Hell's Hinges (1916)

d. William S. Hart and Charles Swickard / USA / 64 mins.


Note: This review discusses details of the film's ending.

Relatively few Westerns made in America and released before the 1970s brandish the level of cynicism and despondency seen in Hell's Hinges, perhaps the first important and truly serious Western film in terms of both its scope and negation of genre principles. As early as 1911 film writers were already bemoaning the formulaic nature of the Western, but Hell's Hinges does away with many of the elements we would expect and substitutes them with an innovative structure and a disaffected hero whose every-man-for-himself moralism is broken only to save a woman his loves; the rest of the town literally burns to the ground.

From the outset it's clear we're in territory far outside the Code-friendly atmosphere the Western would mature within by the guiding hands of John Ford and others. Hell's Hinges opens with a city-dwelling minister (Jack Standing) who puts no faith in the Bible but relishes a congregation that sits rapt at his words. Church elders send him out west into the small community of Hell's Hinges — a veiled Sodom on the frontier, described as "a good place to 'ride wide of'" and whose good citizens are nothing but "a drop of water in a barrel of rum." The parson is accompanied by his genuinely pious sister, Faith (Clara Williams), and they clash with a town where a majority of residents are as godless as they are lawless.

In typical western construction, the town can almost without exception be clearly divided among its good and its bad, but Blaze Tracy (William S. Hart) occupies a moral limbo. He's a stoic gunslinger who enjoys the benefit of an unguarded community, but he drifts away from the nihilism when he falls in love with Faith at first sight. But brilliantly, Blaze is not an instant convert to anything other than his love for Faith. He pushes back against the unsettled town, protecting Faith and her parson brother; when the parson drifts into the den of iniquity that is the local saloon and begins drinking heavily and cavorting with a prostitute, it is Blaze who defends him from the upset good citizens and successfully argues to give him a second chance. In a not-so-subtle way his faith is to Faith alone, and all of his outward actions seem designed to earn her love through a humanistic chivalry. If parting the town makes her life easier, then that is what he will do; he doesn't pretend to be anything he's not, which makes his wooing both more complicated for him and for us.

The official director here is Charles Swickard, but Hart, who dominated the early western format as both its on-screen hero and its off-screen craftsman, is recognized with having unofficially directed most of the film. Hart saw the potential in the western to explore themes of good versus evil; Scott Simmon writes in an essay accompanying the restoration of Hell's Hinges that this is a movie bathed in the extreme — "extremely sentimental in its Victorian vision of the instantaneous effect of a 'good' woman on Hart's 'bad' man, and extremely harsh in its barren look and ethical judgments."

While the former element crossed over into the 1930s through the Western's heyday of the 1950s, the latter didn't. The glory in the finale of Hell's Hinges is that the hero doesn't want to save the town from itself and set the citizens right; with the town at its breaking point, Blaze lets it snap. An angry mob burns down the church, with the parson holding the lead torch. Blaze rushes to town to save Faith, and when he punishes the arsonists, it's for the risk it posed to her. The film's cinematographer, Joseph August (founder of the American Society of Cinematographers and future D.P. in some of John Ford's more expressionistic films), lets the camera move as much as it can and introduces a series of previously unseen high and low angles to make the finale gripping. He and Hart take full advantage of the incinerating church as an exterior backdrop and the fire that spreads to neighboring buildings, such as the saloon, as a claustrophobic interior.

In the end, for Blaze to save the day is to save Faith alone, to bury her brother and attempt to bring her some closure. Even in the film's final moments it's not clear that she loves him, and Blaze for the first time points his head skyward and prays for her happiness and that she'll marry him. The good people and the bad people of Hell's Hinges are punished equally through the destruction of their town. It is a backward view of civilization, the opposite direction many Westerns will take. It channels the darker corners of the soul by admitting sometimes we have no interest in saving the whole of our community; sometimes even the hero is only concerned with saving himself.

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The Searchers (1956)

d. John Ford / USA / 119 mins.


As you watch John Ford's epic 1956 western The Searchers, if you find yourself admiring it but not really getting it, the best thing you can do is put it back on the shelf, watch a handful of other westerns, wait a couple months, and try it again. It's a film that gets deeper and more beautiful the more you've seen other westerns struggle to achieve the power Ford seemed to produce so effortlessly.

