The Coens and "True Grit"

Joel and Ethan Coen are such offbeat, unique filmmakers that it was surprising when they chose to make True Grit, a film in the Western genre, and to do so with a straight approach that respected the conventions of the genre and one that was both a literary adaptation and a remake of an earlier film (Charles Portis' novel, and Henry Hathaway's 1969 film version, respectively).

The Coens' film of True Grit is one of the best films of its decade, and one of the best films the Coens have made, though it is unlikely to go down as one of their best-remembered films, though that is only because it is so different in approach from the style of their most popular movies.

There is so much to praise in True Grit, from the impeccable design and period detail, to the startling maturity and emotional honesty of Hailee Steinfeld's performance, but in my estimation, two things really make it stand apart in a class by itself: the writing by the Coens, and the starring performance of Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. The 1969 film of True Grit provided the iconic John Wayne with one of his best roles, but Bridges manages to completely embody the character and make the role his own here.

The script is one of the best that the Coens have ever written, taking a sincere and straightforward approach to the material, the characters and dialogue imbued with honesty and poignancy without ever sliding into easy sentimentality or hitting a single false note. It's truly one of their finest achievements and, without exaggeration, one of the finest films yet made in the 21st century.

The Bank Robbery (1908)

An early Western subject, directed by US Marshal William Tilghman, and produced by the Oklahoma Natural Mutoscene Company. Tilghman, convicted outlaw-turned-actor/filmmaker Al Jennings, and other frontier lawmen and gunfighters appear as themselves in this story of a gang of bank robbers who, following a hold-up, are pursued and finally captured by the law.

Fascinating for its sense of authenticity (both in the casting and locations) and naturalistic touches (such as a horse defecating on camera) that one would not see in later Hollywood westerns. There is also an interesting early use of the panning camera. It is quite unlike anything I've seen in other films of this period, and while the movement of the pan appears quite jerky and crude (with the cameraman often missing the mark of the subject), it is nonetheless quite surprising and effective the first time it is used, and an instance of astonishing technical experimentation in a film that is otherwise stylistically quite straightforward.

Bucking Broadway (1917)

An early John Ford Western, marked by stunning compositions and expansive use of the locations. His distinctive eye for detail is already evident in this early work. Silent Western star Harry Carey appears as his iconic "Cheyenne Harry" character, lending a mythic quality to the story. A ranch hand is engaged to the the owner's daughter, but their romance is threatened by the arrival of a slick New York horse trader, who romances the daughter and takes her back East to get married. At the engagement party, the man reveals his true colors when his abusive side emerges after having had too much to drink, but the ranch hand and his fellow cowboys arrive just in time to save the girl from her attacker, climaxing in a big, energetic barroom-style brawl on the balcony of the Columbia Hotel.

Ford has fun with the sight of the cowboys in the big city, riding their horses down Broadway (actually the streets of Los Angeles standing in for NYC). There is the predictable Fordian humor of the cowboy out of place in the city (such as mistaking the sound of steam leaking from a radiator for the hiss of a rattlesnake), but there is also a startlingly touching moment when a couple of con artists target the him as an easy mark, but have a change of heart after being genuinely moved by his sincerity and sense of honor toward the woman he loves.

Despite its simple premise and brisk pace, Ford demonstrates some astonishing cinematic inventiveness throughout. His debt to Griffith is clear -- most notably in the cross-cutting between the ranch and the city,  especially during the cowboys' ride to the rescue, his attention to small bits of character business and powerful use of closeups. Ford gives these techniques his own stamp through achieving a fluidity often lacking in Griffith, whose closeups and cutaways were often presented as obvious insert shots to heighten a detail. Ford, however, uses them in a way that arises naturally from the internal rhythms of the film's continuity. At times, they are so subtle we're hardly aware of them, but they add up to achieve the effects he is after in each scene.

There is also evidence of some influence from DeMille, in the effective and surprising use of chiaroscuro lighting that does much to heighten the intensity of both the marriage proposal scene between Carey and Molly Malone, and the later scene on their wedding day, when he realizes she has left him to marry another man. Most striking of all, though, are those breathtaking, sweeping Western vistas for which Ford seemed to have an innate sense of composition. The spatiality and depth he achieves through his framing of these landscapes is truly something magnificent to behold.

The Big Trail

Fox has finally gotten around to releasing on DVD one of their most important early titles in its original format-Raoul Walsh's "The Big Trail", shot in the 70mm Grandeur process.

This is true epic. Watching the action unfold on screen, one is overwhelmed by the amount of visual information Walsh fills almost every frame with. Even seemingly simple setups with two or three of the principals talking to eachother contains what appears to be dozens of extras, animals, props and expansive landscape unfolding in the background. It's not an exaggeration to say that the film could be watched twice in order to catch every piece of the visual detail Walsh provides.

