A legendary hero is finally coaxed out of self-imposed retirement and singularly takes on a seemingly-unbeatable force, inspiring hope and ending their legend in the process.
My Name is Nobody (1973) Dir. Tonino Valerii Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) Dir. Rian Johnson
We all have our favorite Oscar winners that we love to watch over and over again. But there are numerous Oscar winners and nominees that have gained new life thanks to TCM, HBO Max and DVD that are definitely worth revisiting. Here are some of my favorites:
RANDOM HARVEST
I interviewed the legendary funny man Carl Reiner a few months before his death and the conversation drifted to RANDOM HARVEST (’42) and how much he loved the romance. Robert Redford is also a fan. In the 1990s, he was planning on doing a remake, and in 2014, it was announced that Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) was hired to pen a remake. The handsome MGM production based on James Hilton’s bestseller starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson was a huge hit that year and was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Film, Actor for Colman, Actress in a Supporting Role for Susan Peters and Director Mervyn LeRoy.
Both Colman and Garson had great success in other Hilton adaptations – Colman starred in LOST HORIZON (’37) and Garson made her U.S. film debut and earned her first Best Actress Oscar nomination in GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS (’39). RANDOM HARVEST is often overlooked by the other big MGM film released in 1942, William Wyler’s MRS. MINIVER. Not only was the stirring drama about a British family attempting to survive the years of World War II a blockbuster at the box office, but it also won a striking eight Oscars.
But I think RANDOM HARVEST is the more engaging film. It’s hard not to fall in love with this romantic tale with Colman at his most dreamy as a shell-shocked amnesiac veteran of World War I (Colman was wounded in the global conflict) named Smith who falls in love and marries a loving young entertainer (Garson). But Smithy, as Garson’s Paula calls him, is hit by a car on his way to a job interview and wakes up with no memory of the past three years but does remember who he really is – an aristocrat by the name of Charles Rainier.
Will true love reunite these two? The sigh level is very high with RANDOM HARVEST and this love story has a very strong place in my heart.
NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART
I’ve had more than a few people ask me why I like NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART (’44) so much. It’s depressing, they say. It’s downbeat, they say. But I think it’s a chance to see Cary Grant in a rare break out of his “Cary Grant” suave, sophisticated image. Adapted and directed by Clifford Odets from the novel by Richard Llewellyn (How Green Was My Valley), NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART casts Grant as Ernie Mott, a Cockney drifter who returns home to his Ma (Ethel Barrymore). When he learns that she’s dying of cancer, Ernie stays to help run her second-hand shop. But Ernie can’t stay out of trouble, joining forces with a gangster stealing cars and pursuing the mobster’s wife (June Duprez).
Meanwhile, his neighbor Aggie (Jane Wyatt) is madly in love with him and tries to save Ernie from a life of crime. The film was generally warmly received, earning four Oscar nominations and winning supporting actress for Barrymore. She shot her scenes during her two-week vacation from her Broadway triumph The Corn Is Green, and the Academy Award transformed the Broadway star into a much-in-demand film actress. She would go on to earn three more Oscar nominations.
Grant, who had earned his first Oscar nomination three years earlier for PENNY SERENADE (‘41), didn’t attend the Academy Awards where Bing Crosby won best actor for GOING MY WAY. Grant never earned another Oscar nomination, but received an Oscar honorary in 1970.
NIGHT MUST FALL
Handsome and charismatic Robert Montgomery was one of MGM’s top leading men in the 1930s, best known for his work in comedies including PRIVATE LIVES (’31) and FORSAKING ALL OTHERS (’34). Though he did an occasional dramatic part, nothing really stretched him as an actor until NIGHT MUST FALL (’37). Montgomery had long been bugging MGM head Louis B. Mayer for better roles. He supposedly allowed Montgomery to do NIGHT MUST FALL because the studio head thought the actor would be embarrassed when the movie failed. Montgomery later said, “they okayed me playing in it because they thought the fan reaction in such a role would humiliate me.” He went so far as to help subsidize the film’s production budget.
