Something you almost never hear from me, though,  is “my top 5″  or “my top 10″ or “my top 25.” That description is used for all-time favorites, and represents a pool of about 50 steady titles that, over the years, have fallen in and out of one of those categories. So when I tell you that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 romantic-thriller “Notorious”  has been a perennial top 5 of mine for over two decades now, you understand what this film means to me.

There is no other movie that makes me feel as much as this one does. Thanks to the extraordinary performances of two of the most beautiful people ever to stand before a camera, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergmann, “Notorious” throws me on an emotional roller coaster of suspense, exhilaration and, most of all, heartache, for the full 101 minutes. And the reasons are many.

No matter how many times I’ve seen this pulse-pounding story of an American girl with a sordid past who, on behalf of her country, agrees to pretend she’s in love with a man aligned with a group of dangerous post-war Nazis in South America, within the first few minutes I fall deeply in love with Bergman’s Alicia. But that’s the least of it. The thing that wrecks me, thanks to Grant giving one of the greatest performances ever put on film (and again I’m choosing my words carefully), is the emotional grinder Alicia is put through.

Usually, when a love story keeps its lovers apart based on something that remains unspoken between them, the conceit is lazy and maddening to watch. But Ben Hecht’s script is so brilliantly crafted and Grant’s Devlin is so obviously tortured by his own pride (and things we’re never told about but see in his tormented eyes), that we buy into it; which makes for a deliciously agonizing road to a climax so satisfying repeat viewings never diminish the impact.

Alicia’s father is an American traitor, a Nazi sympathizer, sentence to 20 years in prison. Alicia herself is a party girl, a full-blown alcoholic who likes to take men to bed. It’s at one of her many parties where she meets Devlin, a quiet, handsome man she intends to seduce. Only instead of waking up like she usually does, nude, hung-over, and alone, she’s hung-over, dressed, and offered the opportunity to do something for her country.

Alicia tells Devlin she doesn’t give a damn about patriotism, as a response he plays a secret recording of a conversation she had with her father. The truth is that she loves her country, quite a bit in fact, and while she could never turn her father in, it’s clear that nothing will ever convince her to betray America.

The people Devlin works for have been monitoring her and now need her for some kind of top secret mission in Rio de Janeiro. Though Devlin doesn’t know what the mission is, she agrees and during the week they spend waiting for instructions, the two of them fall in love.

It’s obvious Devlin doesn’t want to fall for her, not for someone so striking and vulnerable. This isn’t the kind of woman you have a fling with. This is the kind of woman you either win for life or long for for life. Though not a word of exposition is used to tell us this, Grant’s performance is so pure, we know she terrifies him, and that her past — the drinking and the men — rips him apart inside. As a consequence, he tears away at her. The fact that she loves him, gives him this power, and with an emotional paper cut here and there, he throws her past in her face at every opportunity.

But passion eventually overcomes all until the details of the mission are revealed.  A number of well-connected Nazis have fled to Brazil after the war. One of them, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), used to be in love with Alicia. Using her father’s reputation as cover, the plan is for her to reconnect with him in the hopes she can find out what they’re up to.  

What follows is one of the most gut-wrenching scenes ever put on film. Just an hour prior,  Alicia and Devlin had been blissfully happy in the glow of young, new love. Now they’re alone on the romantic, outdoor terrace of what was going to be their love nest. Devlin explains the mission to her, and they both know what it means; that taking the assignment means she will have to become Sebastian’s lover. Alicia is desperate for Devlin to tell her not to accept. Devlin is just as desperate for her to refuse.

Because this scene is so perfectly crafted, we know that Alicia agrees to the mission because she loves Devlin. More importantly, we know Devlin knows this and yet he still resents her for it.  And what will follow is the fullest expression of human anguish you will ever experience through the medium of the motion picture.

Forget the classic elegance of Hitchcock’s shooting style and even the impossibly suspenseful sequence that involves the key to a wine cellar. All of that is wonderful, classic moviemaking to be sure, but nothing compares to the closing sequence, when every bit of emotional and storytelling track that’s been laid, pays off with unparalleled precision. The hero saves the girl. The hero saves himself. The hero gets the girl. The hero redeems himself. The hero defeats the bad guy.

And those of us watching are left breathless.

“Notorious” is not only Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it is Hollywood’s masterpiece. It is as though the movie gods poured everything that made the Golden Era the Golden Era into a bottle, shook it up, distilled it over a flame, and found the essence, the formula … the perfection. 

“Notorious” is available at Amazon.com.

John Wayne, a.k.a Duke Morrison (he was nicknamed Duke after an Airedale dog that he owned during his youth) was arguably the most popular movie star that ever lived.  Yet when it came to personal wealth he trailed far behind some of his contemporaries such as Cary Grant and Fred MacMurray.  In addition to bad business management and three broken marriages, some of Wayne’s financial woes were brought on by his incredibly generous nature.  His goodness shone during the making of the1953 western Hondo when Wayne arranged for some private detectives, who were trailing him, to be freed from a prison in Camargo, Mexico.  Never mind that Wayne’s second wife Chata had enraged him by hiring the investigators to find incriminating information to use in their upcoming divorce proceedings. The local officials in Camargo were thrilled to have the revenue generated from a John Wayne picture being made in their town and were willing to use extreme measures to keep their top tourist attraction happy, but the Duke refused to let men rot in jail for simply doing their jobs.

Unlike most celebrities John Wayne didn’t immediately dispose of fan letters asking him for money.  He read each request carefully, sometimes agonizing over them, to discern their legitimacy.  Duke would send complete strangers cash so they could visit sick friends, or help finance a kid getting braces.  Once, while hospitalized, Wayne got to know a less-well-off fellow patient; after Duke was discharged his new friend was visited by one of Wayne’s representatives who told him his medical bills would be covered. 

In 1960 a burglar found Duke’s Encino, California address with a movie star map and broke into the home while its owner was watching TV. Reacting quickly, Wayne ran down to the basement and grabbed a shotgun.  He chased the crook into the backyard and said, “Hold it. I got you covered.”

He yelled to his wife Pilar to call the police, which she had already done. The robber was cuffed and about to be taken off to jail when he asked to speak to his intended victim. “Mr. Wayne?”

“What do you want, punk?”

“Well, I came here in a taxi. My driver is still outside. He didn’t know I came to rob you. Could you take care of him, Mr. Wayne?”

The Duke swore under his breath, but after the police hauled the bad guy away, John went outside and paid the cabbie. 

Duke would routinely walk into bars and exclaim,” Drinks for everybody on me!”  Wayne stated different reasons for his grandioseness.  He needed to diffuse any potential challenge from a drunk who might want to prove his manhood. (The six-foot-four actor claimed in an interview that he was never in a bar fight, even during World War II when he was heavily criticized in some quarters for not enlisting.)  Wayne also maintained that is was necessary for him to be a big tipper, lest some bartender or waiter tell a reporter otherwise, and ruin the star’s reputation.  When all was said and done, the Duke was a man who loved to raise a little hell; for the most part friends remembered him as a kindly drunk.  Once, Duke got totally imbibed during a poker game with animal trainer Rudd Weatherwax.  Rudd mistakenly assumed that an inebriated Duke would be an easy mark; soon Wayne owned Rudd’s car and his dog.  The softhearted actor felt guilty and gave back the canine; in his later years Wayne may have more easily been able to afford retirement if he would have maintained ownership of Lassie. 

On another occasion Duke’s pal, entertainment journalist and unabashed liberal James Bacon (It was exclusively through James Bacon that ultra-conservative John Wayne first revealed to the world that he had lung cancer) did an expose on the biggest drinkers in Hollywood.  The far and away winners in Bacon’s informal contest were John Wayne, and his fellow movie cowboy Gene Autry.  Wayne later chastised Bacon for inaccurate reporting.  “How dare you say Gene Autry drinks as much as I do!  Why that piker couldn’t carry my ice!” 

James Bacon was not the only left-winger to admire and like the Duke.  Katharine Hepburn admitted she loved leaning up against Wayne when they costarred in Rooster Cogburn  (1975) and was thrilled when he playfully kissed her on the lips in front of some reporters.  Gossip columnist Sheila Graham couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Duke when he forcefully put forth his right wing philosophy, yet loved how Wayne went out of his way to keep old friends employed, and wistfully wondered what it would have been like to be married to him.  Lauren Bacall, who expected to clash with Duke over politics, found him to be warm and friendly, and was impressed that he was one of the first people to pay respects after her husband Humphrey Bogart passed away in 1957.  Mark Rydell, who directed Duke in The Cowboys(1972) was shocked that Wayne was a far nicer man than many of Mark’s fellow liberals in Hollywood.  Rydell delighted in telling the story of how one night he dined with Wayne and the icon came back from the restroom with sopping wet pants.  Wayne resignedly explained that it happened all the time,” Some joker is standing next to me and says Oh my God, you’re John Wayne and then he turns . . .” 

