Still not done with my
noir viewing, but I feel I should throw my hat in here while I work up the stomach to finish that last write-up. This particular entry could double over for the 1930s list....
Law and Order (Edward L. Cahn, 1932)
One of the earliest sound Westerns of any note, this film is also surprising one of the toughest and meanest, unlike any Western I know of (excluding some of those unseen-by-me William S. Hart silents) until the late forties started giving the genre its edge back. Interesting enough (as Nothing noted before flaming out), one can point towards the pseudo-western
Treasure of the Sierra Madre as the turning point in that regards, and as if that film was only picking up a trail that was lost in the intervening 16 years, here we find another grim western and another Huston family affair. Walter Huston leads the film at his best, and it is John Huston, in one of his earliest assignment, who is given the task of adapting the screenplay, doing so from hard-boiled legend W.R. Burnett's novel,
Saint Johnson - all these names, and this film emerges with its violent, masculine credentials in tact. But the missing key in this lineup is director Edward L. Cahn, someone who's beginning to emerge to me as an unknown auteur worthy of further study. A largely unknown figure, recognized only by the occasional follower of z-grade 50s and 60s schlock, this guy appears to have come running out of the gate in 1932 filled with incredible promise. Making his first four films in one year, they include two truly great pictures: not only this film, but his gangster film,
Afraid to Talk/Merry-Go-Round, is to me one of the greatest pre-code films - a brutal, nasty, nihilistic masterwork in the genre. While unknown to me, his
Radio Patrol, an early police procedural, is considered equally as "great" by Bernard Tavernier. And a fourth possible masterpiece emerges in the now-lost
Laughter in Hell. Based off the great novel by the underrated Jim Tully, it's a chain-gang film following in the footsteps of
I Am a Fugitive in a Chain Gang and
Hell's Highway, and by many accounts, it was perhaps the most powerful and harrowing of them all. In fact, considering some of its inflammatory content - including a still-infamous scene where three black prisoners are lynched - it might not be so accidental that the negatives were eventually destroyed. Yet, his relationship with Universal ended nearly as soon as it started, and at the end of the year, it was he (according to press release) who asked out of his contract. Hopping around studios for a few years, he ultimately ended up (like that other could-be-contender, Arthur Ripley) in shorts, directing numerous
Our Gang films... perhaps for the best, as his early films run on a pre-code attitude that would at this time have become verboten. He emerged in the late 40s as a poverty-row filmmaker of some note, including several programmers that are much better than they ought to be (including a pretty good
Caged rip-off,
Girls in Prison), but unfortunately he ended up working with AIP, a contract that ultimately led him cranking over a dozen films a year, often with the level of quality that output suggests (although some of his sci-fi films seem to have not-entirely-ironic cult followings, including the
Alien-influencing
It! The Terror from Beyond Space).
This film is available in back-channels for those want to make the effort, and for my sake, I won't attempt to summarize the whole film here. Rather, let me give a mild spoiler-warning (although the basic story is familiar enough), and jump straight to the end. For while it moves along rather nicely up until then, it is the last fifteen minutes of the film where its begins to pull away, and distinguish itself as a truly remarkable western - stark, austere, grim, possibly nihilistic, a Western that seems to be operating on a completely different axis than anything else going on in the genre at the time - an era of singing cowboy serials and the occasional tentative sweeping epic. This film is, in essence, another retelling of the
Gunfight at the O.K Corral. Wyatt Earp becomes "Saint" Frame Johnson, the Clantons become the Northrups, Doc Hollyday is largely eliminated and what is left is streamlined into the loyal, trigger happy Ed Brandt, the O.K. Corral turns into the O.K. ranch. However, Tombstone remains Tombstone, and the basic outline of the story remains visible even as particulars are transformed. The tale has been oft-told, but its most iconic representation still remains John Ford's
My Darling Clementine. If to perhaps do Ford a great disservice by ignoring the ambiguities of his film, it can be said that it still largely follows the Myth: Wyatt Earp ultimately fulfill his role as lawman, defeating the Clantons, establishing law and order in Tombstone, and paving the way for civilization - for women, for the church, for Shakespeare - following the Western narrative of the taming of the wilderness. It is to this Myth, this narrative, that Cahn's ultimately distinguishes itself in opposition to. One could almost call it an early Revisionist Western, if not for the fact that the genre and its representation of the O.K. Corral were still nascent.