The film has many fine qualities, all of which are very apparent, and any list much begin with the wonderful composition and photography. The film opens with a gorgeous shot of Dorothy Jordan – playing the matriarch of a family in the late 1860s – silhouetted in the door frame of a darkened house, looking out into the countryside with the camera pushing forward as she steps out into the light. (If you've seen The Searchers, you're probably closing your eyes and picturing the utter beauty of this unexpectedly complicated shot.) The film closes with a visual echo, an equally gorgeous shot of John Wayne standing contemplatively and holding his right elbow as the camera pulls back into a darkened house. In between these memorable shots, Ford demonstrates for two solid hours his innate talent for staging scenes and his magnificent eye for capturing the natural beauty of the West in stunning Technicolor.

Wayne's Ethan Edwards is probably his most complicated character (his Tom Dunson in Howard Hawks's Red River might be on par in terms of complexity). Edwards is a callous, isolated Confederate veteran who spends the film obsessively seeking his niece, kidnapped as a young girl by Comanche Indians. I should say that word one more time: obsessively. The film spans years, and Edwards's motives are not pure; he loves his family but is openly racist, and clearly hates the idea of what has "become" of his niece as a taken member of the Comanche tribe – so much so that, in his twisted love, he considers her better off dead.

Or does he? Wayne performs superbly, an ace blend of villainy and determination. But it isn't so easy to summarize Edwards's views. Roger Ebert notes, quite perceptively I think, that it seems Ford and Wayne – who were not known to be racists themselves – knew what they were doing when they inflated the morally despicable characteristics of Edwards. (It's bee further noted that many westerns invoke racism consciously and subconsciously, but The Searchers embraces it as a central character element.) Even if Edwards as a character is essentially the same in the end, the film can rise above it.

Although it is frequently lauded as the genre's best (and sometimes as one of the greatest films ever made), I'm not ready to go that far. I have seen The Searchers three times – possibly more viewings than I've given to any other western – and each time it has improved in my eyes. Perhaps its greatness awaits me later in life. It wasn't widely admired upon its first release, but it experienced a critical revival due to the film school generation of directors – Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola – who have not only cited it as among their favorites but have made films clearly influenced by or referential to The Searchers. Its climb among critics has been astronomical as well. In 2002 it barely missed inclusion in Sight & Sound's decennial top-ten poll, tying with Seven Samurai for 11th place. When the American Film Institute revised its top 100 a few years ago, The Searchers had the largest leap, going from 96th to 12th.

While beautiful, well-acted, and influential, the film has a story that is not constructed perfectly. Many scenes achieve greatness, but the film loses a large amount of dramatic steam in the middle due to its wildly uneven comic relief and the utterly bizarre subplots of Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Edwards's adoptive nephew and searching partner who is one-eighth Cherokee. In one subplot Martin falls in love with his neighbor's daughter (Vera Miles), and in another, accidentally buys a Native American wife, providing the film with so-called comic relief. Ultimately neither uniquely advance the plot.

As westerns go, The Searchers is among the dozen or so really good ones, even considering its unsubtle faults. Personally it's not my favorite western, and I don't think it's even John Ford's best; his Stagecoach (1939) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) work much better as complete films in the genre, and out of the genre, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is a superior examination of (at the time) more modern life in the western United States. But it's also not hard to see why so many people are inclined to cite The Searchers as a great film.

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High Noon (1952)

d. Fred Zinnemann / USA / 85 mins.


Numerous sources report High Noon is the most requested film to be shown in the private movie theater of the White House. Dwight Eisenhower, who won the presidency the same year the film premiered, saw it three times, and Bill Clinton claims it to be his all-time favorite, screening it at least twenty times and recommending it, for better or worse, to George W. Bush.

It's an interesting fact, yet not at all surprising. What president hasn't presumably fantasized about having a Will Kane moment – the heroic point when everyone you'd known to be loyal fades away, leaving you to hold your ground alone, wearing your honor and your duty on your sleeve, and standing up for what you think is the righteous way of life? In any event, I'm sure part of the frequent screening of High Noon is that it's a man's-man movie, one I'm sure press secretaries love to associate with their bosses.