In 1959 Duke managed to have a civil encounter with Soviet Union Premier, Nikita Khrushchev.  The Communist leader enjoyed meeting Wayne, admired his movies, stated he rescinded the order his predecessor Josef Stalin had given to have Wayne assassinated, and later sent Wayne a giant crate full of Russian vodka for Christmas, which Wayne’s secretary had nervously opened after determining it didn’t contain a bomb.  An interpreter helped ease diplomatic relations between the world’s top red and America’s screen hero.  Khrushchev had laughed when he heard the translator say Wayne would buy him a drink on the day the Soviet Leader ruled America.  What the Duke, far from impressed by any Communist even the head one, actually said, with a smile on his face, was,” I’m going to knock you on your bleeping ass.”

Agee, afire with a sense of purpose and mission, sought to arrest that forgetfulness with his essay. An early film critic and soon-to-be screenwriter (his work in Hollywood would later include the scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter), he was, in the words of a friend, “a big, untidy man who frequently looked like a tramp and who cared not a bit for material things. . . Agee was extremely fastidious about many things — about people, about humanity, about music, movies and, above all, about writing. In his years as a critic, he anguished over books and films that less patient critics would write off as trash: somewhere, Agee felt, there had to be something worth praising.”

A thrice-married, hard-drinking insomniac with the tender heart of a poet, Agee began his now-classic treatise with a description of the type and quality of laughter that America had lost with the death of silent movies:

In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the bellylaugh and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure knows all about a bellylaugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. . .

The reader can get a fair enough idea of the current state of screen comedy by asking himself how long it has been since he has had that treatment. . . The laughs today are pitifully few, far between, shallow, quiet and short. They almost never build, as they used to, into something combining the jabbering frequency of a machine gun with the delirious momentum of a roller coaster.

In Agee’s view, those meticulously crafted and constructed laugh fests of yore — inspiring in audiences what he described as the “laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall” — had given way to cheap isolated one-liners strung together with little thought to momentum, timing, and nuance. As a reminder of what he was describing, he profiled a rich selection of the era’s shining lights, from Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon to Mack Sennett and his Keystone Cops.

Saving one of his favorites for last, his essay ends with a look at the man who “never smiled,” a comedian with a face “as still and sad as a daguerreotype” that “ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful.” The man, of course, was Buster Keaton, and Agee credited the bearer of “The Great Stone Face” with “some of the most preposterously ingenious and visually satisfying physical comedy ever invented.”

The response to Agee’s effusions was rapturous. “The best thing I’ve ever read on the best thing ever done in films,” one reader wrote. “A masterpiece of perspicacity and lucidity,” intoned another, “done with a precision, an incisiveness — and withal a reverent tenderness — I have not seen equaled.” In the coming years, “Comedy’s Greatest Era” was quoted far and wide as America woke up to their lost heritage. Retrospectives became well-attended. Old funnymen still living gained new fans in their dotage via live appearances on that new medium hungry for content, television. Universities, museums, historians, and private collectors went on a quest to preserve as many moldering nitrate film reels as they could. And, bit-by-bit, much of the best of our silent comedies was saved from oblivion. James Agee’s drinking, smoking, and long nights spent agonizing over his writing eventually caught up to him, with a series of heart attacks striking like so many titters and yowls until the fatal one — a real boffo, one might say — felled him in 1955. But he lived long enough to see what an effect his heartfelt essay had on a previously somnolent movie-going populace (and ultimately became one of America’s most revered writers, with a posthumously published novel winning the Pulitzer Prize, and a large selection of his work being immortalized in The Library of America).

One particular treasure, however, looked lost forever: Buster Keaton’s last true silent film, The Cameraman (1928). With prints of two of his other filmic triumphs — The Navigator (1924) and The General (1926) — in increasing circulation among film fans and scholars throughout the 1950s, scholars went hungrily looking for his other pictures. The Cameraman was the first Keaton picture made at M-G-M after a long stint working independently, so it was assumed that the great studio would have an archival screening print on file.

And yet, when one of Keaton’s friends went to ask for a copy, he was told that their house print had deteriorated into oblivion, not from neglect but from over-projection. Apparently, studio heads throughout the 1930s and ’40s had deemed The Cameraman a perfect example of cinematic humor on screen, and ordered every comedian on contract to view it before embarking on their own careers. The movie was screened hundreds of times by the likes of The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, Zasu Pitts, Cary Grant, and Red Skelton until it was left in useless tatters.

(The original negative, squirreled away in the depths of the M-G-M vault out of reach of ordinary fans on the street, was later lost in a devastating 1965 fire, and looking far and wide across the world failed to turn up a decent print. It took the fortunate discovery and assembling of several copies found between the late 1960s and 1990s to create the fairly high-quality version on DVD that we enjoy today.)

When fans, spurred on in their quest by James Agee’s writing, finally got a hold of The Cameraman, what did they find? If the long-dead writer were still here with us, he might answer “titters, yowls, bellylaughs, and more than a few killer boffos.” (not to mention a preternaturally talented monkey whose hilarious hijinks put the Nazi-saluting simian from Raiders of the Lost Ark to shame.) Poised as it is at the tail end of Keaton’s prime years, and filmed mere months before sound rendered the great silent comedians, in Agee’s words, “as badly off as fine dancers suddenly required to appear in plays,” the picture represents an elegant summation of what he reverently calls the Silent Era’s “beauties of comic motion which are hopelessly beyond reach of words.”

Yet as hopeless as the effort may be, we shall attempt in the coming weeks — as Agee himself did — to use mere words to bring the visual comedic delights of both The Cameraman and its maker to life again for modern Conservative Movie Lovers.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read James Agee’s essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Luckily for Conservative Movie Lovers, back issues of Life magazine have been archived and made available for free at Google Books. Head on over and peruse the September 5, 1949 edition containing Agee’s most famous essay. Also take some time to check out the wonderful ads — here is one of my faves:

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz.

At the same time, 3-D movies were another innovation being used to lure your grandparents and parents away from their televisions. Nineteen Fifty-Two, the year before Shane, saw the first flurry of attempts to do for depth what This Is Cinerama did for height and width. By 1955, audiences had seen Vincent Price (eventually christened “The King of 3-D!”) appear in House of Wax and several other horror titles. John Wayne used 3-D for Hondo. The now-famous cult classic Creature from the Black Lagoon crawled off the screen and toward audiences who didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. The great Alfred Hitchcock even toyed with the third dimension in Dial M for Murder.

While the two potential TV killers, widescreen and 3-D, warred with each other for supremacy (one contemporary ad for Cinerama proclaimed “NO GLASSES NEEDED,” reminding audiences of the eye fatigue and uncomfortable headgear necessitated by its rival), these fads spurred frenzied discussions among filmmakers and studio heads. The 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain was then in theaters, mocking the shortsightedness of many 1920s Hollywoodites caught in the bedlam of the transition from silents to sound. Everyone in modern Hollywood, therefore, was wary of catastrophically missing out on what, for all they knew, could snowball into the 1950s equivalent of that epochal transition.

That is, almost everyone. George Stevens, for his part, looked on these developments with wry amusement. His Shane was in the can, having been filmed a year earlier in the summer and fall of 1951. And he seemed perfectly comfortable knowing that his plain ol’ 2-D picture would be debuting in the midst of all this hoopla. “I’m interested in all the new ideas, such as 3-D and widescreen,” he told one reporter at the time, “but I don’t believe the technical method of presentation is the real important thing. Only the picture matters. It’s what goes on the screen that counts.”

Perhaps that is why, when Stevens was choosing a cinematographer to shoot Shane, he zeroed in on a man named Loyal Griggs. Griggs was a Paramount fixture. Born in 1906, raised in Los Angeles, and graduated from Los Angeles High in 1924, he immediately scored a grunt job at Paramount in their effects department. Beginning at a paltry $80 a month and often logging hundred-hour work weeks with no overtime pay, he persevered for nearly three decades, slaving his way up the Paramount food chain towards the coveted rank of Director of Photography. Finally, in 1950, he became head lensman on a trio of mediocre flicks (a gangster pic and two westerns) for producers Bill Pine and Bill Thomas.

At the comparatively late age of 44, he was at long last a full-fledged Hollywood cinematographer.

Stevens had employed Griggs for some process photography on his last film, the popular and well-regarded A Place in the Sun (1951), and during pre-production on Shane it was becoming increasingly apparent that he needed a cameraman who not only could film pretty pictures, but who could use color, lenses, and composition to manipulate images for serious dramatic effect. The director, you see, had chosen Wyoming’s Teton Range over a slew of other locations (Utah, Idaho, Colorado) after sending a camera crew on an exhaustive 4,500-mile trek around the American West, filming test footage in glorious Technicolor (itself an expensive concession made by the studio only after pressure from Stevens).

But while the awe-inspiring, snow-capped peaks and grand desolation west of Jackson Hole looked perfect, there was also a problem — the scenery filmed too well. New York Times writer Jack Goodman, who visited the Wyoming location while Shane was being shot, laid out the essential challenge in a September 9, 1951 article for that newspaper: “The Teton Range west of the Hole has been widely photographed before this and has become associated with tourism and dude ranching through hundreds of travel-magazine articles. . . Further, as Stevens now explains it, Technicolor ‘tends to glamorize and romanticize,’ its basic weakness being ‘the rainbow quality’ it lends to scenic shots.”

So the question was how to get rid of what Stevens once derided in another interview as the, “Oh, what a beautiful morning!’ Technicolor musical look.” How could one make rich, saturated Technicolor images bend to the will of a director who foresaw his story’s need not only for beauty and majesty, but doom and gloom?

