The Long Gray Line

Made during one of the more fertile periods in John Ford’s career, The Long Gray Line tends to be overshadowed by the surrounding masterpieces (The Searchers, The Sun Shines Bright) and popular successes (Mogambo, The Quiet Man). But dip into this slow-boiling vat of tears and you will find Ford’s nostalgia dissolving into a mess of contradictory emotions, ranging from despair to jubilation and every shade in between. A memory play in the mode of How Green Was My Valley and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the film follows the career of Marty Maher, a West Point lifer looking back at 50 years of dutiful service with a fondness hardly in keeping with the often-painful scenes he recalls. He begins his career as an inept waiter seemingly incapable of carrying a saucer two feet without reducing it to shards, and his whole life resembles one long pratfall. Shuffling from one failure to the next, he becomes a boxing instructor who can’t box and a swimming instructor who can’t swim. The film turns what is supposed to be a triumphant summation of a life well lived into an object lesson in falling upwards. One of the film’s running gags involves Marty foisting scalp cream upon a balding student—a young Dwight D. Eisenhower. Even with one of the teacher’s most famed and successful pupils, a hint of failure lingers.

Time turns all stories to tragedies, and Marty’s is no exception. The proud tutor of great leaders becomes the bitter factor of cannon fodder. His wife and father die. He argues with a plaque of his dead mentor in the school hallways. At Christmas time, his house teems with students and well-wishers as an old song transports him to years past. Surrounded by this vibrant community, Marty seems utterly alone. Military structures overtake individual lives: the Maher line ends with the death of his infant son, while the lines of gray-suited cadets seemingly stretch into eternity. Celebration and sorrow grow increasingly tangled until we reach the film’s climactic parade, where hundreds of students march in tribute to Marty as the man’s long-departed wife and father proudly look on. The other officers glance sideways at Marty as he reaches out to this vision, and it’s hard to tell if their worried looks signal mere confusion or horror at what appears to be encroaching dementia. But what shame is there living in the past? Each one of us will take up residence there in due time.

Young Mr. Lincoln

The great emancipator can’t dance.

The titular character of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln is shown to be many things: persuasive speaker, fearsome autodidact, prankster, pie-eater. “Dancer” doesn’t even scrape the bottom of the list. As portrayed by Henry Fonda, Lincoln moves like a bug pinned to a board, his legs kicking out as the life steadily seeps from his body. (“You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and you kept your word,” Mary Todd, his bemused partner, quips.) This being a Ford film, dance—and music, for that matter—are extensions of community, articulating the social bonds otherwise left unspoken. But this Lincoln, mythic figure and gangly dweeb, struggles to understand these ceremonies. Capped off by that stovepipe hat, he towers over everyone so conspicuously he comes across as an alien creature desperately trying to imitate human beings. Even his taste of music runs towards the oddball choice of the Jew’s harp, much to the amusement and/or irritation of all around him.

Ford and crew take great pleasure in complicating a figure who long ago left the world of facts for the more nebulous realms of rumour, apocrypha and Steven Spielberg movies. Against such foes, clumsiness and self-doubt prove to be one of this Lincoln’s most devastating weapons. Rather than the wise old leader, we get the young upstart, learning law from a couple of books off the back of a wagon, defending two men accused of killing a deputy in a legal trial-by-fire (moreso for the lawyer than his clients). But his stumbling dance steps, his goofy affectations and his dry wit—these wipe the dust from the statue. If it were not for such touches, this character could easily become too overpowering a persona. Look at his masterful handling of the lynch mob that has come for the two accused killers in prison. He calms the mob, amuses them, shames them and finally wins them over. “I’m not up here to make any speeches,” he says, and then makes a speech.

Fonda’s face is often as stony as the monument that flashes at the end of the film, but it masks a figure far stranger than the secular saint found in most popular histories. This Lincoln is something of a trickster. Like a shapeshifter, he moves from solemn moralizing on capital punishment at one moment to cheating at tug-of-war in the next. He’s the smartest man in the room, and it would be too easy to dislike him if the same qualities that make him great didn’t also make him so comical. His judgment finds no greater challenge than the choice between peach and apple pie. His diplomacy involves tricking illiterate farmers into settling their disputes out of court (admittedly, some less-than-subtle threats are also needed to close the matter). He deploys his laconic style and self-deprecating humour with all the shrewdness of a master chess player. He’s the ultimate self-made man—and once you’ve made one self, what’s the difficulty in creating a few more?