Fred Zinnemann's High Noon frequently ranks alongside John Ford's The Searchers as one of the best American westerns. The two are always interesting choices because they are such atypical contributions to the genre. Ford's film sprawls like a mesa across moral lines, imbuing in its hero an unbecoming and complicated racism that takes an entire film (if that) to resolve psychologically. Zinnemann's film contains relatively little action and unfolds slowly, appealing to the viewer's mental and emotional elements rather than feeding us intense action sequences. Coincidentally enough, my feelings about both films are similar – they're each good in their own right and are undoubtedly valuable to the culture (with the phrase "high noon" now commonly used to describe an historic showdown) and both films, while good, fail to raise my pulse significantly beyond the standard level of enjoyment.

The aforementioned Kane (Gary Cooper) is the town marshal, freshly married to a lovely Quaker woman (the first big role for Grace Kelly). Kane has to put his retirement on hold when a convict he put away is said to be coming back to town. The townspeople quivers while they wait for the ex-con to arrive, and one by one they rebuff Kane's attempt to form a posse and face the criminal. The film unfolds in virtual real time, which is at certain moments quite boring but also not as boring as you might imagine. Although High Noon has a gunfight in its final moments, the real action is the person-to-person kind, as Kane tries to recruit others to help him only to find his former support dissipating. If the ostensible bad guy is the ex-con come back for vengeance, then the real antagonist is Kane's callow ex-deputy, played by Lloyd Bridges.

High Noon is often cited as a liberal western in an age of the genre's strapping right-of-center conservatism. Screenwriter Carl Foreman admitted it was written in response to McCarthyism. John Wayne loathed it, telling Playboy it was "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life." (But he stared in The Conqueror!) In one of the staunchest screw-you's in Hollywood history, Wayne aided in getting Foreman on the blacklist and never regretted it.

Today it seems like a bold move to tackle McCarthyism in the masculine genre of the Hollywood western; science fiction had always been a more appropriate venue, as Sen. Joseph McCarthy himself was something of alien to the human race. Yet isn't it surprising how the film is still liked by audiences on both sides of the political spectrum? The reason is, I think, that High Noon can be about something as blatant as the blacklist while still appealing to the character traits we admire in anyone, regardless of philosophy: duty, honor, courage, and yes, even loyalty. Foreman and Wayne can argue in the afterlife over the film's politics, but here on Earth let me say, despite some awkward pacing problems, High Noon is a good and intelligent western and must-see for anyone.

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The Great Train Robbery (1903)

d. Edwin S. Porter / USA / 12 mins.


It's difficult to evaluate a film like The Great Train Robbery, a 12-minute long western that was among the first narrative films to be produced in America. If you're looking at it from a historical point of view, it's obviously a five-star feature in terms of its milestone status and technical innovations, much like D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation would be. (Both films are justly preserved in the National Film Registry, but God, I can't think of any rational person who, if asked what movie they'd like to watch, would give either film as an answer.) Director Edwin S. Porter was a former cameraman for Thomas Edison's studio, and he was among the first to utilize the basic cinematic techniques that we see so often today and never think about needing to be invented: cross-cutting, slight camera movement, linear editing, on-location shooting, etc. (Unlike Griffith, however, Porter stubbornly refused to repeat techniques as he used them and he drifted into obscurity.)

As entertainment, it's no surprise The Great Train Robbery runs way too thin – thinner than even other silent films that would have been its contemporary, like A Trip To the Moon (made by Georges Méliès in France a year earlier). For the most part, silent films didn't really start to becoming wildly entertaining until German expressionism and the comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton; those productions were great and continue to feel spontaneous today despite their age. Spontaneity is not the strongest suit of The Great Train Robbery; its most exciting element is when a cowboy points his gun right into the camera and fires. Supposedly audiences at the turn of the century shrieked with fear, but I'd be surprised if your pulse quickened by one beat. The movie is short, simple, and widely available on the Internet (in public domain, of course), so it's worth Googling to see how American filmmaking began and how far it's come.

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