Westerns
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Okay, I tried. A few weeks ago I admitted my bias against certain genres, the Western chief among them, and Girish stood up on their behalf. Tonight I really tried to watch Rio Bravo, and after about 30 minutes, I decided that I would rather go chew glass. John Wayne has this uncanny ability to make my hands and feet shake. I mean, he walks (saunters) onscreen, and I just can't sit still. The more I look at him—the more I watch him doing John Wayne—the more distracted I become by his movie star bravado and his rosy-cheeked makeup and his (dare I say it) "acting." And then I start thinking about his politics and the Motion Picture Association for the Preservation of American Ideals and The Green Berets, and then, well, then I start getting a bit angry.
But my unreasonable John Wayne issues aside . . .
I'm just not sure where I'm supposed to look to discover the artistry in a film like Rio Bravo. I feel obligated to watch it for the same reason that I occasionally find myself reading, say, John Steinbeck: I place enough faith in those mysterious framers of "the canon" to trust that there is something there, something I'm missing. And usually I have the energy to give it a good go. I mean, I haven't actually read all of The Grapes of Wrath, but I've bitten off significant chunks, and had I been called upon to do so, I could have knocked out a decent enough essay on "The Chrysanthemums" for my comprehensive exam. But Rio Bravo was just too much for me.
Looking over Howard Hawks's resume, it seems that I prefer the films from the first half of his career—1926-46, or thereabouts—films like Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep. Or, looking at the list in a slightly different light, I guess I could say that I prefer Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart over John Wayne and Gary Cooper. (I'm probably the only person in East Tennessee who doesn't like Sargeant York.) It's probably most acurate, though, to say that I would rather watch a screwball comedy or a hard-boiled noir than a musical (don't even get me started on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) or a Western. At the risk of ruining whatever cinephile cred I've mustered over the years, I'll admit that, right now at least, I could only enjoy watching Rio Bravo if I treated it as pure camp.
For the record, I'm very fond of Unforgiven, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Wild Bunch, and The Misfits, all of which, it seems to me, transcend the genre to some extent.
Oh yeah, and Blazing Saddles.
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