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Maupassant ("Boule de Suif") is regularly cited but not Cendrars ("La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France"), Sternberg's Shanghai Express and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes are nearby antecedents. From Arizona Territory to New Mexico, microcosm of a society, crystallization of a genre. Kinship between tippling physician (Thomas Mitchell) and banished harlot (Claire Trevor), "come on, be a proud, glorified dreg, like me." Military wife (Louise Platt), Confederate gambler (John Carradine), squeamish salesman (Donald Meek) and absconding banker (Berton Churchill), all aboard the stagecoach plus driver (Andy Devine) and marshal (George Bancroft). The wild card is a fugitive picked up along the way, a newly-carved Monument Valley icon, John Wayne in all his courtly rawness. "Well, I used to be a good cowhand, but... things happen." A chamber piece in the wilderness, the ideal format for John Ford's revitalization of the Western's folkloric tropes. (The doctor steps into the slanting light and low ceilings of a saloon, thus the Germanic eye on American figures so famously studied by Welles.) "The blessings of civilization" embodied by hatchet-faced prudes and an embezzling plutocrat, "what this country needs is a businessman for president." Out there in the desert, heroes are tested and babies are born and daguerreotypes are transformed via glances and gestures. The Apache attack lays down the syntax for a century's worth of action cinema and provides a magnificent example of the experimentalism behind Ford's classicism—the camera remains on Platt's visage as the moment passes from Griffithian melodrama (the Southerner's gun dipping into frame to rescue her from "a fate worse than death") into Brechtian analysis (the maiden virtually announcing the Cavalry's arrival to the audience). Outlaw and whore ride away as the land's new couple, an optimism gradually disintegrated by each of the director's subsequent Westerns. Cinematography by Bert Glennon. With Tim Holt, Tom Tyler, Francis Ford, and Chris-Pin Martin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |