Divided

No one ever told me about this Walter Brennan. The one in Along the Great Divide. Is that why the movie shocked me so much? For a spell, at least, his is one of the most wicked constructs in any western I've ever seen. To be sure, there are characters in the genre's history who've committed grander atrocities than singing a song, but I'd be hard pressed to recall a dynamic as intimately discomfiting as the one between Brennan and Kirk Douglas here, one in which a psychic wound is located and assaulted with such relentless and gleeful surgical precision.

To clarify: Douglas is the marshall who is transporting Brennan's horse thief to face a murder charge properly in a courtroom, evading the father of the murdered man and his lynch mob who assume Brennan's guilt and seek his neck. Brennan, who sees this escort as merely (cruelly?) prolonging the same fate the mob intends to mete out, whiles away the hours with song, and stumbles onto the tune ("Down in the Valley"; more lovely = more menacing) which Douglas's father, killed years ago in a preventable lynching, used to sing to his son. Brennan hones in on the distress the song creates in Douglas and, against warnings, sings it loud and repeatedly, taunting the haunted lawman with invoked and mocked paternal parallels.

Towards what end? Presumably, Brennan aims to be set free in lieu of the madness he might provoke. (As played, a bullet in the head seems the more likely natural outcome). But Walsh and Brennan conspire to point at something more sinister: that this man is positively relishing in the torture he is inflicting, secretly thanking the stars that they have aligned to put him in such a position. The basic survival strategy of Brennan's character here is, as far as Hollywood logic extends, plausible - in an impossible situation, a person pounces on any scrap that may translate to power - but it does not account for the almost pathological grins of satisfaction and gut cackles of pure pleasure that inflect Brennan's performance. These interactions are so stinging, so stark in their single-minded pursuit of emotional damage, that they threaten to overwhelm practically every other development of drama and character in the film. That Brennan ultimately winds up some Frankenstein monster of victim, devilish antagonist, fool, ally, ghost, patsy, and benefactor of faith is just one source of the film's mystery. And when Walsh's sadistic streak (which doesn't begin and end with Brennan; Ray Teal's repeated delighting in the desperation and violent infighting of his prisoners is just as unaccountable) seems ready to tip over into the wearying, we get the remarkably tender scene of Douglas riding horseback with a dying John Agar, singing the forbidden song to comfort his friend as the life leaks out of his body while shots of Brennan, a tired and wholly impassive witness, are tossed out like a dare. The movie turns on such sequences where configurations, both mythic and immediate, of child/parent/death become fluid and interchangeable, with the residual guilt and grace momentarily assuming total command of the narrative. The dexterity with which the film bridges not just pure viciousness and utter humility, but such credible versions of each, is astonishing.

Sinister

Adorno and Eisler once argued that music in film often acts as an antidote against the picture, that rather than supplementing the emotions of an onscreen character it instead works towards helping the audience cope with fear and shock. The degree to which much modern horror cinema has fine tuned with awesome precision a hollow dependency on the loud shocking jolt for effect shows that an inverse of this hypothesis can also ring true: silence utilized not as a neutral, anchoring presence but instead as another manipulative tool that dulls its horrors by reducing them to a clinical play of crashing noise. It's easy to imagine practitioners of such faux-horror hunched behind their cameras with thought bubbles over their heads containing that quote from Zero Dark Thirty, co-opted as a mantra: "Everyone breaks, it's biology."

Sinister doesn't exactly escape cheap shock-jump syndrome, but one of its subtle strengths is its carefully crafted Christopher Young score, an amorphous, ubiquitous dark churn that never sees fit to simply work in accordance with the jolts but instead often seems to exist independently of the specific screen actions, occupying a more elemental place within the emotional dimension of the film, dovetailing with the central themes of obsession and paranoia and amplifying them in a particularly bleak and subterranean manner. The film isn't a complete success, but it's strikingly naked in its despair and takes it seriously (in spirit it feels at times like something plucked from the 70s and slapped with a modern veneer) and its efforts to destabilize on both the aural and visual level (I can't think of many recent mainstream movies of any genre so willing to hang onto a disorienting, visual blackness) are effective more often than not. There's a modest lesson or two in small scale, unbombastic eeriness here that the James Wan's of the world would do well to take note of.

LOL

A bit of roundabout communication from D'arrast's Laughter (1930). The continental flavor and penchant for spicy intimation here have led some, in the small pile of writing I've been able find on the film, to invoke Lubitsch, which seems I suppose as perfectly reasonable a starting point as any in situating this rich, forgotten Paramount item. Likely not enough of D'arrasts's scant output circulates in any capacity today to parse out any kind of full bodied "touch", but to my eyes the real heart of the film pumping beneath Donald Ogden Stewart's screenplay (one of his earliest, and it's a hoot; some acid religious sarcasm or class barb pounce out from every corner) is a physical, jubilant discursiveness that feels very much the product of a distinct sensibility: a potentially awkward situation early in the film is diffused by Frederic March banging out some jazzy number on a piano, opening the door for Nancy Carroll and Diane Ellis to launch into surely one of the most manic of all precode dance numbers; later on Carroll and March break into a home to avoid a rainstorm, and their mounting sexual tension naturally leads to them dressing in bearskin rugs and engaging in a bear battle. Narratively these tangents feel justified in their illustrations of the allure of the bohemian temperament (the source of the title), but the effect is of viewing a group of characters who continually seize any opening to wriggle free from the sway of plot and give into some primal impulse.

Points of Contact (6/13/13)

Sarah / Mary

The Shepherd of the Hills (Henry Hathaway, 1941)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949)

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 Speaking of non-Ford Fordian movies (which Shepherd is most definitely; in addition to the above, Harry Carey plays Wayne's father (!), and Wayne and Ward Bond have an all-out brawl in front of everyone), I'll throw a quick plug in for another fine example that's found reason to be brought up in certain cinephile corners lately, George Marshall's Pillars of the Sky (1956). It's one of five films on the recently released TCM DVD box set Western Horizons: Universal Westerns of the 1950's, surely one of the essential home video releases of the year. I was initially attracted to the set due to the presence of George Sherman's Dawn at Socorro (1954) - I've been watching lately as much of Sherman's marvelous Universal-International output as I've been able to get my hands on and this was one of his most obscure and highly thought of from the period - but every one here is great, with maybe the biggest surprise for me being John Sturges' tough, taut, cerebral Backlash (1956), a truly incredible western. A highly recommended purchase.