The plot is somewhat standard among pre-"Stagecoach" westerns. That is, it deals with ideas like Manifest Destiny; the noble efforts to move westward and settle the land. Before John Ford really defined the Western in generic terms with "Stagecoach" in 1939, Westerns tended to fall into one of two categories: either they played out as pure entertainment-the early films of William S. Hart, for instance, and later Tom Mix-or they were the cinematic equivalent of epic poetry, with beautifully composed long takes which the camera could linger on for as long as needed to convey the beauty and power of the landscape.

The silent era saw a rise in the epic films with a Western theme. The first, and most notable, was James Cruze's "The Covered Wagon", a film that was close to its director's heart, as his parents has been pioneers who traveled west with the wagon trains. The film set a new standard for scale, period accuracy (which, at the time, was hardly that far in the past), and most importantly, for the grand depiction of the landscape. John Ford made a follow-up film for Fox, "The Iron Horse", about the westward expansion of the transcontinental railroad. This magnificent epic provided a scale that was hard to match. Throughout the decade, the Western continued to thrive with films like "Tumbleweeds" by William S. Hart, dealing with the land rush.

The coming of sound posed some problems for the Western, as shooting outdoors was extremely difficult with the newfangled sound equipment. Raoul Walsh had shot one of the first outdoor talking Westerns, "In Old Arizona", in 1928. A little background information on Walsh is valuable in understanding how appropriate he was for this type of material. Born in 1887, Walsh worked a number of odd jobs before coming west to work in the cattle drives. Learning how to ride a horse, he got a job playing a Klansman in a stage production of Thomas Dixon's play "The Clansman", which would be filmed in 1914 by D.W. Griffith. Walsh worked on the film as well, both as an actor (he played John Wilkes Booth in the Ford Theatre sequence), and as assistant director. The same year that film was released, Walsh directed "Regeneration", a prototypical gangster film that gained him excellent notices. The 1910s and 20s were spent working in a variety of films, most notably directing "The Thief of Bagdad" for Douglas Fairbanks at United Artists, and "Sadie Thompson" with Gloria Swanson, which also featured the former actor Walsh in the leading role opposite Swanson.

1928 proved to be a pivotal year for Walsh. The coming of sound, and the fact that Walsh was working at a studio (Fox) that was pioneering the use of sound before most other studios, helped place him in the first rank of American filmmakers working in the sound medium. That year, he directed "In Old Arizona", a Western in which he also played the lead. This was cut short when, driving home from the location one night, a jackrabbit jumped through his car windshield. The shattered glass cost him an eye, and guaranteed the end of his acting career. (Irving Cummings finished direction of the film, now with Warner Baxter in the lead).

If Walsh's career as a leading man ended with "In Old Arizona", another leading man's career was born with "The Big Trail". A former propman, Marion Morrison adopted the screenname John Wayne for this, his first leading role. John Ford had recommended him for the part, and Walsh and the studio executives were willing to take a chance on him. In his first major role, Wayne carries himself very well. It's odd, watching the film today, to realize he'd spend the next eight years (and some forty films) in the lowest-grade Poverty Row westerns before Ford used him in "Stagecoach". Ford supposedly held a grudge against Wayne for making his starring debut in another director's film, but this seems a bit extreme. It is true, however, that Ford did not work with Wayne again until 1939, and that for whatever reason Wayne spent the interim period working in some of the lowest-grade productions imaginable.

"The Big Trail" has become something of a legendary film in the sense that it was a pioneering effort in widescreen cinematography. William Fox owned the patent on a process known as Grandeur, a 65mm precursor to CinemaScope, and employed it on this film. Due to the fact that entire theatres would have to be rebuilt to screen the widescreen version, Fox also insisted on shooting a standard Academy ratio version alongside the widescreen one. In addition to this already tremendous undertaking, three additional foreign language versions were also filmed simultaneously with different casts.

It has been said that Walsh used the wide screen more creatively here than most directors were in the 1950s, when CinemaScope became the standard. Incredibly, Walsh seems to have packed every frame with detail as far as the eye can see. This creates an incredible sense of "being there" amidst the action which is sorely lacking in the standard aspect ratio version.

The widescreen version has never been released on home video until now. It was apparently broadcast on AMC at some point in the 1990s, but the first DVD release contained just the standard version. The newest DVD release is a two-disc collection featuring both the standard version and the widescreen version. It is overall a gorgeous transfer, the only flaws being embedded in the film itself. Fox has provided some nice documentaries on the making of the film, as well as the careers of its director and star, and topping it off with a good commentary track by Richard Schickel.