Actually, “self-made” may be a misleading term. People often cling to the myth of the self-made man as if there were no society buttressing the triumphs of these apparent loners. Ford captures this most succinctly in the curious relationship between Lincoln and the Clay family. Not only do Matt and Adam Clay serve as Lincoln’s first clients, but the family years earlier also gave him the law books that provided the foundation of his legal education. Yet if they recognize each other, neither party shows it. When Lincoln wins freedom for Matt and Adam, there is a sense that they owe him; one could just as easily say he owes them for the revelation of his talents and for the tools that nurtured his legal acumen. The nation does not owe the great leader so much as the great leader owes the nation. The man enters into legend not entirely because of his own merits—although the film certainly holds him in awe—but rather because the country needs its own self-defining legends.

Such contradictions are key to the man. Ford’s Lincoln embodies the American ideal: a simple man from a lowly background, who achieves greatness through a combination of innate ability and hard work, with a bit of luck for good measure. Through the Emancipation Proclamation, he fulfills the egalitarian promise of the United States (well, there’s still a ways to go on that front, but it was a good start, I suppose). Perversely, he is also a walking rebuke to that promise. In myth and history, he has been raised to levels as lofty as any king, a coronation crowned with his own early death. He looms so large he threatens to dwarf all around him. Any child can grow up to be the president, the saying goes, but not any child can be Lincoln.

Beneath the cornball jokes and glimmers of pastoral beauty, the legal duels and high-minded speechifying, there is a clear-eyed depiction of the complex relationship between Lincoln and his public. This may seem surprising coming from John Ford—who has been known to lapse into easy sentiment and misty nostalgia from time to time—but a master myth-maker obviously knows the tricks of the trade. This Lincoln betrays hints of self-satisfaction and egotism; there are moments when he is caught savouring his own storytelling prowess, like a child dipping his finger in the icing when your back is turned. But most of the time, he seems chagrinned by his own authority. When he walks out of the court in his moment of triumph, the wild cheers of the crowd greet him; a crowd, it should be noted, that earlier wielded torches and rope on the jailhouse steps while howling for vengeance. Facing these people, Lincoln’s expression is blank, as if he were uncertain of whether or not to accept this gift. It is perhaps a little difficult to feel at ease with the applause of a lynch mob.

Searchers 2.0

Few films make it, but The Searchers is certainly one—it sits comfortably amongst the pantheon of classics considered nearly unassailable (well, there’s always someone), the standard by which other westerns are typically measured. So it takes a somewhat perverse filmmaker to deliberately court comparison, and it takes an especially bold one to tackle that much-loved film armed only with a micro-budget and no more plot than you can fit into the backseat of an SUV. Or in other words, Alex Cox.

Searchers 2.0 is certainly not a remake of Ford’s original. It’s not even a screwy homage or satire. Cox wrote and directed the film out of a simple desire to argue with The Searchers, the entire western genre, and just about anything else that comes up along the way. And the best way to get people going on one of those rambling movie conversations— you know, where someone asks what the best war movie is and suddenly you’re spouting your theories on the connection between Hollywood and the Pentagon—is to stick them in a vehicle and have them drive through the middle of nowhere. Throw in a couple of car breakdowns and a few random encounters and you’ve got yourself a feature film.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single contrivance, in this case the meeting of Mel and Fred, two hard-luck middle-aged men who both appeared in the same cult western as children. The two men reminisce about the abuse they suffered at the hands (or more accurately, whip) of the film’s screenwriter—Fritz Frobisher, whose name evokes nothing so much as a rogue Germanic Mountie (he's not, but the prospect tantalizes the imagination). Almost immediately, they bond over plans of revenge. The two men set out on a rather ignoble quest to kick the ass of the now-quite-elderly Frobisher at a special open-air film screening in Monument Valley, iconic setting of numerous westerns, including The Searchers.

These two are clearly not tragic heroes, as the prosaic circumstances (and questionable intent) of their scheme suggests. Mel, the more affable half of the pair, is a deadbeat dad and day labourer. Fred, a small-time working actor, watches his old films in a dingy apartment and greets guests with a gun. He is, as the film tells us every ten minutes or so, an asshole. And one of the characters telling us this is Mel’s daughter Delilah, who mocks the men’s fuddy-duddy follies while chauffeuring them to meet Frobisher.

Clumsiness of the opening aside—Cox is so hasty to get on the road it’s a wonder he didn’t just start there and skip the whole forced meeting of Mel and Fred—the film reveals an unruly charm once in motion. Less a story than a sort of free-floating debate touching on Cox’s pet subjects, the film is little more than the three characters arguing about movies and politics, revenge and morality. The director wants a dialogue—not just between his characters, but also between himself and us. Technique is a secondary concern here. Characters pause in the middle of lines not for dramatic effect, but simply because they’re struggling to remember what they’re supposed to be say (the whole thing was apparently filmed in 15 days, and it shows). This is punk filmmaking at its core: shabby, confrontational, weird.

