Issue #165

Sugarloaf at Libby Lake

Photograph by Joe Carducci

---

---

The Race Western and John Huston’s The Unforgiven (1960)
Joe Carducci

The Race Western can be said to go back to the beginnings of cinema when what was called “the Indian subject” was essentially a second Western genre. First there were static single-scene shorts such as Edison’s one-and-a-half minute Cripple Creek Bar-Room Scene (1899), but the eleven minute multi-scene story-film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was a phenomenon that helped move film exhibition out of game-rooms and lecture halls and into true movie theaters, the nickelodeons, after 1905. The action Westerns were harder to make in New Jersey in those earliest years. Francis Ford, an actor in New York who slipped into films by 1908 with the Centaur Film Co. of Bayonne, New Jersey, wrote in his unpublished memoir that English saddles on bob-tailed horses typified the equestrian culture of the East and were used in early Fort Lee, New Jersey-shot Westerns. It’s likely that the more pastoral, romantic presentation of the West (or pre-Columbian East) in the Indian subjects was more common than the shoot-em-up style.

The first producers and exhibitors surely understood that these Indian subjects were better able to attract women to the moving pictures and convince them it would be safe and legit to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers. Women weren’t so welcome in the old game-rooms. Centaur is considered the first independent studio; the Edison Trust considered them disreputable and wouldn’t allow them in. Centaur specialized in “action, action, action all the time” as the early trade magazine Moving Picture World put it in 1909. Ford called these typical one-reelers “chase pictures” and these could rile up men and boys in the audience. (A reel generally ran from 10 to 14 minutes.) These were contemporary films, not necessarily Westerns, though of course cities were still full of horses rather than automobiles in those years. Ford described the chase formula in his manuscript: “The reason for the chase amounting to about one quarter of the reel and the chase took up the remainder.” In late 1909 Ford moved with the Méliès-Star Film Co. to San Antonio, Texas where he learned to direct and the company improved the authenticity, the stunting, and the dramatics of their Westerns. The company moved on to Southern California in Spring of 1911. There Ford and the Western itself came into their own at the New York Motion Picture Co.’s productions made under producer Thomas Ince and labeled Bison, Bison “101,” Broncho or Kay-Bee films. Francis moved to Universal in 1913 and it’s thought his youngest brother John joined his company there in 1914. Very little of Frank’s early work survives; some of Jack’s does – his directing career began in 1917. Essentially the Fords put the romanticism of the Indian subject into the shoot-em-up from Frank’s work, including The Invaders (1912) which survives, through Jack’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which as I’ve written is also a metaphorical treatment of the two brothers’ own story with the wild West standing in for untamed, early filmmaking as it settled into Hollywood and the studio era.

The Indian subject, the Colonial films, the Mountain Man dramas, the Midwesterns, the Southerns, the southwestern Westerns and the contemporary Westerns each required different things of Native American characters. But at the dawn of moving pictures was the exceptional introduction of Native Americans before the camera. A band of Indians, who, though touring as part of a Wild West show, were originally from the Sioux nation removed to Indian Territory (Oklahoma). The Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Wild West Show from Oklahoma included this Sioux village and was wintering in Venice, California when Thomas Ince hired the show whole for film work in 1910. The 101 Ranch was so large that it operted the ranch itself plus three touring shows, one of which stuck with films. Bison “101” Westerns utilized everything the 101 company had from wagons to tipis and trick riders to Sioux warriors. The resulting productions were a giant step up in realism in the early Western; these were two-reelers and occasional three-reel “specials” which moved running times close to soon come feature-length. Scott Simmon of UC-Davis in his book, The Invention of the Western Film, credits these 101 Indians with introducing the underplaying that would come to stand out from the general heightened gesticulation of the early silent era. The Sioux manner of pantomime met the 2nd unit’s style – the terseness typical of stuntmen and horse-wranglers – to create the modern style of acting for the camera which is what my book, Stone Male, is about. William Eagle Shirt’s performance can be seen in the aforementioned three-reel “special” The Invaders (1912), produced by Thomas Ince and directed by Francis Ford who also starred and it was written by C. Gardner Sullivan who was soon the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood.

 The early Indian subject was not the Race Western of the postwar years, of course. But racial accommodation in America was asking a lot. The conundrum was that despite slow, ongoing racial accommodations under way for the generations of those now settled in America, the country was periodically swamped with waves of new peoples from the old world who could only recharge racism. The accommodations are written in our DNA, but also included cultural forays that would later seem retrograde and insulting: those romances about pre-contact Indian life, plus nostalgic portraits of plantation life in the old South, cake-walks, Indian Princesses, minstrelsy, blackface, Wild West Shows, Saturday matinees, cowboys-and-Indians playsets…. But as has been observed, the Western was not just another movie genre. The drama-tragedy-comedy of the settling of the west featured immigrants and races, and the audiences for the early film were largely urban immigrants as no English was required and film itself was at first too disreputable for the bourgeoisie. The Russian writer Leonid Andreyev in 1911 defended the new art, terming it “an artistic Apache, an aesthetic hooligan….” (The Film Factory) Just arrived immigrants who knew only the tenements and factories of the cities in the east must have wondered at these early Westerns as a kind of American mirage though they’d heard that Manhattan had been purchased from the Indians and Chicago had started as a fur traders fort.

Westerns themselves had to be made more authentic as the story-film evolved in the 1910s and ’20s and so every New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago producer sent their crews west to Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico and finally California. European producers had made Westerns over there until American producers moved west. That forced Méliès, Éclair, Pathé, and other European producers to also send companies west of the Mississippi. But Southern California had everything: the city of Los Angeles itself, its many suburbs, the mountains, deserts, rivers, the ocean, and not much winter to stop exteriors. Los Angeles was also still something of a cowtown with a million horses and thousands of cowboys.

