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In the light of the recent TCM Classic Film Festival there has been some debate about the function of a festival devoted to film history, particularly Hollywood history, and as to whether the people who prefer classic films and programmers of the breed that Turner Classic Movies traffics in are in it for the aesthetics, as a key to unlock the more esoteric mysteries of modern cinema or otherwise understand the films that have come later, or whether they’re just nostalgia hounds content to lock themselves in the corral of the glorious past without a shred of interest in anything that isn’t a product of the old studio system. In his piece “Repertory Cinema’s Self-Perpetuating Cycle,”, Vadim Rizov had very kind words to say about my own account of the TCM Classic Film Festival while perpetuating some strange presumptions of his own, including a very sweeping proclamation about the type of viewer who might revel in such a festival:
“It's pretty certain that if you're an aficionado of the most demanding contemporary formalist filmmakers out there -- the ones that attract rabid fans, festival attention and typically little financial reward -- you are almost certain to be very serious about film history as well. However, the converse isn't true: there's definitely a certain kind of rep viewer that's unapologetically nostalgic in outlook and has no interest in the present day. In fact, one of the reasons rep cinema isn't more pervasive could have to do with the musty aura and self-perpetuating air that can surround the more esoteric rep screenings, where there's always more discoveries and obscurities to sort through.”

Two things seem wrong, however. First, it has been my experience with some (some) of the people most interested in those difficult modern filmmakers that they have gaps the width and depth of a small canyon when it comes to knowledge of film history. You can be serious about film history, it seems, while also paying a load of lip service as to the pursuit of it. It is still surprising to me how many film buffs and self-professed cinephiles there are out there who have no real knowledge of or much interest in movies that came before 1962, unless those movies are among the 20 or so titles that routinely show up in the usual critics polls. The second thing that bothers me about the premise flouted in this piece is the idea that those interested in film classics are necessarily uninterested in modern film. Rizov doesn’t allow for the possibility that there might be viewers for whom The Magnificent Ambersons or Sweet Smell of Success serve as proper study along the timeline of film history, and that a grounding in film history provides the necessary context and foundation for appreciating those films that make up the past 40 years or so of international cinema. To my mind, deciding all those who would flock to something like the TCM Festival are simply nostalgia hounds with their blinders on is a bit of perversity akin to saying one eats eggs as an adult not for their nutritional value or because one likes the taste, but simply because they were what one what regularly ate and enjoyed as a child. Mightn't the aesthetics of classic film, the way restrictions on the material, from within and without Hollywood, caused directors and craftsmen to learn to express themselves in more stylistically creative ways, be reason enough on which to base a love for classic movies? Or the way the cinematography shimmers in Technicolor or in bleak shades of gray in film noir? (The question then goes begging, what of those classic film fans who are clearly too young to wax nostalgic about the good old days of Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland? On what are they basing their refusal to look forward to the treasures of the future?)

Most confusing to me is Rizov’s final assertion. He seems perturbed, annoyed that “young kids are, in fact, showing up to rep cinema as long as it's attractively packaged as an ‘event,’ something to build your weekend around.” Of course it’s a good idea to “package” repertory cinema around the chance to screen the films in the presence of actors, writers, directors who were actually involved in making the films, and when these events happen the theaters are usually full. But aside from the opportunity for education, what about this strategy is surprising? The rep houses do it for the chance to let the creative artist speak about their work, of course, but they are also businesses that must think creatively in order to get the butts in seats for whatever kind of repertory cinema audiences will respond to. And it is incorrect to presume that such “events” are the only such programming to attract the young flies to revival cinema. The New Beverly Cinema here in Los Angeles routinely plays double features that have nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with throwing light on the darker corners of film history—even corners not necessarily favored by those fans of modern aesthetics who have bought into the notion that somehow, for example, Bergman is passé. And the auditoriums for these programs are, if not always packed, then at least far from empty.


And now, with a wink and a nod to Vadim (whom I admire a great deal, by the way), and just to be perverse, a few words in favor of nostalgia and cinematic comfort food. Some days the world just seems like it’s pressing in a little too tight. Those days used to come around a lot when I was growing up, for reasons that don’t seem so pressing or important anymore. (It’s called gaining perspective, or in some circles growing up.) And when it seemed there wasn’t much in the way of room to move, when things just seemed to get too constricted or conflicts between brothers and sisters or buddies and buddies got too inflamed, someone whose job it was to cook—my mom, my Italian grandma, my Italian great-grandma—was always at the ready with something to eat to make me feel better, at ease, less battered by the world. A big pot of spaghetti and meatballs was never far away in my grandma’s kitchen if it was needed. My mom knew that the ticket to soothe my soul was a bubbling batch of chicken and dumplings. And to this day, even just to think of pan-fried venison with a heap of mashed potatoes and steamed asparagus on the side is to keep the savage beasts at bay, the culinary equivalent of a hundred-dollar therapy session. We all have our own comfort foods, and all considerations of caloric content aside, thank God for it, because sometimes there are those days when the only thing that’ll do is to wrap up in a blanket, open up the curtains on a damp or otherwise weather-beaten day, and settle in with a bowl or a plate of [ fill in the blank ] to make the idea of keeping the flame burning just a little more bearable.
Movies can certainly function this way for us, and that comfort might very likely derived from nostalgia—for the kinds of movies we watched as kids on Sunday afternoon TV, or at Saturday afternoon matinees, or for movies that take place in environments that are explicitly or implicitly evocative of the kinds of environments we occupied as children. I used to think that the movies themselves—all movies—functioned, or could function, as comfort food for me. But as I creep closer—just three months now—to my 50th birthday, I realize that there is a certain genre, and a certain kind of movie within that genre, that most thoroughly functions this way for me. The genre is the western, and I doubt that’ll surprise too many who read this blog with any regularity. I’m probably the ideal subscriber for the Encore Westerns Channel, with its voluminous and indiscriminate slate of horse opera pulled from all the nooks and crannies of studio B and C-lists and running with abandon 24 hours a day like a runaway stagecoach. Fortunately, for the sanity of my wife and the preservation of the productivity of whatever free time I have left when all the daily duties are done, Encore Westerns is a premium channel on my satellite system, one which is inconvenient for me to try to pay for—meaning, I couldn’t afford it even if it were available as anything but part of a bundle surrounded by a bunch of channels for which I have no interest whatsoever.

