By D.K. Holm
September 22, 2003
Lost Horizons
In this boon time of film books, it is an unusual pleasure to stumble upon a volume of film criticism that reads well, is free of cant, and actually informs.
These days, most cinema books are either academic studies on highly specific subjects, director career surveys, cut-and-paste star bios, or fan-oriented catalogs of gore and horror films. Britain has sprouted numerous new publishers, such as Virgin, Fab Press, and R&H, that lavish untold thousands of dollars on glossy film books often focusing on outré or maudit subjects that, behind the spectacular pictures, all too often have little substantial content. The fanish star bios rarely report anything new. The academic books can be interesting but are usually dry, like the PhD. theses they usually began life as. I happen to read a lot of film books, or at least start a lot of them, and though there are more books on film being published now than since the peak of film studies in the late '60s and early '70s, few really grab you with fresh and original ideas in the manner of, say, James Naremore's noir study MORE THAN NIGHT.
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Therefore, it was a real pleasure to stumble upon Scott Simmon's book THE INVENTION OF THE WESTERN FILM: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE GENRE'S FIRST HALF-CENTURY (Cambridge University Press, $30, ISBN 0.521.55581.7). This book synthesizes a lot of new and old material about Westerns and the west and contributes intriguing new ideas, so many that the pages of INVENTION OF THE WESTERN crackle with insights, observations, and digressions.
Simmon teaches film at UC-Davis and takes a special interest in D. W. Griffith and silent movies. He's currently putting together SAVING THE SILENTS, a second set of DVDs to go with an earlier anthology called TREASURES FROM AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVES (probably to be distributed by Image), and he's also written a book on Griffith as well as co-authored a survey of King Vidor's films with the late great Raymond Durgnat. But though Mr. Simmon is an academic he doesn't write like one, his book being informed and informative without the necessary stodginess that taints most academic press books.
In INVENTION, Mr. Simmon walks the reader through the early history of the western film, from the first images of the American west caught on film by Edison and others to John Ford's MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. But Mr. Simmon writes with so much verve that his cascading enthusiasm can't come to a complete stop, and his survey bleeds over into the second half of the 20th century, all the way up to the recent films TOMBSTONE and WYATT EARP.
One of the great things about Mr. Simmon's book is that it undercuts many of our average and unthinking assumptions about both silent film and westerns. Among the several points he makes at the start of the book is that most early westerns were shot in the east. Forests and lakes were the common setting; prairies and deserts came much later, when film production, for various reasons, moved to the west coast. Mr. Simmon tracks the cinematic preoccupation with lush verdancy back to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and his chronicles of Natty Bumppo, where the characters come to recoil from the dire effects of civilization. These eastern settings make for a very different kind of western, and Mr. Simmon notes that the role of Indians in these films is much different from the role they came to play, if any at all, much later. In these films, Indians were often the saviors of the white man, if not the main characters, and they enacted their rituals in the natural stage-like settings of lakes and tree-lined glens. In the early silents, even those by the commonly-assumed-to-be-racist D. W. Griffith, Indians are the protectors and saviors of white society, the repository of robust values. With the advent of the "western" western, as opposed to the initial eastern western, Indians for the first time became villains.
Mr. Simmon also reminds us that around 1911 there was a real crisis in narrative film production. Audiences didn't understand the new-fangled longer films! With the advent of intertitles, plots became more explicable, but before that the movies didn't make sense unless there was a paid commentator (like the popular benshi in Japanese theaters) there to serve as intermediary between the hash of images and the perplexed audiences. This lack of comprehension terrified moviemakers and industry observers, who had grown to count on cinema to homogenize the ethnic soup of modern cities. The crisis passed, but not before pundits lamented the death of westerns and cinema itself.
Making another excellent point, Mr. Simmon notes that when filmmakers first went west, they didn't know how to shoot deserts. Griffith especially didn't really understand how to capture the southwest on film. In chapter five Mr. Simmon shows how the problems posed by the desert landscape were not confined to filmmakers, and points how the fabled painter Frederic Remington "never discovered how to depict western landscape, which even in his finished paintings tends to be featureless washes of color or vegetationless sketches behind figures grouped into the foreground. If Remington now seems more artistically satisfying as a sculptor, that's party because the medium allowed him to remove completely horses and riders from the land." Only later did painters such as Georgia O'Keefe get a handle on the desert.
This meditation of the conundrums of the desert leads Mr. Simmon to a fascinating conjecture. Griffith's grappling with the difficulties of bland desert settings drove him to solutions that determined standard film technique. Were it not for the fact that Griffith was trying to crowd out the background, he might not have come up with the idea of the close up.