Sound came in the late ’20s and placed a premium on the major studios’ new sound-stages and reduced the production budget status of Westerns which were largely shot in the deserts outside of Los Angeles. But the “high” Western was raised just prior to WWII. Larger budgets elevated the genre to action spectaculars such as The Texans (1938) and Dodge City (1939), or just better genre exercises like Stagecoach (1939) and Destry Rides Again (1939). Immigration had ceased after the market crash of 1929 and the Depression. But in the run-up to the war Americans became once again interested in revisiting the country’s settling the West. During the war, films were made about the war for the women at home. It was after the victory that movies changed for the returning boys, the girls they married and the baby boom they raised. The country was now saddled with defending the free world against communism, and its professed ideals came under pressure. The war’s mobilization and the peace’s demobilization had uprooted most Americans, set the survivors back in new places, and ran everyone through that common experience. War films continued to be made and they got more realistic and valorized everyone’s contribution from city ethnics to country kids, eventually blacks, Asians, and Native Americans. And so some of the postwar Westerns became topical or pretentious in new ways, pulling the genre further away from the kid-stuff of Saturday matinee series and serials of the early baby boom. This new Indian subject was an issue film and the more politically intended A-Westerns were termed “psychological” Westerns.

Broken Arrow (1950) is a handsome A-production from Fox directed by Delmer Daves and features Jeff Chandler as Cochise and Debra Paget as the Indian girl James Stewart falls for. It isn’t a good film though writer-critic Brian Garfield in his guidebook, Western Films, is probably right that it re-racked how Indians were portrayed in Western features thereafter. Another impressive A-production, Devil’s Doorway (1950), confirmed this change though it isn’t very good either. It was directed by Anthony Mann, written by Guy Trosper, and stars Robert Taylor as a Shoshoni veteran of the Civil War defending his ranch in Wyoming. Today one doesn’t routinely cast non-Indians in Native roles but in cultural terms – movieness – it sealed the new respect for Native American characters when Hollywood leading men were cast to play them. For influence on post-war developments perhaps nothing tops the character Tonto in television’s The Lone Ranger series (1949-1957). Tonto was played by Jay Silverheels, a Mohawk from Canada, lending authenticity in expectation and identification to even this children’s shoot-em-up-style moral fables.

Topical and politically “relevant” art is not a good bet but Hollywood’s creative elite often want to expound on issues. Both Delmer Daves and Anthony Mann went on to make great Westerns which dealt with the more universal aspects of human tragedy and fate. In this sense the Race Western can be limiting. Better postwar films dealing with Indians and racism include Broken Lance (1954), Gunman’s Walk (1958), and Flaming Star (1960). Broken Lance was directed by Edward Dmytryk and written by Philip Yordan and Richard Murphy and starred Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Robert Wagner and Katy Jurado. Gunman’s Walk was directed by Phil Karlson and written by Ric Hardman and Frank Nugent and starred Van Heflin, Tab Hunter, James Darren and Kathryn Grant. And Flaming Star was directed by Don Siegel and written by Clair Huffaker and Nunnally Johnson and starred Elvis Presley, Barbara Eden, Steve Forrest, Dolores Del Rio and John McIntire.

Robert Wagner and Elvis Presley both play half-breed sons of a rancher and his second Indian wife and are the heroes of their respective stories. Wagner’s character is schemed against by his older white half-brothers, while Presley’s character’s relationship to his white half-brother is fine even as the family itself is torn apart by an Indian uprising. Flaming Star is a rare pure tragedy for Hollywood and it is certainly Presley’s best film though necessarily more than his fandom wanted – certainly they all saw it, but unlike his lesser films once was probably enough. In Gunman’s Walk the younger brother played by James Darren is sincerely courting the Indian girl his coarser, older, wilder brother had rudely approached. The rough-hewn rancher father played by Heflin carved out the valley fighting off Indians and thinks nothing of covering for his wild son played by Tab Hunter until the townsfolk have had enough of both of them.

Not all good Westerns dealing with Indian characters were racism-dependent in plot, indicating that a more casual understanding of inclusion was again possible as in Across the Wide Missouri (1951), and The Last Frontier (1956). In the first, directed by William Wellman and written by Frank Cavett and Talbot Jennings, John Hodiak, playing the half-breed son of mountain man Clark Gable and his Blackfeet wife played by Mexican actress María Elena Marqués, narrates the nostalgic tale of his parents and his early childhood in the mountains in flashback. In the second, directed by Anthony Mann and written by Philip Yordan and Russell Hughes, three mountain men, James Whitmore, Victor Mature, and Pat Hogan show up at a new fort just before an Indian attack. Whitmore is the wizened old hand who remembers the world he left behind; Mature though white is an impetuous and uncivilized creature of the mountains; and Hogan is a more measured half-breed. Mature is torn as he impetuously tries to join the troop and steal the affections of an officer’s wife. After the attack Whitmore is dead and Mature will enlist and marry the officer’s widow and Hogan, the stolid ideal, more Indian than white, returns alone to what wilderness remains. The Last Frontier is not considered as good as the Westerns Mann made with James Stewart but I think it rates.

Of these actors only Pat Hogan was Native American – an Oneida Indian raised in Oklahoma. I mention him in my book as an example of that realist style of presentation that surfaced out of the 2nd unit’s stuntmen and body doubles in the action genres, finally reaching star billing with John Wayne. Hogan’s effect seemed more in line with the Native American tradition on film going back to the Bison productions. (His IMDb bio claims he hunted often as a youth with a horse named Pet and a dog named White Man.) But as with many actors of interest in this untheatrical style there weren’t many parts available to Hogan though he’s quite good. He’s lucky to have the filmography he does have given that Hollywood was still casting white actors such as Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Michael Pate and John Saxon in Indian roles. Realism in the movies is always relative and evolving and this motion as well as new sensitivities and labor demands of the Screen Actors Guild have led to the greater roles later won by Wes Studi, Graham Greene, Gil Birmingham and others in what few Westerns or western set dramas still get made…

Hollywood, like America itself, is a default whipping boy. The man with the whip-hand feels he’s vaulted into the clique that determines the day’s fashion of sophistication. Rather than complicating matters the media-academia intelligentsia reduces things to social coloration for their clique. There always were Native Americans in the movies beginning in the 19th century with the first Edison Kinematograph productions. But we’re expected to assume they were erased from American history and so from Hollywood as well. The kidstuff of Saturday matinee series becomes the stand-in for the Western because the American Studies radicals who interpret the culture are deaf to the muse and their exertions are to more cleverly evade Truth for their myopic goals. (And I hasten to add there’s a lot of good acting, stunting, music and comic relief in all that kidstuff too.) I wrote about Native American movie actors Princess Red Wing, James Young Deer, Ben Johnson, Will Rogers, Sid Jordan, and the Sioux of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show troop in my book, Stone Male. American Studies racialism leaves its discourse untethered as the Left leaves behind the economics of classical Marxism for more malleable historiography and later cultural, media, endocrinal and nationalist amendments. But white Americans, after all, are but ex-Europeans who went native here under the influences of Native Americans, with a side-swipe from ex-African black Americans, who might have but didn’t take Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement seriously. Ask any European about Americans; they’ll tell you we’re all impulsive, naive, optimistic children – the bloody racists.