Enter Loyal Griggs. He had worked in the various process, front-projection, and special effects departments of Paramount for three decades. There wasn’t a trick in the book he hadn’t seen. And he brought his full array of talents to bear on making Shane one of the most variegated Technicolor films in Hollywood history.

The goal was to achieve the filmic version of what in art circles is called “Rembrandt Lighting,” a classic, shadowy style filled with dramatic possibilities. To that end, Stevens and Griggs studied the famous photographs and drawings of the Teton Range made by William Henry Jackson, as well as the paintings of famed western artist Charles Marion Russell. Most Technicolor cinematographers were afraid to lose exposure and saturation, but Griggs ruthlessly degraded both when necessary. Early each morning weather stations were consulted, and if rain or clouds were on the way the filmmakers would rush out to take advantage. Many times the sun appearing through the gray expanse would ruin the effect, and so Griggs had such shots backprinted (made artificially darker) in the lab to preserve the shadow-laden, brooding atmosphere.

Back in the Fifties, film stocks weren’t “fast” enough (i.e. sensitive enough to light) to pick up anything during a nighttime shoot. So Griggs used a trick called “day-for-night” — first filming in bright sunlight, then adjusting the exposure in the lab to make it look as if it had been filmed in the evening — to capture some of the most important scenes in the movie, complete with visible mountains and vast plains in the distance.

This particular technique was itself common enough, but Griggs took it to the next level, using optical printing to single out characters in the frame and boost their exposure while leaving the rest of the image alone, giving the actors an eldritch, almost supernatural glow of the kind moonlight makes on Halloween. For the very last shots of the picture, he filmed a graveyard bathed in a severe darkness, then used optical printing to insert Alan Ladd’s character as a ghostly silhouette.

Jack Goodman, viewing the rushes while visiting for his New York Times article, came away most impressed: “[By] not hesitating to shoot portions of Shane on days when clouds race across nearby lakes, Stevens has managed to make this most beautiful of western vistas positively forbidding.”

Careful use of lenses also played a role. Stevens and Griggs show here some of the earliest examples of filming vast outdoor spaces with telephoto lenses normally used for facial closeups. The result was a flattening of the depth in an image, which made the distant mountains in the background seem far closer and more imposing. This is nowhere more effective than in the justifiably famous funeral scene of Shane. “There was the funeral on the hilltop,” Stevens explained, describing the master shot for this key sequence, “and there was the dis­tance where cattle grazed, and then there was the town at the crossing, a western town like western towns were. There were the great moun­tains that rose behind it. This was all arranged in one camera view, one camera view that had to do with a man being put away in his grave with the synthesis of the whole story wrapped around it.”

Stevens wanted to connect 1950s families with a time when “death was a very large part of living.” His inspiration for the scene came while visiting a tiny pioneer hamlet in California:

Bridgeport, on the way to the Sierra Nevadas, is. . . a poor little town. . . About three miles away, in the foothills, there is a graveyard. . . A man comes in his front door from a funeral and perhaps goes out the back door to bring in the pail of milk before he goes to bed that night. If he has just buried his mother, he can look up to where she is on that hillside. While he was at the cemetery, he could look back to those beautiful mountains. This is what the pioneers came for, this vast country, and a little cemetery with a fence around it. It’s there waiting. Mother, all those who have gone before, are there. It will be throughout his time, and the man can look down to the town and see the house where mother came as a bride, and where he was born and where he was raised. There is a convenience in being able to visually associate all of these essential aspects of life in a frontier world; some of it isn’t around the corner or on the other side of town, it’s all right there and it’s all true. I see that, I know what it means.

As Shane was nearing its release, Paramount ran a test of the film on one of the big new screens being developed, to see how it would look blown up to that size. To make the square-ish image fit onto a rectangular screen, they unceremoniously chopped off a portion of the top and bottom of Griggs’ lovingly composed compositions. Some critics noticed this right off and grumbled. (Lord knows what expletives emerged from Griggs’ own mouth!) But most thought it was a decent enough compromise for the treat of getting magnified, IMAX-like versions of Shane’s Wyoming vistas.

On April 15, 1953, the industry trade paper Variety ran an article stating that

Shane was previewed in a process stage on Paramount’s experimental widescreen, to an audience perched on makeshift seating. Despite these abnormal viewing conditions, the picture’s worth was not lessened, and the widescreen projection did contribute, in some measure, to a sense of bigness, although, again for the record, Shane would be a big picture on any size screen. Theaters equipped for widescreen showings should find the extra ballyhoo angle of this gimmick adding to the dollars taken at the box office.

The efforts of the cinematographer were especially singled out for distinction: “Pictorially, the picture has been beautifully photographed in color by Loyal Griggs. Wyoming’s scenic splendors against which the story is filmed are breathtaking. Sunlight, the shadow of rainstorms and the eerie lights of night, play a realistic part in making the film a visual treat.” The Hollywood Reporter chimed in as well, praising the use of “long shots and lovely Technicolor hues to establish mood, some of the scenes emerging like exquisite paintings.”

Soon after that test, Paramount debuted the film in New York at Radio City Music Hall, which had just installed one of the first widescreens in the country. On April 24, 1953, The Hollywood Reporter gushed to an industry town holding its collective breath: “New York Critics Enthusiastic About Shane, Wide Screen.” Frank Quinn of The New York Daily Mirror conveyed the almost futuristic, game-changing aspect of the event: “A thrilling new visual concept of motion pictures unfolds with the debut of Shane on the panoramic screen. The screen is wide, more oblong like a picture postcard.”

In Los Angeles, the movie’s star-studded premiere was equally rapturous. Celebrities like Cary Grant, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Irene Dunne, Charles Coburn, Mitzi Gaynor, Rory Calhoun, Anita Ekberg, Shelly Winters, and Claire Trevor poured into Grauman’s Chinese Theater as hundreds of fans cheered. “Shane Premiere Gala Fete: Hollywood Turns Out in Panoramic Pandemonium,” was the headline in the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express.

Philip K. Scheuer, longtime film critic for the Los Angeles Times (who had begun his career covering the silents), penned in his own newspaper a thoughtful review of both film and presentation:

When, in the good old days, we called a picture an epic we must have had some reason for it. Later, through misuse and repetition, the word fell into disrepute and we put quotation marks around it to indicate we didn’t really believe an “epic” was an epic any more. With Shane one is tempted to leave the quote marks off. . . .

At the Chinese, where it premiered last night, it is being projected onto what is, by a slight margin, the largest screen in town (about 50 x 25 feet). Shane was not made for magnification, but its detail “blows up” very well in Technicolor, with not too much of the picture cut off at top and bottom. Directional sound, from three speakers, is used sparingly but effectively. . . However, I am quite sure Shane would hold you even on a 17-inch screen.

It wasn’t long before the trades were reporting that — much like today’s twenty-first-century theaters rushing to install 3-D capability — dozens of 1953 theaters were hurriedly converting to widescreen in a frenzied attempt to take advantage of Shane’s theatrical run. Reviewers and audiences alike were almost unanimously hailing it as an instant classic. The Saturday Review honed in on exactly the things that we’ve been discussing here, noting “Loyal Griggs’ handsome Technicolor photography. . . his cameras point insistently to the physical beauties of the place — the play of light on the distant mountains, the golden skies after a shower, the vast expanse of green and coppery fields. But none of this is merely travelogue prettiness. Nature enters dynamically into the development of the story, its moods matching and underlining the dramatic action.”

Conservative Henry Luce’s Time magazine made the distinction between gimmickry and artistry: “Without recourse to tricky 3-D photography and Polaroid glasses, Stevens, with ordinary Technicolor camera and sound track, has given his flat old story a real third dimension of believability.” A grandstanding Democratic politician from Wyoming, Lester C. Hunt, even went so far as to stand on the floor of the Senate and laud the picture’s stunning portrayal of the beauties of his home state.

So although Shane wasn’t a real widescreen Hollywood movie (the first real one was The Robe, a Christian tale shot in Twentieth-Century Fox’s Cinemascope format, which hit theaters later that fall and quickly became one of the all-time box-office champions), it was the first to be presented with much fanfare on a widescreen, and its marvelous cinematography did much to warm audiences to the new format. Meanwhile 3-D, hampered by a variety of technical limitations, would die out by the end of the decade, experiencing only intermittent spurts of life thereafter (time will tell how this latest 2010 revival pans out.)

Loyal Griggs won his first and only Oscar for Shane (the only Shane nominee to take home a gold statue that night), and went on to a distinguished career as a Director of Photography. A few years later, when Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a combined Technicolor/special effects/VistaVision expert, he turned to Griggs, and the result was another classic of gargantuan proportions, The Ten Commandments. That film netted Griggs another Oscar nomination, and in 1975 he received a special U.S. Bicentennial award for his photography on the picture. He died in 1978 at the age of 71, with two great Technicolor spectaculars forever linked to his name.

If I had to turn to one person to sum up the impact of Shane’s visuals, I’d pick the words of Hollywood writer/critic Ruth Waterbury, who’s own review appeared on Friday, June 5, 1953 in the pages of The Los Angeles Examiner. “The glory that God gave to the American West has been captured by it,” she said of the photography. “The strength, the fidelity, the weakness, the insecurity, that God gave man is reflected in it. . . Shane is on wide screen with stereophonic sound, all very fine. But it would still be magnificent if it were the size of a postage stamp. You’ll remember it long, long after you see it. In fact, I think I will personally remember it always.”