The film opens as if to fulfill this narrative: it posits the legendary gun battle in between the other great moments of the west - the Indian wars of 1840, the finishing of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the land rush of 1889 - an era "punctuated with titanic struggle and stained with blood." For the duration of the film, the story follow the beats of the tale as we would expect it. But in the last fifteen minutes, something remarkable happens compared to some of its rival depictions: at the end of the film, law and order irrevocably breaks down, and Earp/Johnson gives up all pretenses of upholding it. In the middle of the film, he has a great triumph as marshall when he staves off a lynch-mob after a young murderer (Andy Devine). He even manages to sell the despondent killer on his own execution: he will be the first man legally hanged in Tombstone, and dammit, that ought to count for something. The sort of joyous, allegorical celebration is quickly deflated: despite all talk of civility and justice, as soon as the rope snaps around his neck the mood becomes terrible and grim; Cahn even includes a peculiar, but quick yet impossible-to-miss shot of a black citizen watching the hanging with great unease (pointing towards
Laughter in Hell, perhaps). At this point the film turns; this must be one of the earlier films that recognizes and in its own way criticizes the American obsession with guns. "Saint" Johnson passes an ordinance banning the carrying of guns in city limits. At first, we are lead to believe that this is merely a calculated attack on the Northrups. Then, there is a close up of the note dictating the new law, and it is suddenly shot up with holes. The camera pulls back, but it is not the Northrups doing the shooting, but regular townfolk. Suddenly the camera whips around the main square as the town builds to a frenzy. We note an American community where guns are so ingrained into the fabric of life that even elegant young women carry Derringers in their handbags. But the mood goes from absurd to genuinely tense: in trying to do what was necessary, Johnson seems to have gone too far, and even those who were loyal to him against the Northrups turn on him.
Here is another distinction. In Ford, the Clantons terrorize the town but they are ultimately outsiders, haunting Tombstone from the outskirts. Here, the Northrups are part of the community, men about town, and it is final estimate they who the townfolk ultimately align themselves with and most resemble. While it follows the beats of the O.K. Corral as followed by Ford - Earp defeats the Clantons not by trial-and-jury but with a shoot-out, and he ultimately rides out of town at the end - in Ford, the ending, for all its ambiguities, can be seen as an extension of Earp's lawful duties, bringing justice to the wilderness, leaving when the deed is done. Here, on the contrary, while the trajectory is the same, the context is different: Johnson abandons the town to their lawlessness, the final gun-battle is turned purely into a blood vendetta, and if the community is more civilized afterward, it was done so kicking and screaming. After the death of one of his men, Johnson stands in the town square and yells so that all can hear: they'll get their wish, they'll keep their guns, him and his men will resign and leave... but before that, there will be blood to pay. One can read a fascist overtone to its nihilistic view of society, and the harsh steps sometimes needed to taken, by "men with guts", in the face of it; I won't go that far, but the film is definitely unsettling in its worldview. At the beginning of the film, Johnson is ready to give up his career as a lawman: it's a thankless job and the people don't seem to want law and order. Unlike Fonda's Earp, he's not drawn to the job out of personal revenge (that comes later); he seems to jump at the opportunity out of a rekindling of that spark for justice, for doing the greater good. The trajectory of the film is one of desperation, of increasing disillusionment, and as law and order collapses, even the legitimacy of that final famous battle is called into question. This is not the elegant duel of John Ford; the quiet walk to the ranch/corral is here, but it has a sense of desperation and bloody personal duty that points towards that of
The Wild Bunch. And when the shooting begins, it turns into quick and brutal confusion - quickly interchanging stark, static shots that pile up until we're no longer sure which side's doing the shooting and which is doing the dying. At the end, the bloody, wounded "Saint" Johnson is the only one left standing. As he rides out of town on his horse, he sits stiffly, awkward, as if we expect to fall off the horse any moment and die from his injuries. But the wound seems to be as spiritual more so than it is physical; while triumphant in the battle, he seems a broken man, having lost his own men and his own faith in his vocation, realizing that the people he has sworn to protect "don't want peace", but as his dying brother tells him, he's a man who is doomed to "keep the peace as long as [he] lives". Huston doesn't ride off in the distance as a chorus sings "My Darling Clementine". The sounds that accompany his exit are the stark, haunting, monotonous rings of a funeral toll as the screen quietly fades to black.
Definitely an essential Western of the 1930s to be placed somewhere between
The Big Trail and
Stagecoach. Track it down!
It should be noted that the book available for free is
not the same thing as the book that's available in print. They are two completely different overviews of the genre written decades apart. In fact, Cox seems to be embarrassed about the earlier book that he has on his website.