Another canard is that race was easier for Hollywood to deal with in a Western and with regard to Indians than with regard to black characters in a contemporary drama. But while it’s true the Western genre kept Native American actors busier than black actors could be in Hollywood, there were about as many serious Race Dramas about black Americans in the postwar years as there were serious Race Westerns. White actors were still bronzing up to play Native American leads but blackface worn by white performers had been a different style of indignity and generally reserved for Vaudeville-style acts, at least after The Birth of a Nation (1915). Hollywood’s postwar mode was to treat black characters better than it had in the past when they were often limited to comic relief. James Edwards, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and some others began getting respectable parts and these lead to the black cool of the sixties and seventies: Harry Rhodes, Al Freeman Jr., Ivan Dixon, Greg Morris, Rafer Johnson, Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and on to today’s Hollywood of Dwayne Johnson, Ice Cube, Chris Rock, et. al., playing the American everyman of all people. Do they have complaints? I bet they do; I have complaints; George Clooney’s got one or two I imagine...

The postwar elevated A-budget Race Western that stands out to me in its summary power is The Unforgiven (1960). The film was directed by John Huston, produced by Burt Lancaster’s company, written by Ben Maddow from Alan Le May’s novel which was originally titled, “Kiowa Moon,” as it ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1957. Le May had earlier published the novel that was the basis for John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). That film’s reputation has risen since its release when, though successful, it was taken to be just another widescreen Western epic and not a psychological Western due deeper reflection even though its backstory is the hero’s racism! He returns unsurrendered to west Texas years after the South’s defeat, and after years of guerrilla raiding that it’s inferred devolved into simple causeless brigandage. But Ford’s touch is so subtle that though the film was successful, John Wayne’s performance of the character overwhelms, even shot against Monument Valley in VistaVision! Frank Nugent adapted Le May’s novel and so much exposition is unspoken that only a Ford could have convinced a writer that the story would out. (There are some very broad comic scenes that tell you even Ford didn’t perhaps have full confidence in his summer epic.) For these and other reasons I won’t include The Searchers here. But this other Le May-sourced film, The Unforgiven, has fallen through the cracks for complex reasons. John Huston rarely discussed the film; Lancaster’s company took it away from him to recut the resolution. But the film is full of great sequences where Huston is at his best and the film’s impact can hardly be said to be softened.

In 1956 Huston told Edouard Laurot that it made no sense for a director to try to impose his own style on each film. “If I ever made a Western, I’d make the same kind of Western. I don’t want to put my brand on the Western; it has its adequate style already.” (Film Culture, 1956) He terms this style a “noble convention.” But Huston had a riskier theory of casting that trusted actors and non-actors alike as long as he cast them correctly. He told Dan Ford in 1972:

“Take Alphonso Bedoya, Gold Hat in Treasure [of the Sierra Madre]. A delightful man. The heart opens right up to him. He looked great for the part but he didn’t know how to act. My not telling him exactly how things were to be done only confused and frustrated him. There was an uncertainty there that added a dimension of volatility and unpredictability and made him even more terrifying.” (Action, 1972)

Bedoya playing one of the bandits is famous for the line, “Badges? We ain't got no badges….” John Huston took chances that made producers nervous but as a screenwriter-become-director and further as the son of Walter Huston who was one of the Broadway stars who came to Hollywood with sound, John was fully conversant with how films were made and what the camera needed from performers. Walter considered that acting for films had improved his stage acting so the two of them respected what the movies were, though John affected high brow enough that one could doubt that.

The reputation that The Unforgiven has is unusually mixed. Some hate the Dimitri Tiomkin soundtrack; others love it. (It’s the syrupy recording done on the cheap in Italy that bothers me.) Some love the cast; others poke fun at the performances. As with any films of any era there are conventions that you appreciate or not but this film has regular moments where the cinematography, the writing, the directing, framing, acting, et. al., deliver powerfully. And Hollywood production standards were still high and this film that Huston disowned still surprises. In fact one can say that great Hollywood films are films that deliver more than their era’s moviemaking conventions lead one to expect, and typically it’s only on first viewing that false notes or dated conventions distract. In later viewings one discounts irksome details as they pass. Huston’s films sometimes offend on the issue of Manny Farber’s “white elephant” vs “termite art” theory – Farber is brutal on Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950). But John Huston made both prestige films and genre pictures with either tendencies. His two films with Audie Murphy bear this out. The Red Badge of Courage (1951) depends largely on Murphy and it was only his fifth starring role in what was a truly accidental career that capitalized on his notoriety as the most decorated soldier of World War II. Lillian Ross celebrated chronicle of the making of the film, Picture, focuses on Huston and MGM but has nothing to say about the casting which the abstracted, storybook style of the film accentuates. Odd that Ross’ other book is about acting (The Player: A Profile of an Art) so one hears in her work for The New Yorker the precedent for the early seventies film critics – Pauline Kael and others – complaint that what action film actors such as Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were doing in films did not qualify as acting at all. They wanted something like that breakdown scene in First Blood (1980) where near the end Stallone dissolves into a puddle over losing a friend in Nam. Now that’s acting! And those critics said that after the sixties – the worst decade Hollywood ever had! Stallone might have been under the impression that he might receive further Oscar nominations after Rocky (1976). But clearly Huston loved Audie Murphy and wanted to help his unlikely acting career yield effects that true actors could not achieve. (Huston had a real interest in the troubled Murphy as he had made documentaries for the military during WWII that were not shown until years later because his stark presentation of the effects the war had on the fighting men was judged to be counter-productive in terms of propaganda; Murphy gambled away his money faster than he made it and slept with a gun under his pillow.)