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The development of VistaVision: Here’s an informative overview of Paramount Pictures’ own 1950s widescreen format, which debuted a bit too late to be used in Shane. In my humble opinion, it was perhaps the most impressive of all the various permutations of widescreen created during that era. Loyal Griggs used VistaVision for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), John Ford used it for The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock for To Catch a Thief among others.

And check out the rest of The American Widescreen Museum website for even more history on widescreen photography in general.

Order a nifty CD-ROM book on The Making of Shane. Wish I had known about this before starting in on these articles. Compiled by Walt Farmer, it reportedly has a full tour of all of the film’s Wyoming locations, including detailed directions and GPS coordinates in case you want to hunt them down yourself (I love reading about — or performing myself — that kind of historical detective work). He reveals that the only structure still standing from the movie is Ernie Wright’s homestead (the sodbuster played by Edgar Buchanan, whom the Ryker Gang intimidates by running their cattle through his farm and crops). Apparently, the Cemetery Hill still sports a faint depression where Torrey’s grave was dug. Alas, save for a few fence posts and ruins, everything else is gone.

The cost is $20 plus $5 S&H, but if you are a hardcore Shane fan, or simply someone who’d like to poke around the film’s locations the next time you are out Wyoming way, it sounds like an invaluable purchase.

It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

“The whole damn thing took over,” said his then-wife, the Academy-Award nominated actress Diane Cilento. “He really didn’t know who he was. People would call over to him things like, ‘Hey, Bondy, where’re you off to next?’ or ‘See any Soviet agents lately?’ It became impossible to have any sort of life. . . .It got madder and madder with each film.”

Every time it looked as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they did. In Tokyo (where they greeted him with screams of  “Bondo!”) Connery was using a bathroom urinal when he heard a quiet click. Startled, he glanced up to see a Japanese photographer peeking around his shoulder with a Nikon. On another occasion, after graciously signing his name for an elderly lady at the airport, she reacted with a look of horror. “No, no!” she said, “I wanted James Bond.” Director Terence Young, who was with Connery, remembers that “Sean sort of crumpled. It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being, he was a symbol.”

For a painfully private and unassuming family man like Connery, this insane superstardom — Bond-age, you might call it — was intolerable. And so even as Goldfinger was smashing box-office records across the world, the actor responsible for playing the hero was counting down the days until his contract expired.

Tommy Connery was born in 1930 on the wrong side of the tracks of Edinburgh, Scotland, arriving just in time to grow up amidst the poverty of the Great Depression (his crib was a dresser drawer). At age eight he was already finding whatever odd jobs he could to help support Mom, Dad, and a younger brother: delivering milk and newspapers, working for the local butcher. By fourteen he was working three different jobs.

What little spare time he had was spent bodybuilding, and he soon transformed himself into a formidable, well-muscled bruiser. “There was nothing of the long-haired poet about schoolboy Connery,” recalls one of his classmates. “He was big, and he was as hard as nails in an easygoing way, and anyone at school who messed him about got a thick ear and a black eye.” After opening up a can of whoop-ass on a gang of local bullies one day, kids on the street started respectfully calling him “Big Tam.” Later “Shane” became an alternate moniker, inspired by the 1953 film. According to one version of the story, years of neighborhood use eventually corrupted Shane into Sean, and thus Tommy Connery’s reputation for toughness earned him the name that would one day adorn theater marquees around the world.

From early on, Sean found himself looking for some way to escape the claustrophobic slums of postwar Edinburgh, where generations of lower-class workers slaved away in quiet toil only to have sons and grandsons repeat the whole business ad infinitum. At sixteen he abandoned school and joined the Merchant Navy (a pair of tattoos stenciled on his right forearm — “Mum and Dad” and “Scotland Forever” — gave him the requisite Popeye look), but a year later he was mustered out on medical grounds from an ulcer. He spent the rest of his teens bumming around town as an “odd-job man”: steelworker, road worker, coal delivery man, cement-mixer, lifeguard, artist’s model, newspaper press-room worker, and bouncer at the local Big Band dance hall.

It was while serving as a polisher of tables and coffins that a co-worker introduced him to stagehand work at King’s Theater, and the exposure gave Connery the acting bug. When he and a friend later went to London to compete in the Mr. Universe contest on a lark (Connery says he placed third in the tall men’s class, others insist he didn’t make the cut), his ears perked up when someone mentioned that the touring show for South Pacific was on the lookout for burly actors who could sing. Connery crashed the audition, won a job, and was soon traveling all around the British Isles performing six evenings a week as a grunt in the chorus.

Mingling with professional actors for the first time prompted the high-school dropout to begin educating himself with Ibsen, Proust, Tolstoy, Stanislavski, and Thomas Wolfe. At a party he met another young actor named Maurice Micklewhite, and soon the two blue-collar thespians were commiserating about their troublesome accents (a Scottish brogue in Connery’s case, a Cockney twang for Micklewhite). This new pal would eventually change his name too, inspired by a 1954 Bogart movie poster, and thereafter Sean Connery and Michael Caine would remain lifelong friends.

Connery’s athletic prowess was such that, after a soccer match between the cast of South Pacific and a local team, he was offered a professional contract with Manchester United. After thinking over his options, however, he turned it down, choosing instead to keep hammering away at the frustrating but ultimately fulfilling acting game. “One of my more intelligent moves,” Connery later quipped.

A lucky break came when Jack Palance suddenly pulled out of a BBC production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, causing the director to take a wild chance on a physically imposing but still largely untested Scotsman. Connery put in countless hours of practice learning his lines and molding a serviceable American accent, and when the play appeared on TV reviews were good. In the wake of this success, Twentieth-Century Fox’s British office signed the twenty-seven-year-old to a studio contract. which Connery would later say was akin to “walking through a swamp in a bad dream.” Over a period of years Fox didn’t use him in a single project, choosing instead to occasionally loan him out to other studios for a quick buck.

Terence Young, who would direct three early Bond films (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball), remembers working with the young Connery on an early movie shoot. “He came to me and said in that very Scots accent of his, ‘Sir, am I going to be a success in this?’” Touched by this display of hopeful innocence, and impressed by his raw if unfinished talent, the director leveled with the struggling actor: “No — but keep on swimming. Just keep at it, and I’ll make it up to you.”

And that’s exactly what Connery did, acting in whatever films Fox loaned him out for. One day, on the set of Another Time, Another Place (1958) co-starring Lana Turner, her notorious hoodlum boyfriend Johnny Stompanato stormed the set and began waving a gun at the Scotsman, threatening to pump Connery full of holes if he should touch the legendary beauty. In an instant the Big Tam of old roared to life, leaping out of his chair like a panther, twisting the gun away, and sending the gangster flying with a wallop to his nose. Still later Connery would star in the one high-point of his Fox contract: Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), a performance made possible by a timely loan-out of the actor to Disney. The film was the usual Magic Kingdom success (Connery’s rendition of “Pretty Irish Girl” was even released on the radio as a single), and ultimately it would become an instrumental stepping stone to Bond.

Throughout the Fifties various parties had optioned the rights to James Bond, but all of those efforts resulted in nothing more than a single, mediocre 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale. It wasn’t until the early Sixties that a pair of aging, on-the-rocks movie producers named Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman made the whole thing work. Crucially, after negotiating the rights, they hired Terence Young as their director. Soon after getting the gig, Young attended a play in England and noticed that one of the muscular figures up on stage looked familiar. It was that kid — Sean what’s-his-name — who had so impressed him years earlier. Remembering his old promise to give him a boost someday, the wheels started turning: could this fellow possibly handle the Bond assignment?

He mentioned Connery to Broccoli, who did his own research by taking his wife to see a reissue screening of Darby O’Gill. When she began panting over the actor’s raw sex appeal, the producer’s interest was piqued. One meeting later and Connery had the job. “He bounced across the street like he was Superman,” marveled Broccoli about their first encounter. “He moved like a cat. That did it for us. Harry and I both said, ‘This is the guy.’”

“We’d never seen a surer guy,” Saltzman added. “Or a more arrogant sonofabitch!” Connery later explained that he deliberately gave off that impression during their initial confrontation. “My strength as an actor, I think, is that I’ve stayed close to the core of myself, which has something to do with a voice, a music, a tune that’s very much tied up with my background experience.” That voice, that music, harkens back to the mean streets of the Edinburgh slums, when a muscled kid named Big Tam once faced down gangsters and gained the respect of the neighborhood.

The execs at United Artists weren’t convinced by Broccoli and Saltzman’s enthusiasm, cabling them back from America with a curt request to “See if you can do better.” But the minds of the two producing partners were all made up. “Put a bit of veneer on that tough Scottish hide,” Broccoli promised, “and you’ve got Fleming’s Bond instead of all the mincing poofs we had apply for the job.”

