THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN Whenever he makes a movie Arthur Pena talks about something he calls its "dramatic profile," by vthkk he means the way structure reveals character in the film. A quick glance at Penn's...
...Perhaps because he had a background in theater, Perm has always beep interested in characterization above all else...
...He kills all the members of Logan's gang from a distance when they are helpless or even unaware that he is there...
...When Ford made Stagecoach in 1939, he revived for everybody a genre that had been dead since the coming of sound...
...As this is obviously a difficult moral position to maintain, it is not surprising that the climactic scene to which it leads is such a contorted one...
...motivation which explains that action...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Bet at the same time, the scene gives Clayton an appropriate death too...
...Where Logan is not given to gestures of any kind, Dayton is given to gestures that are all gratuitous and rhetorical...
...But clearly Penn's film is an effort to find yet another moral alternative for the Western...
...That is to say, a man of Clayton's disposition and amorality might exist in any age or any drama, but being a "regulator" makes him a uniquely frontier character...
...It is self-contained...
...It proves that it is an act undertaken only for survival and out of necessity, an act in which Logan deserves no condemnation because he takes no pleasure...
...His favorite weapon is a long-barreled rifle with which he can hit a victim he can only sight through binoculars, and it is this detachment from his violence that Logan hates hi him...
...Aloof and absent in every other way, he is also absent when he does his killing...
...What we have come to understand about Clayton is that he Is not there in a sense...
...All this is to say, once again, that formally Penn's film works very well...
...Certainly Penn fancies himself the kind of marauder who can come in from outside and shake up a genre, as he proved with Bonnie and Clyde...
...As soon as die discussion passes beyond Clayton's character to his vocation, however, we are taking into account another aspect of the film, besides die formal one, which is its generic aspect as a Western...
...This is, after all, a Western and it has to lead to a showdown...
...Either tradition may influence the other...
...It is precisely because it is a murder by stealth that Logan's killing of Dayton is acceptable to us...
...His emotions and even at times his rather corpulent body seem to be evanescent, immaterial, non-existent...
...The breaks of the Missouri River are an area of dry declivities, an area where the prairie floor just falls away suddenly like Clayton's life...
...Its action implies the...
...This is why the moral knots get so much more tangled in Penn's film...
...Whether either the character or the landscape will take hold with other directors of the Western Is a good question...
...Shane and High Noon went further by suggesting that the good guy has to be gotten rid of in the end too...
...Plot and character have to meet A climactic scene has to be created which preserves and respects the oppositeness of these two men, and yet resolves die opposition between diem hi a single action appropriate to both...
...Moreover, where the showdown has lost all moral significance, this murder by stealth, the slitting of Clayton's throat, comes to us as a kind of moral affirmation...
...The trend has been away from gunfighters who are righteous and herok toward those who are tragic and self-defeating...
...He can't send away one character and keep the other at the end as Stevens could...
...Having run the entire moral gamut, it seemed that at last, hi the slow-motion sequences of Peckinpah or in the films of clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone, the violence in the Western might become a purely aesthetic event-a work of visual beauty without any moral content at all...
...The other tradition, the outsider's, is made up of films by directors who work only occasionally in the Western and who either import the influence of other genres into the Western or exploit in some dramatic way changes already going on gradually in the Wesetrns of the insiders...
...To see how greatly Penn's Tom Logan complicates the morality play hi the Western, consider how he advances upon Stevens' Shane, another outsider's classic to which The Missouri Breaks seems to invite comparison...
...It seems a futile landscape, this riverbed with no river in it, but learning to navigate here is largely what Penn's film is about...
...Among these would be John Ford, Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah...
...The great problem Penn has set for himself is that that ultimate dash must occur...
...When he intents a scene or composes a shot, what matters to him is not how it advances the plot of explains cause and effect, but how it discloses character...
...To help out the rube sodbuster played by Van Heflin, Stevens supplied the modest, plain-spoken but deadly gun-fighter played by Alan Ladd...
...Human experience in Penn's film seems finally to conform to the very landscape where the film is set...
...In the early fifties when Zinneman made High Noon and Stevens made Shane, the Western in general again turned a corner...
...In Penn's new Western, The Missouri Shahs, this "dramatic profile" is the parallel structure of scenes that I was describing in the last isiue...
...The first, which might be called the insider's tradition, consists of films made by directors who do a lot of Westerns, get their reputations from their Westerns, or think of themselves primarily as makers of Westerns...
...Perm builds up our sense of the antagonism between the two main characters, cattle rustler Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson) and "regulator" Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), by showing them in similar, though unrelated scenes and circumstances...
...There are really two traditions of the Western, two different Genres almost...
...An ultimate clash between them that only one will survive seems inevitable not so much because one man has been baiting the other and spoiling for a fight, but just because they are men of such different temperament...
...And in tills regard die understated, almost unstated way in which he dies is as appropriate to him as it is to his killer...
...In The Missouri Breaks these two characters become just one character, Logan, who has the stylelessness of Heflin but the capacity of Ladd...
...That he doesn't make a contest and a grand show out of killing Clayton proves to us that Logan doesn't enjoy the killing...
...What the character portrait of Clayton finally goes to show is why he is suited to the work he does-why he is a "regulator...
...As a Western, of course, Penn's film is not self-contained and merely self-referring...
...Like The Missouri Breaks, Shane is the story of a feud between a smalltime operator and a cattle baron who has hired a gun-slinger...
...This seems to me to be accomplished, as I was also saying in the last issue, by that peculiar scene where Logan murders Clayton...
...The parallel lines have to be made to converge somehow...
...Though Mann and Ford went on working by then- own lights as always, High Noon, Shane and the "adult" Western cleared the way for Peckinpah's work ten years later...
...Stagecoach went beyond the pure-hearted heroes of the silent Western by suggesting that the bad guys- the prostitute, outlaw and drunken doctor-might actually turn out to be the good guys...
...It is out of such a landscape that a character like Tom Logan is bred...
...The great difference, though, is that the small-timer in Shane has a gunslinger on his side too...
...A quick glance at Penn's filmography shows most of the tides in it-The Left-Handed Gun, The Miracle Worker, Mickey One, Bonnie and Clyde, tittle Big Man-refer to characters...
...It is a reaction to years and years of other directors' films in which die conventions and traditions of die Western have been defined...
...When Logan cute Clayton's throat without either Clayton or us realizing at first that he has done so, the scene preserves that want of flamboyance and bravado which is Logan's nature...
...The Missouri Breaks is perhaps another bid at originality in the Western, another of these periodic attempts to break new ground...
...It is the consistency of personalities, rather than events, that Penn aims for...
...In Penn's version what lies beyond the showdown-beyond the duel in the street at high noon or the gunfight at the OK corral-is murder by stealth...
...In this group would be George Stevens, Fred Zinneman, and, 1 think, Arthur Perm...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 14