The cast in The Unforgiven includes Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, and Doug McClure as the three Zachary brothers, Lillian Gish as their widowed mother, and Audrey Hepburn as their foundling sister. Their distant neighbors on the frontier rangeland are the Rawlinses, led by the parents played by Charles Bickford and June Walker. Their children are played by Albert Salmi, Kipp Hamilton and Arnold Merritt. Joseph Wiseman plays the wandering wraith who haunts the Zacharys and caused the family to relocate once before. Carlos Rivas plays Lost Bird the Kiowa who believes Hepburn’s character is his sister, and John Saxon plays Johnny Portugal, a half-breed hireling for the cattle drive. All are excellent with perhaps the best line readings and moments being performed by Bickford and Walker, Wiseman, and Saxon. Audrey Hepburn’s casting drew criticism but, really, it’s a movie, and Huston certainly intends the frisson of having Hepburn-as-daughter echo Lillian Gish’s original sylph-like effect from the dawn of pictures. D.W. Griffith began knitting together what’s called film grammar, not to say the moving-going audience itself by framing a parade of actresses playing young women in jeopardy starting in 1908 (Linda Arvidson, Dorothy Bernard, Florence Lawrence, Marion Leonard, Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Dorothy Gish, Lillian Gish...). These are his one- and two-reel Biograph films – check ’em out, they’re more fun and more important than his features.

Alan Le May’s novel reads as episodic and though full of impressive detail nevertheless was improved significantly by Ben Maddow in its restructuring for the screen. Huston certainly had some involvement in the final draft but he wasn’t involved in the film’s conception and if Burt Lancaster as the star on set enforced his producer’s prerogatives than one can guess Huston didn’t enjoy his normal freedoms. Compared to the novel the screenplay moves more clearly towards its dual tragic climaxes, first the Zacharys’ break with the Rawlinses, then the confrontation with the Kiowa, with only the family’s reunion in battle to leaven the devastation. The film has more ultimate meaning and direction than the novel. We don’t know how Huston envisioned the film’s resolution (it’s mostly the ending that was changed) but it apparently involved Saxon’s half-breed character, presented as skilled and honorable even after Lancaster’s character throws him to the ground for approaching Hepburn’s. Portugal briefly pulls a knife on Zachary in response. Saxon looks great and more than other movie Indians of the period seems to prefigure the hippie look to come. The character, though, does appears to have been removed after he is sent to track and finally capture the elusive Abe Kelsey, Wiseman’s character. We last see Saxon in a reaction shot as Kelsey tells his truth with noose around neck before all the assembled by firelight – Johnny Portugal listens to the doomed man’s story and then looks over at the foundling Rachel Zachary. Might Portugal have wound up with Rachel in Huston’s version? We don’t know as that’s the last we see of him.

In John Huston’s memoir he dismisses the film’s tone as “bombastic and over-inflated” writing:

“Some of my pictures I don’t care for, but The Unforgiven is the only one I actually dislike. I thought I saw in Maddow’s script the potential for a more serious – and better – film than either he or Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had originally contemplated; I wanted to turn it into the story of racial intolerance in a frontier town, a comment on the real nature of community ‘morality.’ The trouble was the producers disagreed. What they wanted was what I had unfortunately signed on to make when I accepted the job in the first place – a swashbuckler about a larger-than-life frontiersman.” (An Open Book, 1980)

Typically Westerns being shot on location offered directors the freedom from day-to-day oversight from the studio’s producers back in Hollywood. This was especially true of generic programmer Bs of the type Budd Boetticher is now famous for. Randolph Scott was the star-producer of those cheaply made great films. But Burt Lancaster was not starring in and producing that kind of bottom-of-the-bill Western. And neither was John Huston directing that kind of Western. Scott’s Westerns made money because they stayed under budget and hit their marks – screenwriter Burt Kennedy and director Budd Boetticher designed their stories for Randolph Scott and the budget he still commanded late in his career – each film’s profit was built-in to the budget and guaranteed with only a slight chance at an unexpected up-side return. A-budget filmmaking has always been a crapshoot and Lancaster’s production company went broke because unlike the studio model where a slate of many genre films pay for a few risky prestige productions, the independent production company must swing for the fence each time. (The Scott-Boetticher Westerns’ budgets were under half-a-million while The Unforgiven cost $5.5 million) Lancaster is better on screen than you may recall, both here playing the eldest son of the widow Zachary, and later in The Professionals (1966) and Ulzana’s Raid (1972), but as a producer he could be pretentious. The writer of Westerns Max Evans who was a confidant of Sam Peckinpah recounts his meeting with Lancaster who was interested in his novella, The Great Wedding:

“‘OK, Max, I want to know what drives these two men.’ ‘It’s simple Burt. These boys want to ride into town, get in out of the wind, have a couple of drinks, and fuck something.’ My response stunned him. In a very fast ten seconds, I knew I had blown the deal.” (Goin’ Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends, 2014)

Although John Huston didn’t badmouth Burt Lancaster by name he was stuck having his producer on set every day even though they were out in Durango, Mexico. No doubt that poisoned Huston’s memory of the film to the point he was unable to watch it for what it is, a great, big budget “elevated” Western made in that sweet spot of the late studio period when independent film producers could still take full advantage of studio facilities, properties, and the skilled crews and casts, while also taking advantage of the weakening codes of the dying studios to ground our myths and dreams a little bit deeper into reality despite the A-budget polish and the movie stars implying that you will be seeing one or another of Hollywood’s more typical feel-good fantasies. A decade later and all of those resources, especially the 2nd unit requirements for Westerns – the horse stables full of trained movie-horses and their wranglers and stunt-riders – would be gone. I wrote in NV #159’s “Yellowstone vs. Hollywood’s Lost Horsesense”:

“The stables run by Fat es, the Hudkins Brothers, Ralph McCutcheon, Glenn Randall and others must've weathered jolting downturns as the production of Westerns halved and then halved again for movies, and then for television too. Jones died in 1963; Ace Hudkins died in 1973, McCutcheon in 1975…” (The New Vulgate)

By the mid-70s any Western production that managed to get financed essentially needed to reinvent the wheel.