Although the point is made in the documentaries, it's worth remembering that in 1930, many of the actors in the film had been around at the time of the pioneers' move westward. It was still quite recent history, and as a result, the film has an authenticity which can never again be matched. What's even more impressive is that the filmmakers were able to travel over such a variety of locations as were used in this film, and be able to film incredibly deep shots without picking up any signs of "modern" buildings. It would surely be impossible to make this film today, at least with the same variety of locations, as the landscape has surely been riddled with gas stations, fast food restaurants and other developments that would prevent it from being usable.

In so many ways, this film is an important historical document, not just of American cinema, but American history as well.

The Winning of Barbara Worth

This film proves how much was lost when the transition from silent to sound film occurred at the end of the 1920s. It tells the story of a rivalry between two men for the love of a girl in a Western town. Abe Lee (Gary Cooper) is the simple but brave son of a local seer, who finds himself in direct rivalry with Holmes (Ronald Colman), the foster-son of Greenfield, a big businessman, for the love of Barbara Worth (Vilma Banky), whose adopted father has promised to an irrigation system for the small Western town. Unfortunately, Greenfield has only profits on his mind, and fires Mr. Worth and his entire team before completion of the system, after they point out that without further reinforcement, it could give way and destroy the town. Holmes, working as Greenfield's assistant, is blamed, but is determined to prove that he knows nothing of Greenfield's business dealings and decides to help Mr. Worth to prove himself. Worse still, Mr. Worth is unable to meet payroll to pay his team, and things turn ugly. Mr. Worth and Abe Lee ride off to try to get the money from a visiting businessman, and are surprised to find their rival, Holmes, already there, and having made a successful plea for the money to lend to Mr. Worth. Holmes then accompanies Lee on his journey back to town to deliver the money. The two rivals are brought together by their love for Barbara and their desire to save the town from disaster. The film contains a spectacular flood sequence which is a tribute to the scale these filmmmakers were working on at the time.

Based on a novel by Harold Bell Wright and adapted by Frances Marion, the film is a tightly written drama that still finds plenty of room for the comic relief so favored by filmmakers at the time, especially John Ford. The supporting characters here offer the same kind of broad comic relief one would find in a Ford Western. King proves himself here to be a true visual stylist, something that was lost in his transition to sound filmmaking in the 1930s. Here, every shot is perfectly composed. The print of this film that is available on DVD is, thankfully, one of the best-looking silent film prints I've ever seen, complete with tinting, which really heightens the effects of these carefully-composed frames.

Remarkably, as we see even in a rather straightforward drama such as this, silent film was truly thought of as a visual art form. By the 1930s, when the values shifted toward films made in the grand literary tradition, such visual artistry became much less common. But in this 1926 film, we can see the care with which King has taken to make sure every shot is splendidly photographed. The film was photographed by George Barnes and Gregg Toland, certainly two of the finest artists of their craft.

What, perhaps, is even more remarkable are the performances. Vilma Banky is quite good as Barbara Worth, and it is a pity to remember that her career would end in just a few years with the coming of sound. The two male leads, however, would find that sound helped launch them into long careers as stars. It's rather difficult to imagine Ronald Colman playing a role like this in a sound film, but here, he's fine, and it's easy to see his more understated acting style which was better suited to the sound film. The real revelation, however, is Gary Cooper, in his first substantial role. Watching him here, it's easy to see why he became a screen legend once audiences were able to hear his voice. This is a role he could have played, say, ten years later without virtually any change. He gives a comparatively natural performance, with an incredibly expressive face. There is one scene, in particular, where he watches Barbara dancing with his rival, Holmes, at a town dance toward the beginning of the film. The change of expression in his face, from joy and affection at watching Barbara, to jealousy while watching Holmes, is the most powerful moment of the film, conveying so much through mere changes of expression in his eyes. His expressive face has always made Cooper especially powerful as an actor, and this can be seen perhaps most of all in one of his very best later roles, that of the sheriff in "High Noon".

As I mentioned earlier, the single most apparent aspect in watching this film is the realization that things changed very, very much just three years later when the transition to sound took place. Watching this film, I would guess that Henry King was one of the finest visual artists of the screen, whose name would be mentioned alongside John Ford, say, or even Josef von Sternberg. With the coming of sound, however, he worked primarily as a contract director at Fox, making films that fit within the aesthetic guidelines of the studio. We see the same thing happen with John Ford in that early sound period, working his way through multiple studio assignments that lack the visual power of his best silent work. I've often felt that King was unfairly overlooked as a filmmaker, especially in regard to his silent work, but even in his sound films as well. When given the chance, he was clearly capable of creating films that displayed the artistic possibilities of the medium as well as just about anyone else from that period. All too often, he found himself working on studio assignments, where that kind of thing wasn't encouraged. Indeed, the greatest change of all between the silent and sound era could be seen as the re-positioning of the director from being a primary creative force in the filmmaking process, to the position of studio craftsman, whose primary task was to film the front office-approved script as closely as possible.

