|
"Dirty little village," moral arena. A Sunday wedding for the retiring Marshal (Gary Cooper), a vengeful gunslinger is coming to town so the Quaker bride (Grace Kelly) states the situation: "You're asking me to wait an hour to find out if I'll be a wife or a widow." Cowardice reigns, no way to round up a posse: The judge (Otto Kruger) packs up the flag and bolts, the deputy (Lloyd Bridges) angles for a promotion, the mayor (Thomas Mitchell) sees it as a matter of economics, the mentor (Lon Chaney Jr.) has only arthritis to show for a life of lawful vigilance. The former mistress (Katy Jurado) has become a forthright entrepreneur but the bluntest voice belongs to the cynical clerk (Howland Chamberlain) who knows that peacetime is bad for business. The iambic meter of a pendulum clock, the blank canvas of a cloudless sky. "No time for a lesson in civics, my boy." A Viennese abstraction of American heroism and sacrifice and the silent majority, done up in Fred Zinnemann's stark neatness. Taut lines, triangular façades, the sturdy vertical of Cooper's stride growing battered and sweaty. (He stops at the barbershop to rest and instead hears the hammering of a coffin next door.) Conscience is a Dimitri Tiomkin ballad thumping within, the Reaper is an empty chair and a train whistle made to tick via rhythmic montage. Ostentatious modesty, allegorical determinism, Western dilemmas and showdowns compressed in a laboratory. Private integrity amid communal cravenness, dwarfed on Main Street by an ascending camera. "For what? For nothing. For a tin star." The final shootout stems from Stagecoach, and is variously remembered by Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West), Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), Eastwood (High Plains Drifter). Cinematography by Floyd Crosby. With Harry Morgan, Ian MacDonald, Lee Van Cleef, Robert J. Wilke, Eve McVeagh, Morgan Farley, Harry Shannon, Sheb Wooley, and Jack Elam. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |