for the sake of financial security. As morally indefensible as this course was, evil must be assigned elsewhere: to those who placed people in such circumstances that required them to choose between solvency, even survival, and the integrity of their own connections to colleagues and their past. The U.S. was in the grip of a sordid panic—ironically, the projective result, most of all, of its own “successful” conclusion to the Second World War by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our wartime allies, the Soviets, were now our Cold War adversaries, and U.S. officials desperately worried that the Soviets would do to us what we had done to Japan. Having established a fearsome precedent, and determined, despite that, to hold onto the notion of our own goodness, we could only assume that those whom we considered worse than us—they weren’t—would not hesitate to strike us with the ever increasingly holocaustic weaponry that the arms race generated.

The United States was thus in the grip of bizarre (and largely unconscious) rationalizations; so was Dmytryk, who in turning against friends and associates had ultimately turned against himself. This self-division, with its attendant repressed guilt, helps explain the dark, twisted nature of Warlock. Whatever else it is or is not, Warlock is Dmytryk’s most personal film.

Nineteenth-century Warlock: a western mining town that is being terrorized by a gang of vicious thugs. The citizens of the town hire a professional gunman, Blaisdell, who has a near legendary reputation. Accompanied by Morgan, a clubfooted gambler whose job it is to pick off “backshooters” in order to keep fights fair, Blaisdell succeeds in banishing the culprits with an impressive show of nonviolent determination. But then a Warlock-bound stagecoach is held up by two members of the criminal bunch, who are also arrested for the murder of one of the passengers, a man accompanied by a sometime prostitute, out of jealous love for whom Morgan, in fact, had fired the fatal shot while hiding in the hills. The two prisoners are brought back to Warlock. Gannon, the brother of one of them, who has uncomfortably existed, generally drunk, on the gang’s fringes, becomes the deputy sheriff so that he may protect the boy from both Blaisdell and the townfolk; sober now, he remains on, dedicated to bringing law and order to the town—a mission that traps him in between his former gang and the hired gun. When he visits his former cohorts to warn them against coming into town for a showdown, the gang leader mutilates his draw hand with a knife. The next day, he faces the thugs alone; inspired by his courage and determination, people of the town (unlike those in High Noon) assist, while at gunpoint Blaisdell is prevented by Morgan from joining in, Morgan all the while hoping that Gannon, whom his former mistress now loves, will die. Disgusted by this and one other revelation, Blaisdell turns against Morgan, who tricks his only friend, the one person who never made him feel like “a cripple,” into a duel in which he outdraws Blaisdell but with the outcome, nonetheless, of Blaisdell’s killing him. Overwhelmed by guilt, Blaisdell forces a showdown with an exhausted Gannon but heroically backs down, throws his guns into the dirt and leaves town.

Dmytryk proceeds with a modest amount of skill. For instance, both Gannon’s rehabilitation and Morgan’s physical infirmity are handled in a sensitive, understated way. The town’s atmosphere of dread is convincingly rendered, and the relationships, to the extent that these matter, are thoughtfully portrayed. While the film pales in this regard by comparison with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo a year earlier, Morgan’s obsession with the woman he loves intrigues; he performs, arranges or attempts to arrange three murders over her, he keeps an enormous portrait of her on display in his room, and yet he finally threatens to kill her if she dares to come between him and Blaisdell. (Go figure.) The central relationship between the two men, regrettably, remains inconclusive, but it isn’t hard to imagine that Dmytryk was drawing on his own sense of self-division, probably unconsciously, and just as unconsciously identifying with Morgan to an almost pathological degree. Certainly something “dark” appears to pervade the Blaisdell-Morgan relationship—something hidden, unwholesome. This “something” surely masks the political underpinnings of Dmytryk’s blacklisting ordeal. By the oddest of coincidences, playing Blaisdell is none other than Henry Fonda, who was himself, many believe, blacklisted, but who chose to ignore the stigma and was a big enough star to prevail. Fonda is, of course, one of the greatest American actors ever, but he isn’t at his best here, making little attempt to penetrate Blaisdell’s personality, the self-deluding and morbid turns and twists of which should exactly complement the emotional contours of his moody, calculating and feral friend, Morgan. (In light of the performance that he gave in Carol Reed’s 1956 Trapeze, Burt Lancaster might have fared better than Fonda in the role.) On the other hand, a real aura of ambiguity surrounds Anthony Quinn’s variously crippled Morgan. This sometimes happens; the great actor is bad here, and the lousy one is quite interesting.

But the heart and soul of the film belongs to Richard Widmark as Johnny Gannon. In a conflicted role encompassing physical torture and multiple torments, Widmark admirably avoids hints of masochism, pessimism and self-pity. The sweetness, gentleness, quiet authority and humble perseverance that he enacts all generate tremendous concern for Gannon’s welfare and for the vulnerable future of America that he represents. After a dry stretch, Widmark is once again the marvelously sensitive artist of Jules Dassin’s Night and the City and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out (both 1950).

FAHRENHEIT 451 (François Truffaut, 1966)

Oskar Werner is wonderful as Guy Montag, a firefighter who reads on the sly David Copperfield, just to find out what a book is like, in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, from Ray Bradbury’s futuristic novel. In a society that has banned books, Guy’s job is to ferret them out and burn them. According to Bradbury, 451°F is the temperature at which paper ignites.
     No one is more gung-ho than a fresh convert; after a taste of the Dickens, Guy is a rapt reader. His passage from being on society’s side to being divided, to being committed against society’s suppression of reading and the absence of freedom this embodies charts a Carlylean course of Romantic enlightenment. Now Guy is one of many who are on the run.
     Given the grim material, one is likely to be amazed at how much fun Truffaut’s only English-language film is. A help in this regard is that the film is untainted by what might otherwise seem obligatory paranoia. Relatedly, while one expects a deep-think cautionary piece, one is instead gloriously entertained. Julie Christie in a double role and Nicolas Roeg’s color cinematography add enchantment.
     Truffaut. Consider this mind-jolting moment: reversing motion on Guy’s taking off his fascist gear, Truffaut is able to show us Guy’s putting on this gear with unearthly slipperiness and smoothness: a thematic summation of the world that’s out of joint and seductively pleasant (in a Stepford sort of way) without bothersome books around to disturb anyone’s head. Truffaut slips in other instances of reverse-motion, with glidings up the fire-station pole—delightful proof that he knew his Chaplin (The Great Dictator, 1940) as well as his Hitchcock.
     The film’s finale, when the human books meet and greet, overwhelms. And the children. With dear François, always the children!

HEADING SOUTH (Laurent Cantet, 2005)

In the late 1970s Haiti attracted tourists from up north. Ellen, a Wellesley College professor, 55, has been finding her “Roman Spring” at a beach resort there for the past six years. Brenda, a 45-year-old divorcée from Savannah, nastily competes with Ellen for Legba, who, when he was 15 three years earlier, inspired Brenda’s first orgasm. Unbeknownst to Ellen and Brenda, because she is discreet, Sue, from Quebec, also shares a hotel bed with Legba, where at least he gets some sleep. Legba’s eventual murder may seem irrelevant; but Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud, from Dany Laferrière’s La chair du maître, draws a bracing connection between the 1915 U.S. occupation of Haiti and the corrupt, brutal regimes of Papa and Bébé Doc Duvalier half a century, and more, later.
     Ellen and Brenda embody selfish U.S. presumption. The former’s viewfinder shows a rear view of Legba, as he lies naked in her bed, that recalls the view of him that Brenda, freshly arrived, espies on the beach. This reduction of Legba to a mere image is underscored by two things: Brenda’s “love” for him because of the way he looks at her—a practiced look soliciting loot by which he helps his mother in her Port-au-Prince slum shack; the fact that Legba is the only main character denied a revealing personal monologue. In charge of the hotel restaurant, Albert moves beyond family history in his monologue: “This time, the [U.S.] invaders . . . have more dangerous weapons than cannons: dollars, so that everything they touch turns to garbage. The whole country is rotten.”
     Legba and a former native girlfriend, who is being kept, likely, by a Duvalier official, are murdered together—by her “guardian angel,” her master’s chauffeur. In the dead of night.
     This is Cantet’s strongest film.

THE BURGLAR (Valeri Ogorodnikov, 1987)

Valeri Ogorodnikov’s The Burglar (Vzlomshchik), which seemed lame to me when I first saw it many years ago (the Soviet Union still existed at the time), now seems worse—a formal mess that collapses at the finish into sappy, overwrought melodrama. Perhaps my main interest in movies is the nudging of fiction in the direction of documentary and the nudging of documentary in the direction of fiction. The Burglar should fascinate me, then, since it’s chock-full of documentary techniques that are applied to a work of fiction. For example, in two instances—an interview of a singer; the police interrogation of a pre-teen criminal—a discreet jump-cut effects the appearance of an edited television news piece. But to no avail, given the formulaic (non)resolution to which this film is headed.      Humanity is simply not part of Ogorodnikov’s mix. We have a father and two sons; their wife and mother died a year ago. The man drinks and holds his social life above the needs of his boys, one of whom, “the burglar,” lives at home; the other is a punk rock performer. They all live in (what was then) Leningrad. Presumably the father acts the way he does out of some sense of loss because of the death of his wife; we can supply that bit of humanity, but it is nowhere in the film—not in any bit of the mise-en-scène, not in any accent of the performance that the actor gives. The boy becomes a thief, stealing a synthesizer from a community center, in order to keep his brother from stealing it. That’s what he says, and we believe him; but he might as well be Coleridge’s Iago—actually, Shakespeare’s Iago is plenty motivated—for all the depth of indication of his motivation that the film provides. Perhaps Ogorodnikov simply couldn’t face the enormous pain inherent in his dramatic (and social) material, so, instead, he played with homages to Truffaut and Milos Forman and let the film devolve into a facsimile of Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, two excrutiating Hollywood products. Above all, none of the intended poignancy of kids scrambling for some sense of their own identity and individuality in Gorbachev’s liberalized Russia filters through. This is not a good film, although (until the last cornball shot) it employs an exceptionally agile and alert camera.