But here, in The Unforgiven, the movie that Huston and Maddow and Lancaster & Co. made can be said to deliver on its pretention, if not entirely on their ambitions. It’s not a psychological Western, and it’s not a noir-Western, it’s a signal entry into the Western’s “noble convention.” The blood ties of tribe, nation, and race are to be transcended in this new bastard nation of individuals loosed from tribes, race nations, and maybe even civilizations as then understood. The Zacharys – stand-ins for America writ large – survive as they must as characters in Hollywood’s own Americanized, de-Greeked genre of the semi-tragic-epic-comedy... but they survive unforgiven.

[Illustrations: The Unforgiven’s Kiowa deerskin “calendar”; Lilian St. Cyr, Charles K. French in Red Wing’s Constancy (1910); 101 Ranch poster; Robert Wagner, Earl Holliman, Hugh O’Brien, Richard Widmark in Broken Lance (1954); Elvis Presley in Flaming Star (1960); Pat Hogan, Victor Mature in The Last Frontier (1956); “Kiowa Moon” by Alan Le May in The Saturday Evening Post; The Rawlinses and the Zacharies: Audrey Hepburn, June Walker, Charles Bickford, Lillian Gish, Audie Murphy, Burt Lancaster; Joseph Wiseman as Abe Kelsey; John Huston, Bill Pickens probably, and Audie Murphy on a Durango location hunt, photo by Inge Morath; John Saxon in Johnny Portugal’s last moment on screen; Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Doug McClure, Audie Murphy near the end]

---

---

Netzley Pond, Naperville, Ill.

Photograph by Joe Carducci

---

---

                                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                        Reaction Shots 3.0
Joe Carducci

- We may need a malevolent AGI just to get rid of Sam Altman.

- If you love the culture but hate the polity, keep thinking because you aren’t there yet.

- The politico discounts the arts to a point where he no longer hears a muse, which leaves any thought ideological.

- After Khrushchev’s 1961 “For New Victories” speech moved the Party off economics to race the American Left began its dream of making whites a minority; its nightmare is when whites begin to act like a minority.

- When an individual indulges a group he becomes a type.

- Atheists demand America be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

- The four year delay before Trump’s second term made all the difference.

- Passion is the will toward destiny.

- The Republican party will spend its majorities on dirty work and heavy lifting because it feels a drift toward disaster, whereas the Democratic party in majority, assuming crises are the norm and managing them a given, tends to freeze up.

- Madison Avenue had no model for moving the pop culture microphone from the first half of the baby boom to the latter half so the middle class’s toying with rock and roll ended as it aged. The forestalling of punk airplay for fifteen years forged an underground but yielded cultural brain damage by oxygen deprivation and a pop culture of solo artists and engineers. Memphis beat New York, then San Francisco beat Memphis, then Los Angeles beat San Francisco, then Orlando beat Los Angeles.

- Every public servant should be required to wear a vest camera.

- The mediasphere is essentially juvenile in its use of words to impose wishful thinking on reality.

- Musicians leave bands and go solo which allows them to hire and fire accompanists as needed; they grow up and stop listening to others while their listeners prefer their early work.

---

---

Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Ill.

Photograph by Joe Carducci

---

---

Steve Beeho at the London Desk…

Jonn Elledge in NEW STATESMAN, Why Does Keir Starmer Even Want to Be Prime Minister?

Starmer may not, as assorted opposition leaders claim, have misled Parliament and thus breached the ministerial code. But if he didn’t, that only serves to highlight the fact he didn’t ask the questions he should, and was outsourcing vast chunks of his job to functionaries. Not for the first time I am left wondering why he even wants the job at all. Being prime minister is stressful, invasive and will inevitably mean literally millions of people hate your guts. Keir Starmer clearly has no animating mission, no zeal for addressing the nation, no interest in either politics or policy. The only plausible answer for why he wanted to run the country at all was because he thought he could run it more competently than his predecessors had. Well: the most flattering interpretation of these latest revelations is that he doesn’t want to do that bit either. Perhaps he is done. Perhaps he is not. But given everything we know now about his style of governing – why on earth does he even care?

^^^

Jonny Ball at unherd.com, Morgan McSweeney’s Inside Job.

In Starmer’s image, a new Parliamentary Labour Party has been created. Out of the 403, not a single one of them represents a plausible alternative Prime Minister. This is the only thing that keeps Starmer in place, in spite of his unprecedented unpopularity, itself about to collide with a coming recession and inflationary spiral. McSweeneyism, in pursuit of political professionalisation, has produced a Labour-dominated House of Commons packed with legislators whose chief achievements centre not around representing workers, rising through the ranks of trade unions in a variety of sectors, and sit still less upon building organisations or creating successful institutions with national impact. Instead, it is a hollowed-out parliament of junior managers armed with humanities degrees, specialising in internal slideshows for corporate public affairs departments or the third sector. Gone are the organisers, the rabble-rousers, the barnstorming autodidacts, and in are the dull young things, delivering speeches in the manner of weekly updates on Microsoft Teams. Once it was a party of labour; today it is a party of LinkedIn.

^^^

Marina Hyde in GUARDIAN, Starmer Seems to Think He Can Do No Wrong.

McSweeney believed this was ultimately about Mandelson’s judgment, not Starmer’s. This must have been the sort of loyalty that endeared him to the PM. Like Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn before him, Starmer has a fundamentalist belief in his own probity, and no amount of sleaze rows or judgment rows or any other type of row is going to dent it. The prime minister seems to regard himself as rather above politics, when in fact he just doesn’t really understand it. The Mandelson appointment was a sixth-former’s idea of realpolitik, replacing a well-regarded ambassador who had proven good relations with the Trump mob (Karen Pierce) with a brand name he’d heard of. In some ways the whole saga has the flavour of Starmer’s bizarre decision to hire Sue Gray as his political chief of staff, presumably because the Sue Gray of Sue-Gray-report fame was someone he’d heard of. As even Starmer must be able to see now, unless he needs Waheed Alli to freebie him some better glasses, that decision to sack Olly Robbins was a kneejerk spasm of anger that has become an infinitely bigger headache for the PM than if he’d considered some questions before acting. For a cautious guy, Starmer doesn’t half do some impulsive things. This particular impulsive thing has removed the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office in the middle of a war and a global situation of gathering instability, taken us on a frenzied couple-of-weeks detour of self-destructive Westminster drama, and – perhaps most lastingly dangerous – made public a whole load of information about our developed vetting procedures, for which I’m sure our international enemies are most grateful. In between sharing disbelieving laughs that we’re doing it.

