TIlE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN The climactic scene in Arthur Penn's new Western, The Missouri Breaks, is purposely more of an anticlimax. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), a "regulator" hired by a Montana rancher to...
...Somewhere out in the wilderness, Clayton beds down for the night...
...Clayton is, in other words, the sort of man who is given to gratuitous gestures, while Logan isn't given to gestures at all...
...There is the momentary confusion of the awakened sleeper in those eyes, but nothing more...
...But for Clayton's dying to be such a non-event is completely appropriate as well-appropriate to the kind of dangerous non-being we have ultimately understood him to be...
...When he first arrives at the ranch he works for, the rancher's daughter sees two riderless ponies wander up to the house, and she gives a start when Clayton's head suddenly pops out of a pack slung over one pony's side...
...Then off-camera Tom Logan's unexpected voice says quietly, "What woke you up was, I slit your throat...
...In the second scene Logan finds an absent member of his gang whom Clayton has killed propped up in a coffin in the street with a sign, "Do you know this man...
...It is a difference of substance, or perhaps lack of substance, since the implication is that Clayton really feels nothing for the dead man he's elegizing...
...This being Clayton's nature, there is pure irony in Penn's having made Marlon Brando put on thirty or forty extra pounds to play the role...
...and just as this shot pops onto the screen, Clayton's eyes start open...
...In the second scene Logan takes Clayton unawares in a bathtub after Clayton has killed the youngest member of Logan's gang...
...Farmers ain't smart...
...In the first Clayton walks in on a wake for a ramrod killed by the rustlers...
...In each of these scenes one of the men is sizing up the other, getting some insight into who the other is...
...If this represents the extent of Clayton's insight into Logan, however, Logan's into Clayton is superior...
...More than true confrontations, those two earlier meetings are part of that structure of parallel episodes I mentioned before...
...This is just it, of course: Clayton isn't there, and those suds are the perfect image of his insubstantiality...
...At the end of the second scene, when the shot he has fired into the bathtub has somehow missed Clayton, Logan bats aside a mound of soap suds and spits, "Look at you...
...We can't see Clayton's throat, but an ooze of blood now coming from the corner of his mouth tells us it's true, and his eyes become hooded again as if he were simply going back to sleep...
...When Logan's bullet later misses him in the tub, his physical existence really does seem to have been thrown into doubt...
...When Clayton at the end of the first scene throws Logan the pistol saying there is one shot left, Logan replies that he doubts it...
...Like the emotions he expresses afterwards at the wake, Clayton himself doesn't seem to exist this first time we meet him...
...There is, for that matter, pure irony in Penn's having cast Brando as Clayton in the first place...
...You're smart," he observes...
...He plays his harmonica for awhile, until he's interrupted by the pissing of his horse, and as he drops off to sleep, Penn fades slowly to blackness...
...What makes this peculiar scene work is the way it plays out the relationship between the two men in it...
...The next shot is a tight close-up of Clayton's sleeping face...
...In contrast to the half dozen bullets scattered facilely around by Clayton, Logan fires only one, and that one with great reluctance...
...At this, suspicion that Logan is the rustler he's after dawns on Clayton...
...Speaking with a heavy Irish accent in one scene and with no accent at all in the next, Brando plays Clayton as a kind of ventriloquist's voice crying in the wilderness...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Their story is framed, for instance, by a pair of scenes in which each of them reacts to the sight of a dead man...
...Lifting the corpse right out of the coffin, Clayton loudly berates the ranchers for having cost "this poor man" his life...
...That relationship has developed not so much through confrontations between Clayton and Logan as through parallels Penn has drawn between them throughout the film...
...The result is that where Clayton is capable of hitting a rope or a fence post at twenty paces, Logan misses Clayton himself at point-blank range...
...In the first scene Clayton takes Logan unawares at Logan's ranch one day and puts on an uninvited display of marksmanship, whizzing bullets at targets all around Logan to make him cringe from the line of fire...
...In the first scene Clayton makes another of his gratuitous gestures, while in the second Logan again refrains from gestures altogether...
...Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), a "regulator" hired by a Montana rancher to control rustling, has tracked down and killed all the rustlers except one, Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson...
...The film bears out this notion that Clayton is a kind of grand emptiness, too...
...Taken together, they have about them that same quality of inverse proportion that the two scenes with dead men have...
...Logan himself realizes it in one of the two run-ins he has with Clayton before that scene where he kills him...
...You're not even there...
...For Logan's killing of Clayton to be so without flourish and pos turing is completely appropriate to who Logan is...
...Just as such a corpulent physique emphasizes Clayton's incorporeal nature, so, too the presence of a legendary star on the screen seems to enhance the completely-protean, anonymous personality of the character he is playing...
...Seeing the two men in similar situations has invited a comparison from which we sense how different they are, and thus how great must be the antagonism between them...
...Stunned, Logan hurries off without saying anything...
...The first occurs just after Clayton arrives at the ranch that has hired him as a regulator, the second just before Logan kills Clayton...
...He is, as the whole film has shown, the opposite of Clayton...
...Between a man who makes a great show of emotion over somebody he doesn't even know and one who conceals emotion over somebody he does, the difference would seem to be more than just a matter of style...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 13