The “bit of veneer” was provided by director Young, a man of fine tastes and manners who took Big Tam under his wing and taught him how to act sophisticated. Young decked Connery out in the finest clothes from Savile Row using his own tailor, and continually coached the actor in the nuances of creating a polished performance (“Sean, do keep your mouth shut while chewing your food!” “Tone down that bloody Scottish brogue!”). Soon Connery was looking and acting the part, to the point where movie critic Pauline Kael would gush that, “Connery looks absolutely confident in himself as a man. Women want to meet him and men want to be him. I don’t know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much.”

Although the transformation sent the movie’s producers over the moon, the character’s creator took a bit more convincing. “I don’t think [Ian Fleming] approved of me terribly,” Connery later said. “But he did have casting rights over the film, so I guess he must have come round to the idea.” Fleming initially dismissed Connery as “that laborer playing Bond,” but once the first few films were successful he changed his tune, going so far as to adopt Connery’s Scottish background for the Bond of the books.

For those of us who wish Connery could have played Bond all the way up to the present day, the way his participation in the series ended was unfortunate. Compared to what Broccoli and Saltzman were making, Connery’s share of the burgeoning 007 pie was small, with only a fixed salary and a bit of profit participation to offset all the hell that Bond’s fame was playing with his life. Meanwhile, his image was being used on all manner of merchandise (toys, cars, aftershave — hundreds of products in all) without him getting so much as a cent for it:

I was paying 98% tax. I was making all this money and making movies and I had nothing. . . . Basically I’m a private person, and the Bond producers wouldn’t let me be that. I’d work six days a week, all day, with much of the work physical, then have to spend every free moment answering stupid questions like, “Do you like to beat people up? Slap women around?”

As the character’s popularity reached insane levels with the release of Goldfinger, Terence Young (slated to direct Bond’s next adventure, Thunderball) sensed Connery’s dismay with his stardom, and advised the producers that they would be wise to take the actor on as a full partner. “He’s a Scotsman,” Young argued. “He likes the sound of gold coins clinking together. He likes that lovely soft rustle of paper. He’ll stay with you if he’s a partner, but not if you use him as a hired employee.” Broccoli and Saltzman rejected the idea out of hand. In their opinion, Connery was getting more than enough for his trouble, and could be replaced fairly easily if needed. “All I ever did to Sean Connery,” Broccoli later said, “was make him an international star and a very, very wealthy man.”

Insulted by their stinginess and tired of the demands put on his time and life, Connery would grudgingly finish out his contract with Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967), then after a one-film hiatus commit to a final movie, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), so that he could donate his million-dollar paycheck to charity. But even as he appreciated what 007 did for his career, he left the fold with bitter feelings towards the two producers who, in his judgment, got filthy rich while he did most of the heavy lifting. “I’ve been screwed by more people than a hooker,” he said in disgust at the end of his run with the Broccoli outfit. “Bond’s been good to me, but I’ve done my bit. I’m out.”

And except for thumbing his nose at his erstwhile employers with the non-Broccoli-produced Never Say Never Again (1982), he’s stayed out. Like another veteran actor, Gene Hackman, Connery retired almost a decade ago and hasn’t looked back. He now spends his days enjoying “golf, food and drink,” that first item being a passion developed in 1964 while training for Bond’s epic match against The Man With The Midas Touch in Goldfinger.

Decades after his own stint, Connery was asked whether he had any advice to offer the then-new Bond, Timothy Dalton. His answer was only half-joking: “I hope he has a good lawyer.”

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at (and a listen to) the iconic music of Goldfinger.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Sean Connery: Neither Shaken nor Stirred by Andrew Yule. (Also published as Sean Connery: From 007 to Hollywood Icon.) The world is chock-full of Sean Connery biographies, even though he’s kept pretty mum about his personal life in the decades since he gave up being Bond. I found this one to stand out above the rest by virtue of its anecdotes fueled by superior research and original interviews.

Sean Connery singing “Pretty Irish Girl” in Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959). This great live-action movie is of a kind that Disney gave up making long ago. Judge for yourself whether Cubby Broccoli’s wife was right when she thought that ol’ Big Tam displayed here the requisite sex appeal for his future role as James Bond.

Barbara Walters vs. Sean Connery! Watch Walters ambush Connery in typical leftist sneak-attack fashion, pitting her practiced feminist high dudgeon against his relaxed masculinity. Will he crack under the withering disapproval of this liberal-news-network Lady Macbeth? Or will he end up, in typical Bond fashion, “Neither Shaken Nor Stirred”?

Sean Connery — AFI Award Tribute. A nice 2006 career-capping speech from a class act.

That’s pretty complicated stuff, especially in 1947 before blasphemy and defiling God became a Hollywood resume enhancer. But nothing about this lovely Christmas film with a great big spiritual heart seems complicated at all thanks to a deft script that gives each of its characters a simple dignity, and Grant, who effectively adds a subtle layer of darkness to Dudley that works almost on a subconscious level. 

And what a wonderful film to spend a couple of hours with. Photographed by the legendary Gregg Toland, the holiday spirit leaps from the screen in every snow-covered scene.  Christmas shopping, ice skating, choirs, churches, decorations, and the time-honored tradition of buying a tree. You don’t watch “The Bishops Wife,” you visit for a couple hours as you’re transported — not to the way life is or was — but somewhere better: the way life ought to be.

The cast is the likes of which we will never see again. Monty Woolley oozes warmth as a sweet old history professor feeling his age, tired of hollow intellectualism and looking for faith. The always delightful James Gleason is just as memorable as Sylvester, the gruff cabbie brought back to life on a pair ice skates, and Elsa Lanchester manages to steal most of the big laughs as Matilda, the bishop’s nervous, scattered housekeeper.

As Dudley’s prickly, difficult charge, Niven deserves credit for managing to not get lost playing straight man to all of this, and the luminous Young is just as impressive as Grant playing a faithful wife and mother drawn to the attentive, somewhat roguish Dudley. 

Magical, charming and ultimately bittersweet, in the end, “The Bishop’s Wife” is not about  the power of angels or spirits from on high. It’s about the power of the human spirit and how true monuments to God aren’t built from brick and mortar, but in how carefully we tend to our relationships with the people we love.

You can see the full list here.

In an age where Dreamworks’ feeds us a steady diet of kung-fu pandas and boogie-in-your-butt lemurs voiced by the guy that gave us Borat, three-to-thirteen year olds have a place to fill up on some traditional values – Disney/Pixar.  

My wife and I took our 6-year old boy to see Up on Saturday to a packed movie theater in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood.  All we heard in the theater was laughing, deep emotion and applause. And why not?  Up is film that, had it been produced with live actors decades ago, may have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.  It is classic American storytelling – true love, big dreams, self-reliance and fierce determination. It doesn’t need gimmicks, politically correct characters or audience focus-group testing to determine its destination.  It relies on Russell, who misses his Dad, and Carl Fredricksen, a lost old curmudgeon grieving over the death of his wife – they get us where we’re going.  You know them – they’re the sort of folks we see and meet most everyday.  

It’s crystal clear — the golden age of animation has returned to the American cinema since Pixar made Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and Up.  Pixar virtually invented CGI animation, but masters such as John Lasseter, Brad Bird and others have remembered that dazzling audiences with the computer doesn’t really matter if you can’t remember to have healthy dose of humanity.  Case-in-point: the exchange between 8-year-old Russell to old man Fredricksen – when walking though the jungles of South America, Russell recounts a simple day with his estranged Dad as they counted cars on the curb of a local ice cream shop. “That might sound boring,” Russell says with a flushed face, “but it’s what I remember most.”  

“Wonder and interest doesn’t have to come out of pizazz and spectacle and huge ideas. … I always knew that the power came from the small, and not from the big,” Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Newsweek earlier this year. Oh, there may not be any sure-fire Happy Meal spin-offs, or top-40 hip-hop smash hits in Up, but that’s never what has made lasting, and ultimately successful, cinema. 

With all this good feeling, there has to be a catch, right?  Sure!  More and more, Pixar is coming under scrutiny from feminist critics who would rather see female lead characters featured in their films. Seemingly, themes on the the do-not-call-attention-to-list are a father’s undying quest for the well being of a son (Nemo), the willpower and love of an elderly man (Up) or the robot love of Wall-E (apparently, even though the female robot was clearly superior – the film was named after the male robot, and thus, inviting to criticism).  

But, hey – it’s summer.  Can’t we all just get along? If you want to remember how glorious it is to find true love, to dream the dreams of a child and then find out how life ends up after all that falls apart, Up is your movie…

No kidding, professor.

No, really, they are. I don’t mean in all the right places, of course, but somewhere else, with movies, in enjoying the things we see in the movies. 

I remember seeing Gunga Din (1939) for the first time and knowing from the opening shot that this was my kind of film. This was a guy film. Not a wishy-washy movie filled up with dance numbers and kissing scenes, but a guy flick. Great guy stuff was in this movie, and I was sold on it from the first pounding of that thunderous mighty gong. When Alfred Newman’s score turned from playful to ominous faster than you can say, ‘trouble in Tantrapur’, I knew I was in for a good one. This was the kind of movie you watched on a Saturday afternoon with your dad or with your pals. This was adventure! 