^^^

Ed West in SPECTATOR, How Hitler Came to Define Western Morality.

The German dictator has become the moral lodestar of our world, as Renaud Camus pointed out in ‘Hitler’s Second Career’, and the decree ‘to do whatever He wouldn’t have done’ has warped many people’s political sense (there was even a notorious case in 1970s Germany when authorities placed children in the care of convicted philes, partly motivated by the guiding sense that the Nazis would have opposed the scheme – you’ll never guess what happened next). […] [Alec Ryrie] sees the moral worldview which replaced a defeated Christianity as shallow, and indeed it tends to emphasise soft virtues like ‘tolerance’ and ‘kindness’. He also fears for what comes next, and gives the impression of someone who wants to save the post-war worldview from itself. I’m not convinced by his solutions, and the latter half does at times read like an anguished Anglican sermon, but his thesis is undeniable and well argued. Indeed, Ryrie suspects that the Age of Hitler is coming to the end. Partly it is just the passage of time, and the increasing distance of the Holocaust. The taboo about anti-Semitism is certainly fading among younger generations, but this is also related to the most consequential effect of Hitler’s second career – the changing demography of the west and the arrival of large numbers of outsiders to a civilisation psychologically incapable of keeping them out. Unburdened by civilisational guilt and possessing religion of their own, these newcomers do not need the crooked cross as their moral guide. The age of Hitler may indeed be over.

^^^

Wolfgang Munchau at unherd.com, Welcome to the Age of Uncertainty.

If you want to understand uncertainty, after all, the mean is your enemy. Politicians should care about the voter with the median income; the voter who, when income is ranked from poorest to richest, is sitting in the middle. He would be a different person from the man with the average income, because the super-rich distort the picture. It’s the “Bill Gates walks into the pub” problem, where a single billionaire raises the average income of a group. There’s an old joke about the statistician who died crossing a river that was three foot deep on average. Real statisticians, of course, know about this stuff. The people most at risk of such misjudgements are those with a Statistics 101 background, who have been taught some powerful techniques they then unleash on an unsuspecting public: economists, journalists, doctors, epidemiologists and unfortunately also climate scientists.

^^^

James Martin Charlton in THE CRITIC, The Hidden Bureaucracy Shaping Britain’s University Curriculum.

One might hope that a university course would involve acquiring skills as well as knowledge in a particular discipline. Computing, for example, remains a skills heavy subject. Students are expected to master core competencies such as algorithmic thinking, software development and data analysis. Of course, computing students must also engage with the previously mentioned priorities and consider, as the benchmark puts it, the “legal, social, ethical, professional, environmental and economic factors that are relevant to computing”. But the technical core still dominates. If you summon a computing graduate, they should at least be able to make their way around your laptop, even as they pause to mutter darkly about “divisions and hierarchies of colonial value … replicated and reinforced within the computing subject.” Students of Drama, Dance and Performance are not so lucky — and neither are their future audiences. You can go through the benchmark for this subject with a fine tooth comb without encountering a single core professional skill. Acting, directing, choreography, movement, voice: the benchmark is perfectly content for students to pass through three years of study without any explicit expectation that they master the craft of performance. Graduates may therefore be unable to play Hamlet or dance Giselle, but the benchmark does ensure that they will demonstrate a “sophisticated engagement with critical and theoretical perspectives” and mastery of “critical modes of investigation”. Perhaps the latter will come in useful if they are ever cast as Columbo. Reading the document, you might begin to understand why such a large proportion of graduates from these degrees never end up working in the profession they thought they were studying to enter.

^^^

Peter Hitchens in NEW STATESMAN, Anglo-Gaullism Is Doomed.

But the true difficulty is that it is too late for British Gaullism. When I called myself a British Gaullist I was, as I always am, discussing what we could have done and didn’t. I wasn’t offering a manifesto. We cannot haul the remnants of the decrepit British dreadnought out of the muddy, polluted creek into which it has sunk. In my review of Professor Jackson’s book, I noted above all that de Gaulle had in the end been beaten, in 1968, by a wordless, incoherent insurrection. Vacuous as it was, it defeated him, his patriotism, his idea of France and his evocation of ancient loyalties. The 1968 generation in France had no use for the threadbare banners of nation, duty and faith. They preferred the new post-patriotic, secular Europe, in which bodily autonomy matters much more than national sovereignty. I wrote in 2019 that it was a great tribute to Charles de Gaulle that this movement, which has transformed the world, originally rose in its full strength specifically against him, his rule and his principles. He had a certain idea of France and of the world, and they knew, absolutely knew, that it was their enemy. Britain had no such figure then or since, whatever the Thatcherites would have you believe. It thought it was too safe to need one. Now it is clear that it is not safe, there is no such leader available and there will be no “Anglo-Gaullism”.

^^^

John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, AI Will Dissolve Civilisation as We Know It.

The metaphysical shock of AI comes with the realisation that matter can be intelligent. The sociopolitical shock comes from the fact that human intelligence is losing its scarcity value. Think twice about becoming an interpreter or translator, an advertising copywriter or university lecturer, a solicitor, accountant or hedge fund trader. The “knowledge classes” are facing an immiseration akin to that suffered by farm labourers displaced by tractors in the Industrial Revolution, but at a much-accelerated rate. Far from ushering in an “era of abundance” as promised by Silicon Valley futurists, AI risks bringing a new age of mass poverty – and with it, a new kind of revolutionary politics. The infantile left-populism of the Greens is a harbinger of more hard-edged movements to come.

^^^

Richard Norton-Taylor in LITERARY REVIEW, The Soviet Network.