My thirst for these movies can almost exclusively be measured by how efficiently they can patch into the rather less discriminating, but not completely indiscriminate, tastes I had as a boy, and my ability to be caught up in the simplest of storylines by effects and techniques as simple as the sound quality of a cowboy whose prairie whistling is quite obviously overdubbed; or looking to see how well the sets that make up the small town are integrated into the surrounding landscape; or evaluating the saloon in movie “A” and how it measures up, in terms of verisimilitude, to the saloon in movie “B;” or noticing the multitude of bit players who were either familiar from other westerns or who would eventually become stars in their own right (Claude Akins and Lee Van Cleef are ones I’ve been running into lot lately.) I’m not sure I could make a case for the lasting value of any of these films as art, and if it meant that I would have to come up with some other more lofty rationale for enjoying them in order to do so, I’d probably be even less interested in doing so than I already am. But just because a western doesn’t aspire to the heights of expression evident in a movie like The Searchers or Once Upon a Time in the West doesn’t mean that it has no value, or that what value it has should be somehow downgraded or tempered. These movies are nothing if not for pure enjoyment, for reveling in not the flexibility of the western as a vehicle for social or aesthetic commentary, but for celebration of the very conservative nature of the genre itself, even as we may still examine what it is about our national character that spawned the genre and its specific elements in the first place.


A frothy concoction like The Gal Who Took the West (1949) doesn’t have a lot of offer in the way of storytelling innovation. Like many of these pictures, it really is the familiarity of the whole enterprise that is the movie’s strong suit. But within that familiarity here, you’ve got Yvonne De Carlo (never more luscious or amusing, and self-amused) as a barroom singer who snookers land baron Charles Coburn into bringing her out West by billing herself as an opera star. She immediately causes a ruckus when Coburn’s feuding nephews (Scott Brady and the balsa-like John Russell) both fall for her. The movie toys with some pre-Rashomon noodling as to the true nature of De Carlo’s character—delicate flower, drunk or greedy floozy, depending on which grizzled drunk is telling the story at the time—but it’s really all about how De Carlo must negotiate her own marital status between Brady and Russell before fussin’ and fightin’ of a lead-based nature starts to bustin’ out. The picture, directed by Frederick De Cordova (the same gentleman who eventually gained fame as Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show producer), is tame and doesn’t have much of a grip on what kind of tone it’s after from scene to scene, but De Carlo clearly relishes her role in the spotlight, and her dry, arched-eyebrow line deliveries and sly double takes will satisfy anyone looking for an easy, good time. A western in only the loosest terms—it takes place in the late 1880s, people wear Stetsons and ride horses-- The Gal Who Took the West is agreeable eye candy with the chewy nougat called Yvonne De Carlo at its center.



But perhaps my favorites of late have been unassuming cowboy tales starring Audie Murphy, one of which highlights the dark underbelly of the myth of the returning veteran that he so ably rode to movie stardom, and the other in which is he is cast against type as a mysterious avenging killer. That luxurious breed of Universal Technicolor is put to good use in both Nathan Juran’s Tumbleweed (1953) and the spectacular wide-screen vistas of Jack Arnold’s No Name on the Bullet (1959), movies which single-handedly justify the unlikely ascension of Audie Murphy from real-life war hero to number-one box office draw. In Tumbleweed, Murphy, as Jim Harvey, is first seen, as were so many western heroes of the time, riding alone toward the camera straight out of a mysterious past as the movie begins. Harvey is attacked by a rogue Indian, the son of a murderous chief, and ends up wounding the man. But rather than finishing him off, Harvey nurses him back to health, an act of kindness that will come back to haunt him in unexpected ways. Harvey is eventually hired to guard a small wagon train as it makes its way west. When the train is attacked by Indians Harvey hopes to persuade the chief to call off the attack—it was the chief’s son Harvey saved and he hopes this fact will carry some weight with the warrior leader-- and leaves the train to negotiate. But rather than talk, Harvey is captured and the rest of the train is wiped out except for two sisters. When he returns to the town, it is to a populace that assumes he betrayed the wagon train to their deaths, and he has to avoid the hangman’s noose long enough to prove his innocence. That he will do so is rarely in doubt, though the movie does take a turn or two darker than expected, especially in the first half. It’s through the prism of history that Tumbleweed gains in stature and makes for an interesting occasion to reflect on Murphy’s real-life hero’s welcome back from World War II in contrast to the suspicion laid on him by the townspeople in Tumbleweed (the title refers to Murphy’s trusty horse) and, of course, what we know of how veterans would be treated just 15 years after this movie’s release when they returned from Vietnam. It’s still just a really good western yarn and claims for it being much more than that would be, I think, made with 20/20 hindsight, but Tumbleweed is a good example of how pliable the western form can be even when the storyteller isn’t interested in exploding or even rigorously twisting that form.

The trailer for No Name on the Bullet (1959)
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