There’s no way, I had always thought, that a girl can appreciate this kind of film, that she can ‘get into’ Gunga Din and get out of it what I got out of it. There’s just no way. Would she be able to feel the same way I did, the way other guys do, when watching Victor McLaglen face quickly turn from stone to fraudulent smile as he tries to trick his buddy? Can she feel the same rush of pride when hearing the trumpet scream the battle cry, or when seeing the Sikh Cavalry charge against the 400 horsemen of Kali? Does she get choked up along with Mac, Cutter and Bal when Montagu Love reads Kipling’s reflective poem in that final scene? Is modern woman capable of this? Or will she be more concerned with the sole female character in the story, trying, naturally, to relate to her instead? These things I wondered. Yet, I was as certain of the answers to these questions as I was of Sergeant Ballantine’s destiny. No woman could do these things, bridge that crevasse away from the familiar into pure guy territory, where it’s always double drill and no canteen. It just isn’t done. 

But guess what? I was wrong. Completely wrong. In fact, I’ll go out on an already shaky rope bridge here and state I’ve never met a woman who didn’t like Gunga Din. That’s right, not one.  Sure, it’s got funny and handsome Cary Grant – what woman doesn’t love Cary? For that matter, what man doesn’t want to be him, including? And it’s got the dashing Douglas Fairbanks Jr. with that infectious smile and shock of hair that falls down great when he lunges with either saber, pistol or right hook into an opponent.  I mean, let’s face it, what female doesn’t like to watch these two guys at rest or in motion? But that’s not it, that’s not the reason they like Gunga Din, well not completely, anyway. 

I believe it’s actually closer to what happens in the scene in the temple when our three British soldiers plus one, are caught and imprisoned in the confines of that locked dungeon, complete with pit of snakes. Comically, with torture and certain death if they don’t figure a way out soon, all the ‘proud ox’ MacChesney can think of is retrieving Sergeant Ballantine’s signed reenlistment form, securing his buddy’s companionship and saving him from what he believes is a death far worse than any pit of snakes could ever inflict: married life.  The means he goes about trying to get his hands on that paper is a joy to behold. His phony fear of snakes and being lashed again is, like so many other Victor McLaglen moments, lovable and priceless.  It really is, I believe, this kind of friendly sparring and not so much the looks and charm of the other two leading men, that is the key. The loyalty, friendship and devotion to one’s chums, the camaraderie replete with fun-loving jabs and good natured mocking is what wins the day for the viewer and makes these kinds of films work so well and on so many personally appealing levels.   

An equally shocking discovery I made about Gunga Din is that not only do the women I know love this movie, but that they dislike the love interest, the fiance, Emmy with equal passion. No, not for the cliched reasons like ‘she’s not a strong character’ and all that baloney. No, that’s not it. And anyway, it’s not true since, under the circumstances, she’s pretty darn strong. So what don’t they like about her? The same thing George Stevens, Ben Hecht and I don’t like about her. They hate what she’s trying to do. The women I know hate the fact that Sergeant Ballantine’s lover wants to take him away from his pals, from the adventure, from life itself, to go into the tea business, of all things. They, like Cutter and Mac, want that siren to fail.

In real life there are not many women who would give up a life of luxury, lucrative profits in a very promising business in order to let a husband run off and reenlist in the thankless job of Her Majesty’s service. Nor are there many women who want their men to go up against elephants on rope bridges or Kali worshiping stranglers as a line of work. Not many at all. Probably not even one. And that makes a lot of sense. So, why do women when watching Gunga Din want Bal to join Cutter and Mac (and Din) and do precisely that in the movie? Is the answer simply to be explained away as yet another unfathomable layer of the complex nature of woman, the incomprehensibility of the fairer sex to the brutish mind of man? 

Beats me. 

So, I asked myself, why do women want a fellow woman’s plans stopped, granted not in the same feverish way Eduardo Ciannelli’s high priest wants to stop the British Empire with his much copied crescendo-building “Kill for the Love of Killing” speech, but definitely stopped. Why do women want Cutter and Mac to succeed in their scheme to reenlist their friend and take him away from the woman in the story?  This question puzzled me. It nagged at my inner man. Then, one day, quite unexpectedly,  I had an epiphany, a stroke of genius. It was one of those ‘eureka moments’, the kind you hear about, the kind that make you jump out of the bath, covered in soapy suds and run out into the street yelling at the top of your lungs, “I’VE GOT IT!! I’VE GOT IT!!” 

For the record, I’d suggest not expressing yourself in that way, exactly. Unless, of course you have a very good lawyer or a burning desire to see the inside of a psychiatric ward.  I have neither, so it’s fortunate that I came to my senses before I cleared the door jam and therefore was not forced to scribe this article onto a thick stone wall with a dull spoon. 

What I figured out amongst the bubbles was this: Women want men. Again, no kidding. No, hold on. That’s not it, exactly. Women want other men. Wait a minute, that’s not quite right, either. Let’s try again. Women want what other women want and that includes men. Yeah, that’s what I mean, sort of. 

Or to put it another way, in the form of a question, I came up with this: What woman, besides Joan Fontaine’s Emmy, would desire a domesticated Douglas Fairbanks who does very little else aside from selling tea and reading the paper? None. What woman would want a Douglas Fairbanks riding a horse, crossing swords with bad guys, getting trapped, imprisoned, escaping “by sheer strategy alone” and saving not only his chums, but the whole bloomin’ regiment, king and country, with a little help from his friends? 

Every woman, that’s who! At least I think so. 

Because, that’s the figure of a man. A man acts. He doesn’t necessarily think. For good or bad, he just does. And then another revelation occurred to me, not at the same time, thankfully, and not involving suds, but still noteworthy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have a theory about men and women and it sort of ties in with all of this. I’ll restate part of it here briefly:

Men are simple. Women are complicated. 

Men live in the past. Women live in the future.  

(I have a sneaking suspicion children are the only ones who live in the present)

Here’s the big one: 

Women plan. Men dream.

When men become more like women – no not that way -  but when they stop dreaming as men dream, stop being reckless, stop living the adventure, stop thinking anything is possible (even if it clearly isn’t), stop acting, stop doing, when they cease to do these things, be these things, something has happened to them. 

They’ve grown old.

What I mean is, they’ve given up the ability to dream. They may not be old in years, but in spirit they are dusty cobwebs. They may not even know it happened to them until much later, well after the woman in their lives knows it. That’s something I’ll have to remind myself of from time to time, no doubt. 

When I think on other films that are called ‘guy flicks’ or ‘buddy movies’ there are so many that I love that I won’t even attempt to begin to list them. I will say, though, that along with Gunga Din (1939), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Sea Hawk (1940), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Sahara (1943), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) are some of my favorite guy movies of all time, which honor things like honor, duty and the undying capacity to dream large, even when all around them is a nightmare. These are films I never get tired of watching, nor ever will. There are others, lots more, and even some that are more recent, that have similar appeal. Braveheart comes to mind. But for the most part, these newer films are missing something that their predecessors have.  Maybe it’s the technicolor, or the monochrome for that matter, or just maybe, it’s the writing, the way in which dialogue plays such a dominant role in shaping the characters. I tend to think that’s the reason. Then again, maybe it’s just because I saw most of them as a kid. Who knows? Not me, and frankly, I don’t think I really want to know.  Because I’d rather dream. 

But, yes, these are some of my favorites, and it’s interesting that all of them, yes, all of them, are some of my female friends’ favorites as well. What does that say? That I hang around a bunch of butch chicks? No, I hope it doesn’t say that. It says that there are films about men, that don’t get all mushy, that women truly love for the same reasons men do. It says that women can sit and watch a film about men with no female character they can associate with, or even like in the story and come away thoroughly thrilled at the outcome. 

So, are these guy flicks, or not? I guess not. They’re more than that. They’re great flicks. They speak to both men and women as loud and clear as Din’s trumpeting. But how are they able to do that? What do they have in common? They were all written by people who could write. Sure they are genre, but they aren’t hackneyed, formulaic. And most of all, they weren’t supposed to appeal to just men, or just women, or just kids, or just adults. They were meant to be enjoyed by everyone. Their message however politically incorrect some may find it, is universal.  And that’s why they are hard to find nowadays. Because today, it’s all about pitching to a niche. Everything has to have a target audience, a market to aim for, a demographic to appease, please and all to often, pander to. 

Great films don’t do that. Not guy flicks, not chick flicks, not any flicks. Great is great. And great films charge ahead into the breech not caring what this or that group thinks is proper or offensive. We’re missing that kind of courage today.  And our culture is suffering because of it.  These days, we hear a lot about so-called controversial films. Yet no filmmaker seems daring enough to take a chance at being great, at dreaming large. Why should they when it’s so much easier to pander? 

There’s a scene in another great, though entirely different film that captures and defines the essence of what a man is, what he wishes he was, and what he wants other men to see him as. 

At the end of The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager takes his Lockheed F-104 Starfighter up to where the sky ends and space itself begins. He’s so far up that there isn’t enough oxygen in the air to fully power the turbine anymore. His engine quits. He spins out of control amongst the vast stars and great heavens above, falling to earth like Icarus with melted wings. 

But unlike the Greek, there is no ocean to catch him. Only the brutally harsh and unforgiving desert of Edwards. 

With frantic eyes peering past hope at the funereal black smoke on the horizon, the ambulance driver suddenly spots a lone figure in the distance walking toward them, shimmering in the blurry heat like a mirage – or a god. We see he is burnt, bloody and limping. It’s Yeager, and he’s carrying his helmet and parachute. 

“Is that a man?”, the driver asks Ridley, fellow test pilot and Yeager’s best friend. 

Grinning ear to ear, Ridley replies, “You’re damn right it is!”

Something tells me Emmy would agree.

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.”

In his now-famous 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne recalled his own loathing for the film:

Everyone says High Noon was a great picture because [Dmitri] Tiomkin wrote some great music for it and because Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly were in it. In the picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to church and asks for help and the guys go, “Oh well, oh gee.” And the women stand up and say, “You rats, you rats.” So Cooper goes out alone. It’s the most un-American thing I ever saw in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it.

Some critics like to nitpick and remind us that Cooper doesn’t actually step on his discarded tin star, but Wayne’s then-twenty-year-old memory is plenty close enough for government work. The conclusion of High Noon (former President Bill Clinton’s favorite movie, natch) has marshal Will Kane casting his badge into the dirt with a sneer, his features oozing contempt for the yellow-bellied townsfolk he defended. “That was like belittling a medal of honor,” Wayne seethed privately to his friends. And even as he graciously did his pal Gary Cooper the favor of stepping up at the 1953 Academy Awards and accepting the Best Actor Oscar for High Noon on Cooper’s behalf, the Duke began thinking about how such a role should have been played, and how he might someday use his superstar clout to craft the same basic story according to his own sensibilities. A story where the town didn’t cringe and run, but instead backed the marshal with their guns and their lives against the black-souled gangsters arrayed against them. A story which would ennoble America, flaws and all, instead of soiling her with a revisionist history at odds with how the brave pioneers of the west really acted.

Hawks agreed and, reinvigorated by the prospect of the film, he commissioned a script from the talented pulp writer Leigh Brackett, with whom he had previously collaborated on The Big Sleep (1946). He was re-invoking cinematic first principles, determined to “go back and try to get a little of the spirit we used to make pictures with.” Instead of High Noon’s straitjacket of a script, featuring automatons in the service of a preordained ideological payoff, Hawks strove to create characters that threatened to derail the plot with unpredictable and shamelessly entertaining personalities. In the place of a grim, constipated marshal standing alone and without help, Hawks envisioned a good-natured hero whose bacon is saved at every turn by the intervention of his colorful assortment of friends, in between raucous bouts of drinking, smoking, showering, shaving, shooting, kissing and singing — not necessarily in that order.

A big part of Hollywood’s Golden-Age spirit stemmed from the excellent writing to be found in many movies from the 1930s and ’40s. The best of these had wonderfully witty dialogue, spoken by characters so vibrant and alive that they fairly leaped off the screen and into the audience’s hearts. It’s worth remembering that underneath the gunshots and barroom brawls of Bravo is the clever and mischievous mind that once gave audiences hilarious screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Monkey Business (1952). “We used to use comedy whenever we could,” Hawks remembered about his early years in Hollywood, “and then we got too serious about it. So, in Rio Bravo I imagine there are almost as many laughs as if we had started out to make a comedy.”

One of the things modern filmgoers often forget is that movies like Bravo once played on big screens to packed audiences, eliciting massive laughs from scenes that we now watch alone in our living rooms on DVD with scarcely a murmur. Hawks once explained his particular brand of humor thusly:

I like things like — I think it was in Rio Bravo — Wayne went over to a man and said, “So nobody ran in here?” Some man said, “Nobody ran in here.” And Wayne went like this and hit him right across here with a gun so blood was coming all over his face. And Dean Martin said, “Take it easy, Chance.” And Wayne turned and said, “I’m not going to hurt him.” The audience laughed so at that.

Howard Hawks is often cited for his unobtrusive nature, his lack of a palpable style compared to other great directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. But this is a gross underestimation of a man that contributed far more to his films than he is given credit for. Rather than use the camera for an assortment of clever movements designed to catch the Academy’s attention come Oscar-time, Hawks used a minimalist compositional palette that refused to pan, crane or dolly ostentatiously. The results are often startlingly unique. Under Hawks’ direction, the first four minutes of Rio Bravo became a near-pantomime without a single word of dialogue, an apparent homage to the silent movies he had cut his teeth on so long ago. The next time you watch Bravo pay close attention to the compositions, most of which are medium-wide shots, with the camera at chest level. There are virtually no close-ups in the picture, a gutsy decision at a time when technique was becoming far more elaborate in Hollywood fare. In hindsight, it was a bold choice that enhanced the languorous, easygoing byplay between the film’s charismatic stars. Director Michael Powell once said that Hawks “had a very deep understanding of people, what was inside people.” The relaxed purposefulness of Rio Bravo’s confident compositions allows a rare richness of character to shine through.

Characters are the most important elements of any Hawks movie. By 1958 he had concluded that “audiences were getting tired of plots….But if you keep them from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest…It’s when a character believes in something that a situation happens, not because you write it to happen.” Hawks had an unparalleled flair for consciously using detail to expertly reveal character. All throughout the production of Rio Bravo, he would sit silently as the actors rehearsed their scenes, ever on the lookout for ways to organically grow their motivations cinematically, thereby creating deep wells of subtext without clubbing the audience over the head with a screaming, obvious M-E-S-S-A-G-E. Here’s Hawks describing just one example out of hundreds that he seized on to make the movie what it is:

In Rio Bravo, Dean Martin had a bit in which he was required to roll a cigarette. His fingers weren’t equal to it and Wayne kept passing him cigarettes. All of a sudden you realize that they are awfully good friends or he wouldn’t be doing it. That grew out of Martin’s asking me one day, “Well, if my fingers are shaky, how can I roll this thing?” So Wayne said, “Here, I’ll hand you one,” and suddenly we had something going.

Most crucially, it was director Hawks who crafted John Wayne’s character into a master not only of action but of reaction, in the process establishing an overriding feeling of camaraderie that makes the film endlessly rewatchable. “John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on screen,” Hawks claimed, and yet by dint of directorial will the star of Rio Bravo becomes everyone else’s straight man. During the course of the plot the Duke gets socked by Dean Martin (twice!), is verbally out-dueled by the precocious Ricky Nelson, suffers the outrageous behavior of Walter Brennan, is relentlessly teased by the ever-flirtatious Angie Dickinson, and is continuously rescued by all of the above. “You give everybody else the fireworks,” Wayne grumbled to Hawks at one point, “but I have to carry the damn thing.”

And yet Hawks knew that, with a universe of talents at his disposal, Wayne’s secret weapon was always his generosity and humility as an actor, his penchant for binding himself and his ego to the needs of a picture. He was unparalleled in his ability to lend his potent movie-star glow to others in a scene, holding up the entire business like a grizzled, enduring Atlas. For Rio Bravo, the breakthrough came during one of Dean Martin’s many set-pieces, while Wayne was standing aside and watching glumly as Martin got to once again chew up the scenery with his performance. “What do I do while he’s playing all of these good scenes?” he finally asked Hawks in frustration.

“Well,” Hawks replied, “you look at him as a friend.”

Suddenly everything Hawks had been striving for, the entire emotional spectrum he was meticulously constructing, became clear. And throughout the finished Rio Bravo, you can go to any point and see the spectacular results of Wayne embracing Hawks’ perceptive direction. Watch, for instance, the scene after Walter Brennan’s character Stumpy has almost killed Dean Martin by carelessly shooting at him through the jailhouse door. Wayne stands by as Brennan, one of the all-time great scene-stealing character actors, goes through an entire blabbering monologue of words and emotions that covers denial, mortification, and finally a resigned acceptance of responsibility. It’s all great stuff, hugely entertaining — but look closely at Wayne. Not a word spoken, not a single word. And yet his pitch-perfect reactions to each of Brennan’s lines gives the scene its touching pathos and power.

Wayne spends virtually the entire film loaning his star power to others in this fashion, not acting so much as reacting, and using those reactions to give his co-stars a much brighter spotlight in which to shine. Indisputably, we have Howard Hawks to thank for that. The Duke was known to sometimes distrust and argue with lesser directors, but along with John Ford only Howard Hawks commanded his absolute respect. “Hawks I trust with my life,” he once declared, a sentiment amply proven by the fearless bigheartedness of his performance in Rio Bravo. Both star and director were so happy with the way their collaboration went (only their second time working together after Red River eleven years before) that they more or less remade the same plot twice more in later years, as El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). The relationship was a special one. Long after both Hawks and Wayne had died, Peter Bogdanovich (who knew both) recalled in an interview that “The last times I saw both Cary Grant and John Wayne, they both talked about Howard, about missing him.”

What they missed — the desideratum of Hawks’ personality and artistry — can be sensed within every frame of Rio Bravo. The film features old friends (Bravo marked the twenty-second and final time that John Wayne and Ward Bond — a delightful character actor and Wayne’s best friend — would appear together in a movie), old props (in Bravo, Wayne wears the same, now-rumpled hat he wore twenty years earlier in his breakout role in Stagecoach [1939]), and old music (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” was created by adding new lyrics to a theme previously used in Red River a decade earlier). Surrounding all of this are seemingly endless moments of pure character-driven pleasure. Wayne scooping up a sleeping Angie Dickinson like a kindly father and carrying her to her room. Ricky Nelson taking a nervous drag on his cigarette and a deep breath of courage before brashly heading out the door to kill or be killed. Dean Martin pouring a glass of booze back into the bottle, hands steady as steel, finally conquering his demons. Wayne kissing Brennan on the top of his head and getting his ass swatted by the business end of a broom in return. And above all, that marvelous singing interlude in the jail, a masterstroke that releases the audience’s built-up tension via a sustained sequence of pure fraternal joy.