The Cambridge Five, Senior suggests, were blinded by ideology. And MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office were blinded by prejudice: files have already revealed how those at the top simply could not believe that Cambridge graduates would betray their country. Such an attitude was perhaps father to the thought. The Whitehall establishment was terrified of the damage to their reputation and the reaction in Washington if the truth came out. Better to keep the growing evidence and their suspicions under wraps. Although Senior states that ‘there was never enough evidence to charge any’ of the Cambridge spies, the reality was not so simple. Declassified files reveal that the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was told in March 1952 that there was insufficient evidence – in spite of months of investigation, phone taps and interviews to prosecute Burgess and Maclean – even if they were to come home from Moscow (they had defected in 1951). The files also reveal that the Foreign Office told Sir Patrick Reilly, the British ambassador in Moscow: ‘Defection is not, of course, a crime in English law.’ Another Foreign Office official told his boss, Sir Harold Caccia, in 1962: ‘We certainly don’t want either [Burgess or Maclean] to return.’ MI5 was so anxious that Burgess, unhappy in Moscow, might try and come back to Britain that the agency encouraged Blunt, whose Soviet affiliation was still unknown, to write to Burgess. ‘What the outcome of the trial would be is of course a matter of speculation,’ Blunt wrote in 1959, ‘but on the way the whole story would be raked up again and many of your friends would certainly be called as witnesses, and mud slung in all directions.’

^^^

Michael Cohen at quillette.com, The Professor and the Pariah.

There’s no evidence that Chomsky had any interest in Epstein’s crimes or private life. The more plausible explanation is simpler. He treated Epstein as he has treated many controversial figures: as someone one might talk to, argue with, and engage. That instinct—the refusal to draw hard social boundaries—helps to explain his position on Cambodia, his support of Faurisson, and his willingness to flirt with historical absurdities. And it helps us to understand the Epstein encounter. The problem is that Epstein was not simply a controversial figure. He was a man who understood the mechanics of legitimacy at a level that many intellectuals never have to consider. He didn’t need Chomsky to agree with him. He needed him to appear with him. Chomsky’s framework leaves little room for this kind of asymmetry. If systems are what matter, then individuals are secondary. If structures shape outcomes, then personal proximity seems trivial. But proximity is not always trivial. Sometimes it is the whole point. The man who spent a lifetime examining hidden structures of power may have underestimated the oldest and simplest one: that reputation can be borrowed, that legitimacy can be staged, and that not everyone at the table is there for the same reason. Chomsky saw a conversation. Epstein saw an asset. And in that gap, the blind spot opened.

^^^

Douglas Murray in SPECTATOR, The Rise and Fall of Tariq Ramadan.

From Athens to Oxford, whenever I encountered him I could never understand the entitled, arrogant attitude he projected as he mouthed evasive platitudes. It was as though he knew he was always going to be fine. Life was good to Tariq. All of this has come to an end due to something I suppose not many people could foresee. But, as I say, the more striking thing about Ramadan is not his fall, but his rise. He will doubtless appeal the French verdict. But I would be surprised if we hear much from him again. The accounts of his victims tell us too much about him. But the supply and demand problem that created him says an awful lot about us, too.

^^^

Julie Burchill at spiked-online.com, The Arrogant Alastair Campbell Was No Match for the Great JK Rowling.

The social-media spat with Campbell is more serious – if one can apply that word to this man. After years of refusing to interact with any of us ‘unkind’ types on the gender-realist team, as is characteristic of people who know that they are doomed to lose any sensible argument, Campbell recently indicated that he and Rory Stewart would be ‘happy’ to welcome JKR [JK Rowling] to their podcast, The Rest Is Politics, just in case she could use the publicity, one supposes. This was after years of putting misters before sisters in the debate about whether transvestites should be given extra human rights to other men, and of only having transvestite-friendly guests on their show. More in sorrow than in anger (the same way he must have punched that journalist who dared to mock Robert Maxwell, his former employer), he added that ‘previous attempts’ to get her on the pod ‘have been rebuffed’. A million memes bloomed showing unattractive men pressing their clammy attentions on attractive women who wanted none of it. And then JKR herself landed a sucker-punch: ‘That’s because I wasn’t interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny.’ The three women known as For Women Scotland, who were in London last week marking the anniversary of their legal triumph at the Supreme Court, offered themselves up for a ‘grilling’ on The Rest Is Politics instead. ‘We are still in London’, they said on their X account. ‘He can ask us on the podcast and call us toxic to our faces. If he has the guts.’ Answer came there none. The groom was only interested in non-Transmaids if they brought the spotlight with them.

^^^

Michael Hann interviews Jowe Head in GUARDIAN, The Return of the Mega-Influential Swell Maps after 46 Years.

Swell Maps’ descendants weren’t the kind to get sleeve tattoos and don leather. They, like Swell Maps, were nerds. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore described them as “part of my upbringing”. Stephen Malkmus noted that Pavement formed, more or less, as a tribute to Swell Maps and their kindred spirits Desperate Bicycles. Now add all the bands who have tried or still try to sound like Pavement or Sonic Youth, bands who may never have heard of Swell Maps. That’s how you map the scope of their influence. “We took what we were doing very seriously, but we were determined to have a bit of fun doing it,” says 69-year-old Jowe Head, who has convened a group of sympathetic musicians as Swell Maps for a new album, Swell Maps C21, the first newly recorded material since 1980’s Jane from Occupied Europe. “We had a saying: ‘serious fun’. A lot of the bands around at the time – some of the ones on the Rough Trade scene – were very dour and frowning all the time, wearing grey. We weren’t like that.”

^^^

Christine Donovan at mostlyijustwalkaround.blogspot.com, In the Cafe of Lost Youth.

Debord's experience of his early life in Paris was for him a time of huge change, living away from home, becoming an adult and falling in love with both women and political thought. At the time Debord was establishing himself as a leader, breaking away from Isidore Isou's Lettrist group and establishing his own Lettrist International. It was at this time that he became involved with two women who would become life long influences and with whom he fell in love, Eliane Papaii and Michele Bernstein. Eliane was Debord's first great love, and right up until his final film, In Girum Immus Nocte consumimur igni, and his final book Panegyric, one of van der Elsken's photos of her was used by him as an image of rebellion, "it shows all the hate in the world, all the fear in the world, all the violence, all the refusal" said her ex husband Jean-Michel Menison. Part Hungarian, part Spanish, part gypsy, Eliane was a persistent runaway, law breaker and as Debord put it a "lost young hoodlum girl". Eliane and Debord eventually broke up, and as a way of getting out of repeatedly being picked up by the police as a runaway she married Jean Michel Mension and then later Jean Louis Brau. Like many other of his friends they were cast into a social outer darkness by Debord, who was probably heartbroken as well as cross, and when she had the temerity to write a book about the Situationist movement he ridiculed it in the Internationale Situationniste journal. By then he had married another Moineau regular, Michele Bernstein, and had begun his long relationship with his future wife Alice Becker. I often wonder what the course of the Situationist movement would have been had he remained with Eliane, rather than the much better behaved Michele.