INVENTION comes in three large parts. The first section tracks the treatment of Indians from silent films to the B westerns of the '30s. The second part uses Raoul Walsh's THE BIG TRAIL as a springboard to discuss the philosophy of western expansion. The final section zeros in on Ford's MY DARLING CLEMENTINE as a means to discuss changes in attitudes to Indians, women in the west, commerce, gunfights, frontier high culture, and the cinematic rivalry between westerns and noir. His atomization of Ford's film also inspires Mr. Simmon to track all the other cinematic versions of Earp and the story of the O.K. Coral, disguised or otherwise, as barometers of changing attitudes to family, justice, and vengeance. These films range from FRONTIER MARSHALL in 1932 to Kevin Costner's film, though Mr. Simmon has chosen not to include a citation of Blake Edwards's SUNSET, in which James Garner plays a Rockfordian Earp coming to the aide of western star Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) as the Old and New West clash by night in the car-jammed streets of Hollywood.
In an insightful essay in a new book called SAM PECKINPAH'S WEST, Robert Merrill notes that most writers on western films don't bring themselves to study the western genre as a whole. They restrict themselves to a few hundred western films and don't bother to read Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour or histories of the real west. Mr. Simmon does not suffer from such inhibitions. Indeed, his range of reference is astounding. In one chapter alone, ostensibly about the A-western's relationship with history, Mr. Simmon refers to Claude Levi-Strauss, Thomas Hobbes, Herbert Spencer, Richard Hofstadter, Peckinpah, Theodore Roosevelt, Christopher Lasch, Estwick Evans (the guy who walked across the west), the Oregon trail, William Jennings Bryant's speech on the gold standard, Jackson, Owen Wister, and Jefferson's obsession with farmers as the bedrock of a sane economy.
The good-time spoiler in me must note, however that the book isn't perfect, though it comes close. There are a few typos (an extra "like" on pages 240 and "flip" instead of "flips" on page 337, among others), which is really a function of the decline of the copyeditor's art rather than the writer's, a decline that has grown to startling levels of acceptance in university press books (by the same token, every column I have ever written has a typo in it somewhere: a solecism free column is my personal El Dorado).
Also, I feel that Mr. Simmon shortchanges William Witney and his Roy Rogers films. Mr. Simmon mentions THE GOLDEN STALLION in passing on page 101, as an example of the "dream logic" often found in crazy, time-transcendent B westerns. Thanks to Tarantino, interest in Witney has been renewed, or inspired in the many film writers who were unaware of him before (like me). Unfortunately Mr. Simmon seems to fall back on the same old received opinion about Witney and his Rogers films that the rest of his book is a valiant argument against, viewing Witney as little more than a purveyor of horse operas. Tarantino has pointed out how dark and unexpected Witney's Rogers films can be. THE GOLDEN STALLION is the main example of Witney's contemplative, genre-busting style, and the particular tracking shot up to Rogers face as he wrestles with an impossible choice has only to be seen to be convincing.
Also, on another matter, Mr. Simmon might find the Dashiell Hammett Continental Op story "Corkscrew" interesting as a literary version of the marriage of gangster and western genres that he charts on page 153. And a line from CLEMENTINE that he discusses in detail in chapter 20, when Clanton chastises his son by saying, "When you pull a gun, kill a man," is echoed 20 years later in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY.
But these are quibbles with and additions to a book that invites argument by its very use of the word, beginning about half way through, when Mr. Simmon begins to make a case that westerns engage in debates with each other, and not just in the famous example of RIO BRAVO versus HIGH NOON. I like the case he makes, on page 158, for B-westerns being more sophisticated and intellectual in their way than A-westerns. His discussion of space and time in the western on page 233 is fascinating and evokes thoughts about ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. His notion that a commercial Hollywood movie can, in a sense, tell two contradictory stories at once, one in words and one with the visuals, is helpful, and helps explain what Andrew Sarris meant years ago when he wrote about what auteurs do in the otherwise conformity inducing dream factories. His discussion of the extent of domesticity in the west on page 251 is another presumption underminer, and his discussion of the uses of sunlight in noirs and noir westerns has a special appeal to this reviewer, since it falls under the rubric of what I elsewhere call film soleil.
I feel like a louse even raising the minor complaints that I have, because Mr. Simmon's book is one of the best on film that I have ever read. It's too bad that the Oscars don't in some way honor film writers and critics, because Mr. Simmon's book does the same thing that the Oscars were presumably invented to make you want to do — see movies.
NEXT TIME:Warren Beatty wants to have sex with you.
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