Based on the play by Emlyn Williams which ran on Broadway in 1936, NIGHT MUST FALL finds Montgomery playing Danny, a serial killer who just happens to have a trophy from his latest victim—her head—in a hatbox. Danny charms his way into the heart and home of a wealthy elderly woman (Dame May Whitty, reprising her London stage role). Rosalind Russell, who made five films with Montgomery, plays the elderly woman’s niece who has her suspicions about Danny but can’t convince her aunt that she’s in danger. Both Montgomery and Whitty earned Oscar nominations.
Though Montgomery returned to the comedy genre after NIGHT MUST FALL, he began directing films such as LADY IN THE LAKE (’46) and found great success in TV in the 1950s with the anthology series Robert Montgomery Presents, which often featured his daughter Elizabeth.
THE NAKED SPUR
Jimmy Stewart’s image took a 180 degree turn in the 1950s thanks to Alfred Hitchcock with REAR WINDOW (’54) and VERTIGO (’58), but most notably in the five Westerns he made with Anthony Mann. Far from the boy-next-door character he played pre-World War II, Stewart was transformed into conflicted, troubled men – anti-heroes who often could be as villainous as the bad guys who peppered these sagebrush sagas. (Mann also directed Stewart in three non-Westerns).
THE NAKED SPUR (’53), which earned a screenplay Oscar nomination for Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom, is my favorite of their collaborations. Stewart really digs deep into the character of Civil War veteran turned bounty hunter, Howard Kemp. He’s angry and bitter having lost his land during his conflict. Kemp hopes he can get his land back by working as a bounty hunter. And he’s doggedly determined to get outlaw Ben Vandergroat (a fabulously vile Robert Ryan). Along the way, he encounters two men (Millard Mitchell and Ralph Meeker) who join him on his journey. And when he finds Vandergroat, he also discovers he has a young woman (Janet Leigh) with him. Intelligent, often disturbing and brilliantly acted, THE NAKED SPUR is an exceptional exploration of the dark side of humanity.
Demons. Monsters. Witches. James Crowley’s sacred duty as a Black Badge is to hunt them down and send them packing, banish them from the mortal realm for good.
He didn’t choose this life. No. He didn’t choose life at all.
Shot dead in a gunfight many years ago, now he’s stuck in purgatory, serving the whims of the White Throne to avoid falling to Hell. Not quite undead, though not alive either, the best he can hope for is to work off his penance and fade away.
This time, the White Throne has sent him to investigate a strange bank robbery in Lonely Hill. An outlaw with the ability to conjure ice has frozen and shattered open the bank vault and is now on a spree, robbing the region for all it’s worth.
In his quest to track down the ice-wielder and suss out which demon is behind granting a mortal such power, Crowley finds himself face-to-face with hellish beasts, shapeshifters, and, worse … temptation. But the truth behind the attacks is worse than he ever imagined …
The WitchermeetsThe Dresden Files in this weird Western series by the Audible number one bestselling duo behind Dead Acre.
I’m reading a lot of Louis L'amour lately & while I have issues with the way he writes some things, its made me question things even more than I did when I read his books as a kid. Is the “western” extinct? Can you have a “western” that’s not a complete pile of trash? (I’ve seen worse than LL, though) can you write a story about discovering a new land without all the genocide, etc and still call it a western?
American mythology is deeply, deeply tied into being a settler-colonizer. The brave settlers(-colonizers), facing the “wild” North America (actually very well maintained by Native people), carving out a place for themselves (to either make Europe richer, or to make themselves richer) while either getting rid of the “outlaws” and “riff raff” or “civilizing” the “savages” (both times it’s pitting Native people as the problem). At best, it props up the erasure of Indigenous populations. At worst, it is an active tool of oppression, showing genocide as a necessary evil for the Good (white) American to prosper.
This goes for a lot of American-written “explore another land’ works, by the way. Westerns aren’t immune from it. You can check out more detailed breakdowns under the colonialism, colonizer, and colonization tags.
Consider Natural Resources.
Whether or not Westerns can not be a complete pile of trash… that’s hard to determine for a simple ecological fact: cows and bison need the same resources, and there’s a reason that you’re hard pressed to find multiple herbivore megafauna with overlapping ranges (barring a super lush area like the Rockies). The land plain old can’t support it.
For example: Cows and bison both eat a lot of grass.
Grasslands, while very fertile, can only grow so much grass.