^^^

Ian Penman in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Peter Doggett’s book, Surf’s Up: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.

Landy was way out ahead of our own current era of group therapy reality TV, celebrity crisis management and social media surveillance. For one of Wilson’s shaky ‘comeback’ TV appearances, Landy stood off-camera holding signs prompting his charge to SMILE. This is not a future Freud can ever have imagined – more stalking cure than talking cure. And yet, Landy’s notion of what might work for patients who were in the terminal stages of addiction and surrounded by cowed enablers was not unrealistic. There was, at the very least, an understanding of the way an addict will arrange everything around themselves like a siege directed outwards, making the people in their life prisoners to their illness. A ferocious will can lurk behind what may present as terminal lassitude. There were some in Brian Wilson’s circle who saw this ‘dumb angel’ as a tenth-dan master in passive-aggressive manipulation. His seeming lostness went hand in hand with an intermittent ability to focus on exactly what he wanted to the exclusion of all else, whether it was exquisitely layered harmonies or being left alone in his room to scarf up drugs. This was procrastination choreographed like a battle plan, and Landy responded with a plan of his own: he effectively restaged the Wilson family’s toxic psychodrama, complete with Bad Dad’s all-seeing eye, violent mood swings and harsh words. Landy also laid down the law in other areas of Wilson’s life. He asked for songwriting credits on top of his fees, whether he’d contributed anything or not. He demanded that Wilson change his will. He even wanted the two of them to merge their names to become Eugene Wilson Landy and Brian Landy Wilson. Then there was the matter of an immediately disputed ‘autobiography’, for which Landy stood to receive 30 per cent of the royalties. Wouldn’t It Be Nice (1991) is an unsettling, unpleasant read. You’re instantly struck by the certain knowledge that this is not Brian Wilson’s voice. The book is subtitled ‘My Own Story’, yet that is precisely what has been taken away from him.

^^^

Eugene S. Robinson at substack.com, In Defense of...Greg Ginn?

Everything about the man was weirdly otherworldly. The anti-fashion, the seeming absolute lack of vanity, weird given the Los Angeles provenance, and again, the blunted affect. There were glimmers of something else though. He and Earl from Saccharine Trust and Dukowski had some to see us play at Spaceland in Silver Lake. We started talking about wanting to keep the rights for our music for potential TV and film use. He got kind of edgy, almost insisting. My wife at the time was a lawyer and had been adamantly opposed to this. Which I said. And which seemed to back him off. He was irked but backed off. With a shrug. That and, of course, his refusal to correctly pronounce Steve Albini’s name correctly. Albini recorded Serenade in Red, the second record of ours that he had worked on. Most of the world would pronounce his name AL-BEAN-E. Ginn made a point, consistently, of pronouncing it AL-BINE-Y. I didn’t know why but it wasn’t hard to imagine why. Albini was not shy about his opinions, particularly in regard to other guitar players and he had multiple times shit on Ginn’s playing. The word that came up most often when he was doing so was “trying.” Whatever it was though it had clearly filtered back to Ginn and he would use his name as often as possible when talking to me, just to mispronounce it. I once asked “isn’t it pronounced AL-BEAN-E?” Ginn sort of smiled and asked in answer “AL-BINE-Y?” Serenade in Red came out, sold well, and we even got a single royalty check out of it.

^^^

Greg Ginn interview at thevinylguide.com.

---

---

Woods Landing, Wyo.

Photograph by Joe Carducci

---

---

Reaction Shots 2.0

Joe Carducci

-Materialists make the best zealots.

-Dictators no longer leave power for exile thanks to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

-The New York Times used to ground its political temper in arts and letters but today that coverage is too thin to keep anyone grounded.

-Democratic Party elders think the radicals are committing political suicide while the radicals think the elders are sell-outs; they should agree to agree and start over.

-The Republican Party’s center of gravity moved to its insurgents while the Democratic Party’s center of gravity resisted its insurgent reformers and is unchanged.

-The American Left tied to the public sector is thereby and unknowingly tamed.

-Watching television isn’t as easy at it looks.

-Social media isn’t as easy as it looks.

-A.I. isn’t as easy as it looks.

-Full disability is tenure for the working class.

-Birth control and abortion trims numbers on the Left and incentivizes the teachers union to fail the Right’s children.

-Judging by social media memes Native Americans now favor immigration.

-Conversion therapy is directionally incorrect, while transitioning is directionally correct.

-The 1950s American ideal was the social product of the 30s New Deal, cemented in place by the World War II mobilization, but the Democrats disowned “the 50s” while the Republicans who fought the New Deal adopted that ideal.

-Modern medicine’s ultimate effect is to dull the Darwinian scythe and weaken the species proving the point of the Amish, determined to submit to God’s will and maintain a hardier consistency contra nature.

-The original meaning of the Russian term, Intelligentsia, describes the cultural class that thinks it is thinking.

-Marxists’ current hope is that A.I. will allow the state the information transfer now accomplished by markets and will increase productivity to eliminate work, requiring a universal basic income and finally making men as gods.

-The ultimate achievement of feminism seems will be leaving the planet to Islam.

-Those who tout American Exceptionalism politick as if we’re not, while those who deny America is sui generis argue as if we are.

-The intellect prefers running along well-trod ruts because these restrict the apparent number of variables at play.

-A.I. will allow writers to produce nonfiction without detaching from the infostream, which will mean the books produced will refuse to attach to the grand historical narrative for the politick of the moment.

-Private corporation reporting standards imposed on the public sector would trigger an autogolpe.

-It’s racist to deny the undocumented a chance to partake of all this racist country has to offer.

---

---

Snowy Range, Wyo.

Photograph by Joe Carducci