Some directors, especially those who worked at Paramount, were able to maintain the virtually-complete control that they had in the 20s (Sternberg, Lubitsch, DeMille). Others (Walsh, Hawks, Ford, Wellman, Vidor) found ways to work within the studio system and use the vast resources to their advantage. Henry King seems to have lost his "artistic identity" somewhat in the 30s, rarely doing any work that blatantly stands out from the routine studio assignment (compare what he did with "Jesse James" in 1939, and the distinct difference that Fritz Lang brought to its sequel the following year). This is not to dismiss King as a filmmaker (he was certainly one of the best studio filmmakers of the 30s and 40s), but merely to point out the change in hierarchy that took place. That may be the single biggest loss that the art of film suffered in the transition to sound, and the subtle beaty of a film like "The Winning of Barbara Worth" is a testament to that.

"The Winning of Barbara Worth" has been released on DVD as part of the Gary Cooper "MGM Movie Legends Collection", which features three other titles from Cooper's sound film work. The print quality is excellent, apparently taken from original 35mm elements, and is one of the sharpest transfers I've seen of any silent title. The organ score is a live recording by Gaylord Carter, and after watching so many recently-scored silent films on TCM by young composers with no sense of how to really accompany a film, rather than to work against it, Carter's subtle but effective accompaniment is a breath of fresh air.

Shane and The Psychological Western

As the Western progressed out of its pulp roots, which had been firmly established in the movies' earliest days, a new view point, a mythical, legendary perspective of the genre developed. The first film to really portray the Western on an epic scale was James Cruze's 1923 film "The Covered Wagon", followed the following year by John Ford's epic of the building of the transatlantic railroad, "The Iron Horse". Over the decade, there were numerous other epic Westerns, including William S. Hart's "Tumbleweeds" (1925) and Raoul Walsh's "The Big Trail" (1930). Because of the cost and logistics of the location work involved, the Western took a dramatic downturn in the early '3os, and spent most of that decade as the lowest form of Saturday morning kiddie fare, much as the science fiction film would in the 1950s. Cecil B. DeMille's "The Plainsman", which appeared in 1937, represented a triumph for the Western, but it was John Ford who, with his "Stagecoach" in 1939, revolutionized and re-energized the genre to the level of art. Ford's Westerns, along with those of other notable directors such as Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Howard Hawks, and others took a genre that had become completely set in conventions to the point of tedium, and took it to new heights combining the use of psychological elements, character development and strong story to elevate the genre to a new glory.

The films of these directors took root during the 1960s and 70s due to the interest of auteurist critics, who admired the consistency of themes and style from film to film. Ford's best Westerns stand out among the genre. As fine entertainment, Hawks' "Red River" and "Rio Bravo" stand out, but for me, lack the psychological depth that marks my three favorite Westerns.

The three that I admire the most are "The Ox-Bow Incident" (William A. Wellman, 1943), "High Noon" (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), and "Shane" (George Stevens, 1953). Of these, "Shane" stands out for me as the ultimate achievement within the genre.

"Shane" tells the tale of Shane, a flawed White Knight of a gunfighter (Alan Ladd) who comes in off the plains and offers support to a small ranching community under constant threat from a gang of ranchers who want to re-claim the land for themselves. Mr. Starrett (Van Heflin) and his wife (Jean Arthur) don't know what to make of this stranger, but their son (Brandon de Wilde) takes an instant sense of friendship to him, and sees him as a sort of guardian figure in some ways. Shane touches their lives, and stands off against the villainous rancher (Emile Meyer) and his chief henchman, Wilson (Jack Palance).

For me, "Shane" represents a Western with heart and a psychological element that works on several levels. It explores the relationship between Shane and Mrs. Starrett, saying so little yet conveying so much; it examines the relationship between Shane and the Starrett's son, who comes to see him as a tragic hero; and finally, between right and wrong, in interestingly gray terms for an American Western: in one scene, we hear an explanation as to why the rancher (Emile Meyer) wants to drive off the new settlers, and it makes the audience understand his point of view.

Visually, the film is beautiful, and takes place in a slightly different "West" than is often portrayed in Hollywood films. The Westerns usually take place in the dry, desert climates of such locations as Monument Valley and other far Western locales. But "Shane" is beautifully photographed by Loyal Griggs in the mountains and plains of Wyoming, in gorgeous Technicolor. It is a pity that the film was not made just a year or two later, as it would have probably been photographed in widescreen, which would have contributed greatly to the scenery. "Shane" has been criticized as being too neat and tidy for a Western, but I would disagree. The costuming is well-researched and accurate, despite the criticisms of some. And the performances have a certain beauty to them that add great depth to the characterizations.

The "Psychological" western fascinates me endlessly, and I will offer up more on it after re-watching both "High Noon" and "The Ox-Bow Incident".