Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/21/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Cast: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally, Millard Mitchell, Charles Drake, John McIntire, Will Geer, Jay C. Flippen, Rock Hudson, John Alexander, Steve Brodie, James Millican, Abner Biberman, Tony Curtis, James Best. Screenplay: Robert L. Richards, Borden Chase, based on a story by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun, Nathan Juran. Film editing: Edward Curtiss.

Winchester '73 fetishes the titular firearm as if it were Excalibur or the Shield of Achilles. Which is all to the point if you're mythmaking, as this film, the first of a series of five movies on which James Stewart collaborated with director Anthony Mann, distinctly is. It's not only a contribution to the myth of the American West, but its central conflict is based on the story of Cain and Abel, with a touch of Oedipus thrown in. Sibling rivalry -- I almost wrote "sibling riflery" -- never got hotter. This is the only one of the Stewart-Mann Westerns that wasn't made in color, but it hardly matters: William H. Daniels photographs the high desert country of Arizona as lovingly as he ever filmed Greta Garbo. The film also holds a place in Hollywood movie history because of the deal Stewart's agent made guaranteeing the actor a percentage of the profits -- a step toward the disintegration of the studio system that would accelerate through the 1950s. But it might also be noted that the studios still held some power: Two up-and-coming Universal contract players, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis, both have small roles in the film, the former in war paint and a fake nose as the Indian chief Young Bull, the latter in a bit part as a cavalryman who admires the rifle on which the plot centers. Winchester '73 is one of the great Westerns not because it questions the myths (and the clichés, such as Shelley Winters's "dance hall girl" with a heart as gold as her hair) on which the genre is founded, but because it so wholeheartedly accepts and integrates them into a well-paced and entertaining movie.