The US military actually did go off and kill bison en masse to support the expansion of America and to actively attempt to starve out Plains people (source). Also, the introduction of European tick-borne diseases (brought by cows), guns, and wasteful slaughter brought bison to near-extinction (source 1,source 2).
The very basis of cowboy-based stories is deeply entwined with colonialism. Cows getting introduced to North America (by the Spanish) massively upset the ecology, and it wasn’t just the humans who didn’t have antibodies against European illnesses. Ranching absolutely decimated the Plains population, both the people and the animals, just from being introduced to North America.
Manifest Destiny
Westerns are built on an extremely flawed principle: the concept that the West needed taming. It’s the same colonialist principle that I covered in my Monsters and Fantasy Colonialism ask—you have the “predatory” outside (often full of Natives), the “civilized” inside (the ranch, the outpost town), and the brave and bold hero who’s out there making everything safe by killing the “predators”. Sometimes those predators are white outlaws, and other times they are Native people. And behind everything is the shadow of genocide that “cleared” the land for the settlement to happen.
This covers every effort to genocide Native populations, from the Spanish to the French to the Americans, seeing as how much land America bought from the Spanish and French. You are dealing with three related but different colonial histories with cowboys, and you have to research all of them.
The doctrine behind this is called Manifest Destiny: the belief that the United States deserved to go coast to coast. That’s why so much of its “land discovery” is tainted: the colonial underpinnings of believing that settlement of those areas are deserved. It’s possible to have people explore and settle in other lands without this attitude, but for a colonizer, it will take a lot of unlearning for you to approach it safely. And reading works that show a different way to expand out than colonialism.
The Verdict?
I can’t say for sure the Western genre is dead. I can, however, say that the Western genre is built off manifest destiny (the reason why the west was even settled) and cannot exist without colonialism because of its reliance on European animals (cows) and technology (guns).
Whether or not that makes it impossible to redeem is up to you.
I think it would be out and out historically revisionist to pretend that period of American history didn’t exist. It would be historically revisionist to pretend that manifest destiny didn’t play a huge role in the way US history developed.
Is it possible to explore this safely? To speak out against colonialism when most people don’t even see cowboys as being part of colonialism, no matter how not-white cowboys were? To not prop up American exceptionalism in the mythology of cowboys, when so much of American pride is wrapped up in being a settler? To look at the “heroes” of media set the Wild West and critique them for the white supremacist figures that they are?
I don’t know.
I am not from a tribe (or even a general region) that was impacted by ranching and cowboys, so I can’t give specifics for how to make it work. Some points have been covered before in the cowboys tag, but that’s about it.
Opinions from Plains and Southwestern peoples are welcome! Preference will go to people who were directly impacted or participated in ranching, which includes Plains and Southwest Indigenous people, along with Mexican ranchers (especially if you were in the region that was purchased by America).
~Mod Lesya
For any followers looking to unpack your own relationship with the Western genre, and how it warps your perspective on history, I whollyrecommend Richard Slotkin’s trilogy about the myth of the American Frontier:
Slotkin started writing these in the 70′s and finished them in the late 90′s, and he painstakingly breaks down how American literature, media, and cultural “myth” codified this false idea of an American frontier, and how it went on to influence US policies for centuries. A dense but fantastic read!
Django Unchained | 2012 | Quentin Tarantino RT: 88% With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner. Stars: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio
TITLE:Old Custer AUTHOR:Eli Cash ORIGIN:The Royal Tenenbaums (movie, 2001, directed by Wes Anderson)
Everyone knows that Custer died at Little Big Horn. What this book presupposes is… what if he didn’t?
I. Fiction — Westerns — Problematic romanticization of racist tropes II. Fiction — Alternate histories — The Old West III. Serious Literature — Genre fiction with pretensions — Impressive-sounding words
And here we’ve got our first repeat offender with another book from The Royal Tenenbaums! Told you there’d be more. I’m spacing them out, but Wes Anderson’s got a LOT of these. Anyway, much like Family of Geniuses, this image originally came from the Criterion Collection 2012 gallery of the books and magazines by and about the film’s characters, archived here.
And… boy, is this cover a LOT more racist even than it appears at the quick glance of it you get in the movie, which is already pretty freaking racist. I mean, I guess that’s part of the point about the type of person and writer Eli is, but STILL.
