Cinema
Going West
By ISABEL QUIGLY The Bravados. (Carlton.) THE West is the great modern legend, the sort of thing the Age of Chivalry once was, or the Golden Age of any country, when every- thing seems cleaner, brighter, more individual than it does in the present, and men are larger than lifesize and can accomplish more, alone, than a hundred can manage later. The trouble with Golden Ages, though, is that they are generally rather remote; no one really remembered Amadis of Gaul or King Arthur by the time they got round to being popular. Whereas the West really happened, the whole western half of a continent was opened up more or less haphazardly by individual pioneers and for a few years men had the chance to stamp themselves and their actions on the landscape, all within living memory. Elderly memory, I admit: my grandfather knew St. Paul as a frontier town, after which lay the great beyond, empty or inimical, but bewitching. And wasn't President Truman's grandmother (someone will soon write to say if she wasn't) scalped by Indians?
Which all means we cannot judge Westerns the way we would films about stockbrokers or cannibals or nuclear physicists, or even films about exploration and adventure elsewhere: we are too much involved (or at any rate I am), the whole thing is too personal, we are caught up in the legend and know exactly what to expect, and demand that our legendary truths are respected (at least I do). This is not to say that a Western must be just like every other Western, or must subscribe to the glamorised picture of the West : one of the best recent Westerns, Cowboy, set out to debunk a good deal of the legend, and many of the best have shown the cruelty behind the picturesqueness, the viciousness of mob rule before the law took over from the individual. But there are some basic things about the West we all believe, and Westerns, if they are to be con- vincing, must stick to the spirit of them.
The first is that the legendary West had a certain austerity, or frugality, or homeliness in the• American or the English sense, in fact a plain-living-and-high-thinking air about it that must be reflected in everything about it, from the clothes to the conversation, from the director's style to (even) the landscapes. The Bravados (director : Henry King; 'A' certificate) is directed with a lushness, sleekness and glossiness that would suit a film set, say, in Paris in the Second Empire. Everything about the West is larger than life, that we all admit; just as the Western hero is bigger than the ordinary hero, and can ride harder, shoot faster and talk less than anyone you can think of. But it is larger in a spiritual, not a material sense: the hero isn't big in the Citizen Kane or the Mike Todd way—he owns nothing but his horse and his lasso—nor, however many acres or head of cattle they own, do the minor characters live in a good old (even if slightly smartened and extended) log cabin. Whereas everything about The Bravados is enormous. True, it is set well and truly south, near the Mexican border; but it still aims to be a Western and the Western ethic remains. Much of the time, when.we aren't roaming out of doors with a posse in pursuit of four bad characters and a girl hostage, is spent in a church, with the heavenly music provided, not out of the sunset, as generally happens, but by a real live choir of about fifty boys prinked out in the sort of ecclesiastical finery that would hardly disgrace the Vatican. All this in the usual sort of one-horse town you see in films of this sort, with its sheriff's office and its gaol and its general store! All this in a Western I There is the same velvety, over- sweet touch about everything in it, from the dialogue ('You must have been'—gulp—'very much in love with her,' just because the poor man mentions he's married) to the heroine's elaborate low-necked dresses and the long, long mantillaS that look suitable for a funeral or a fancy-dress , ball, but hardly for popping into church for a brief prayer.
Then Gregory Peck, that universal favourite, though not mine, is the hard-riding hero (not, characteristically, a cowboy, but a ranch-owner), and, for all his wicked lassoing of enemy legs, he remains something of a city slicker throughout. He lacks the nonchalance that is an essential part of Western heroism, that almost imperceptible lift of shoulder or eyelid that a dyed-in-the-wool hero like Henry Fonda can fill with scorn or anger or excitement; he is solemn, rather than serious, and his determination arouses amuse- ment rather than respect. For the Western hero, being a simple soul on the face of it, takes a high degree of intelligence to play; as all that riding, and those landscapes, and those great tempting sunsets, take a high degree of restraint to cope with.
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