If there is a single criticism of Rio Bravo that grates above all others, it is the widely-held idea that the jailhouse duet between Martin and Nelson is a major artistic misstep, superfluous and corny. Nonsense. The memorable scene in question occurs almost two hours in. For much of the film, the audience has endured a mournful and threatening Spanish dirge called “El Degüello” (“a throat-slitting”), rumored to have been played by Santa Anna’s troops to the doomed defenders of the Alamo to weaken their resolve. It’s a song the villains play to signify “no quarter,” and as it begins to grate on the heroes’ nerves in Rio Bravo, we the audience worry right along with them. Then, deep in the movie, in a gripping emotional scene, Dean Martin with great agony renounces the bottle and regains his manhood. Finally, at long last, all four men are united in purpose, their doubts behind them. At that exact moment Hawks gives us a much-needed respite via the relaxed singing in the jailhouse. Coming on the heels of all that dramatic strain, it serves as a massive, cathartic release, a musical sunset after the long storms of the first two acts. It is male bonding on a par with the protagonists of Jaws (1975) comparing scars and warbling “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” It is the cementing of an oath-bound brotherhood between friends.

As Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing, we get lingering reaction shots of Brennan and Wayne appreciating the music — the first relaxed, genuine smiles we’ve seen for a long time. We listen as Dude and Colorado effortlessly merge their voices and complement each other, the beginnings of the teamwork that will become so important in the trials ahead. Stumpy asks Colorado to play something that he can sing along with, and Nelson obliges, bringing Brennan into the emotional core that has formed. This is one of the very few scenes without arguing or bickering of any kind — it’s a peek into the true feelings of a pseudo-family newly formed to confront a daunting menace. By the end of two songs, these disparate personalities have gained a much deeper sense of friendship and fidelity. We the audience have seen them at their most human — not as cardboard cutout plot points, but as people with longings and heartaches and dreams beyond the dusty and dangerous present. It’s the kind of scene that couldn’t possibly exist in a film like High Noon, with its relentless cynicism and sense of betrayal. And that, of course, is the point. “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” has become a thematic mirror-image to the sinister “El Degüello,” and it’s no coincidence that, late in the picture, Hawks has the former tune playing on the barroom piano in the hotel, serving as as a subtle, triumphant reminder of which song — and which worldview and moral code — has won the day.

Strangely, Hawks’ potent cinematic iconography seems to be lost on many of Rio Bravo’s most ardent admirers. Director John Carpenter has called Hawks “the greatest American director,” and he not only made Rio Bravo’s plot the template for his Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), he also remade Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951) as The Thing (1982) starring Kurt Russell. Neo-noir director Quentin Tarantino also reveres Rio Bravo, to the point of using it to screen potential girlfriends — if she doesn’t like Bravo, she’s outta there. And yet while the films of Carpenter and Tarantino possess many shallow Hawksian trademarks — groups of men struggling in environments poised on the razor’s edge of danger, conversations so hectic and colorful they threaten to derail the plot — they seem to pay scant attention to the emotional resonance Hawks strove to achieve. Film critic Robin Wood, who wrote what is by far the single best book-length treatment of Hawks and his films, notes that, “Hawks is not really a modern artist…he is a survivor from the past, whose work has never been afflicted with this disease of self-consciousness. An artist like Hawks can only exist within a strong and vital tradition.” Too often, a “disease of self-consciousness” overwhelms the work of directors like Carpenter and Tarantino, as they mimic the techniques and plot elements of Hawks without capturing (or indeed, hardly seeming aware of) the “strong and vital tradition” that makes his best films worth remembering in the first place.

Modern film critics, on the other hand, often recognize Hawks’ heart and soul, but just as often they tend to dismiss them with jaded cynicism. The late Pauline Kael, long the High Priestess of The New Yorker’s film criticism department, once sniffed around the edges of Rio Bravo and approvingly declared it a “semi-satiric western pastiche…silly, but with zest; there are some fine action sequences, and the performers seem to be enjoying their roles.” Satiric was a favored adjective of Miss Kael’s whenever she felt the need to explain away the pesky traditional mores of a film she otherwise liked. She also judged The Right Stuff (1983) to be “often satiric,” and for films that celebrated conservative values too unambiguously to laugh off — think Dirty Harry (1971) — she’d pull out the critical napalm and call it fascist. Liberals struggling to justify their forbidden love for John Wayne westerns often adopt such views. In Rio Bravo’s case, the argument usually goes: It’s a cult film, man. A hip film. It’s satiric, dude. Knowingly silly. So determinedly un-cool as to be super-cool.

I beg to differ. Dr. Strangelove (1964) is satiric. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is satiric. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is satiric.

Rio Bravo, in all of its particulars, is sincere.

A full half-century after its release, Howard Hawks’ masterwork still epitomizes the essential qualities that made Hollywood’s Golden Age glitter. It’s a nostalgic old man’s love song to the “spirit we used to make pictures with,” a movie that loves its characters — and through them its audience — with a sincerity that soothes like a shot of whiskey chased by a mouthful of warm apple pie. For fifty years now audiences have loved it back, with an ardor that is equally unabashed and unadorned. The song that haunts Rio Bravo is a elegiac melody celebrating humanity, friendship, honor, and tradition, all treasured parts of the deep, eternal river of memory that ever rolls through the God-fearing American soul.

By the memory of a song,
While the river Rio Bravo flows along….

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Buy the two-disc special edition DVD of Rio Bravo at Amazon. Rio Bravo is also available on Blu-ray.

Add Rio Bravo to your Netflix queue.

Buy Howard Hawks, a clearly-written, thoughtful critical volume by noted cinéaste Robin Wood.

Buy Howard Hawks: Interviews, a meaty collection of conversations with the master director.

Buy Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, the definitive biography by Todd McCarthy.

If you are ever down Arizona way, visit Old Tucson Studios, where the exteriors for Rio Bravo were shot.

View some great behind-the-scenes pictures from the set of Rio Bravo at Life magazine, The Dino Lounge, and Emulsion Compulsion.

“The Story Behind Rio Bravo: The Greatest Western Ever Made” by Kaleem Omar.

“Rio Bravo Still Popular and Hip at 50″ by Allen Barra at The Wall Street Journal.

“Rio Bravo“ by Jim Monaco at The Dean Martin Collector’s Club.

“Rio Bravo Turns 50″ by Phil Nugent at The Screengrab.

“The Duke and Democracy: On John Wayne” by Charles Taylor at Dissent magazine.

“The Great American Movie: Rio Bravo“ Charles Taylor (again), this time at Salon.

In the Sunday L.A. Times, Reed Johnson examines the evolution of the portrayal of gay characters on film from 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon” to last year’s “Milk.” In his paragraph covering the gap between “Falcon” and 1980’s “Cruising,” Reed lets this drop:

…Hollywood went back into the closet during the Eisenhower presidency and more or less stayed there until the late 1960s … Coyness and euphemism were the order of the day, with the likes of Rock Hudson and Randolph Scott impersonating big-screen macho men.

What Reed does here is essentially state as fact that Randolph Scott was gay, which is not only unfair and irresponsible, but also an all too typical tactic used by the Left these days. The idea is to boil down something that is at best disputed (as is the case with Scott), or worse, an outright falsehood (Bush lied us into war, Palin attempted to ban books), into a few words and spread them matter-of-factly as though simply true.

In a world of soundbites, these dishonest declarative statements are purposefully built on just a few words in order to become rhetorical knots designed to put our side on defense and off-message because of the difficulty in untying them with just a few words. And in the case of Reed’s unfair assertion regarding Randolph Scott, the statement comes with the added benefit of a counter-punch all set to go. Defending Scott against such charges can only mean one is anti-gay, right?

Well, how about pro-truth and pro-fairness?

The rumors surrounding Scott’s sexuality began in the early 1930s while he and Cary Grant lived together for twelve years in a Malibu home they named, “Bachelor’s Hall.” Both had been married previously and would marry again – Grant, 4 times, Scott just once, from 1944 until his death in 1987.

Grant and Scott are on record unconditionally denying both a romantic relationship between the two of them and any other kind of gay relationship. Books have been written of varying credibility stating otherwise, but to say these claims are hotly disputed would be an understatement.

So other than a respect for truth, what does it matter that Reed and the L.A. Times would attempt to pass off rumors director Budd Boetticher, Scott’s close friend and frequent collaborator, called “Bullshit,” as fact? For starters, Scott’s long dead and unable to defend himself. Secondly, his family survives, and for Reed to assert someone’s beloved father and husband of four decades lived a lie, or at best, lied about who he said he was, borders on cruelty.

Who knows, someday evidence might turn up proving Reed 100% correct. In which case, the only reaction he’ll find surprising from me is my indifference, but for now Reed doesn’t know and therefore shouldn’t insinuate otherwise.