Yes, of course, narrative is a bourgeois trap, using the candy of order and aesthetic pleasure to lure us into the oven of hidden master ideologies (or whatever), but part of me wishes Cox would just do away with the story entirely. The film still goes through the motions of a narrative, even though it clearly distrusts that whole game. But instead of completely trashing the story, Cox follows it half-heartedly until finally throwing everything out the window only in the last ten minutes or so. When you’ve got one foot over the edge, why wait so long to jump? As always, sensible behaviour is the sworn enemy of self-sabotage.

As a filmmaker, Alex Cox flirts with bad ideas in a way that is often thrilling. I can easily see him making a deeply flawed, even bad film, but never a mediocre one—there’s too much at stake for that to ever happen, even in a small film such as this one. It’s true that the film can be obvious, sometimes to the point of irritation (Delilah’s SUV constantly runs out of gas BECAUSE THE IRAQ WAR IS WRONG YOU PLUTOCRATIC GITS), but there’s also a keen humour and insight that runs through the whole thing. There’s something energizing about watching a filmmaker openly contemplate war films as product placement for the army, or question the debased ideal of revenge in westerns, and inviting us to do the same. Look at this not as a refined, self-contained work of art, but merely another salvo in a cultural dialogue that has been going on for over fifty years.

The Furies

Few directors took so strongly to heart the mythical undertones of the western as Anthony Mann. His films are not nation-building legends (looking at you, John Ford), but tragic myths of cruelty and longing, more concerned with tearing apart individuals than building up communities. Sometimes they are the twilight of the gods (Man of the West), and other times tin-plated Passion plays (The Naked Spur), but they rarely explore a specifically American mythology. Dress up his characters in togas or robes, and the action could be transplanted two thousand years in the past without a hitch.

The Furies makes its connections to Greek lore fairly explicit—right there in the title, see—and it’s tempting to view the whole thing as a cattle-baron epic starring Zeus and Hera (if Zeus and Hera were a borderline incestuous father-daughter pair instead of bickering married couple, that is). Like Greek gods, T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) and his daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) seem to exist on a different plane than the mere mortals that serve as pawns in their games. Both glow with an inhuman will. It’s there when a wrecked T.C. asks his bride for money, and in the face of rejection still drinks a toast to her—and means it. It’s there when a heartbroken Vance cries about losing the only man who ever hit her, and you see that she makes no distinctions between violence and love.

Out on the plains of New Mexico in 1870, perhaps such distinctions are a hopeless luxury, better suited to well-heeled eastern types than gruff cattlemen (and women). T.C. has built up his ranch from nothing but blood, sweat and tears—just not necessarily his own. Vance preens for daddy like a little princess, but she’s perfectly willing to play rough as well. Seemingly just to irritate T.C., she courts the revenge-seeking son of one of her father’s victims, although it later occurs to her to fall in love with the man. She willfully defies her father whenever it suits her, which is about every five minutes.

These being intemperate folk, defiance can take some rather extravagant forms. T.C. threatens his daughter’s position on the farm by bringing home a Washington-bred fiancé, a society dame given to genteel political maneuvering. When the wicked stepmother dares to come between daughter and daddy dearest, the fairytale turns more Grimm than Disney, and suddenly the baffled matron has a pair of scissors stuck in her face.

Understandably, T.C. is annoyed at the permanent disfiguration of his bride, but he’s also been blind to how Vance’s efforts are the only thing keeping the ranch afloat despite his profligate ways. The man has handed out so many IOUs they’ve become a currency in the county (all sporting an image of Vance, as if T.C. were slowly spending away his daughter’s love for him). One bad turn deserves another, so T.C. hangs Vance’s only friend, as well as the only decent man who ever loved her—a Mexican squatter named Juan who has survived on the land thanks only to Vance’s influence over her father.

The hanging is a thing of beauty, a shadow play lit only by a thin sliver of light between ground and sky (the film may not be a showcase for the masterful use of landscape that would mark Mann’s later westerns, but it’s a gorgeous example of western noir). The scene is pure theatre, clearly staged to humble Vance. But she refuses to give in, and sets about to destroying her father by yanking the ranch right out from under him.

Given how casually T.C. courts disaster, you start to think he wants his daughter to take away the ranch. He approaches each calamity with a weary shrug and a sigh, as if he were finally about to be crushed, but he always walks away with a skip and a grin—failure is the man’s greatest source of energy, apparently (Huston performs some masterful emotional sleight-of-hand in conveying these shifting moods). But the daughter is no less perverse, and she seems to understand on some level that to defy her father is to prove her love (she treats his dying wish like a private joke between the two, cheerfully ignoring it). In Vance, T.C. has very carefully crafted the engine of his defeat, and it may be his greatest triumph. What would have happened had he survived on the ranch? Poverty, decline, stagnation. There is no crueler fate for a god than to become a mere man.