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"Chicken today, feathers tomorrow," the independent artist's existence. Nicholas Ray has a beautiful opening in roughly five swift strokes: The Brahman bull lumbers into the rodeo corral and snorts right into the camera, which tilts up to reveal Robert Mitchum about to mount the beast, seconds later he's trampled in the dirt; dissolve to fanfare and dispersing crowds; dissolve to the discarded man limping out of the arena, alone with the trash and the dust all around. Where have all the cowboys gone? Into the crawlspace under the dilapidated ranch, "looking for something I thought I'd lost." (Wenders recreates the moment almost verbatim in Kings of the Road.) Sore after two decades on the saddle, the wanderer is ready for a home, possibly the one belonging to the farmhand (Arthur Kennedy) with his own dreams of glory. The veteran turns mentor against the wishes of the greenhorn's wife (Susan Hayward), "a decent, steady life" is her goal, on the road the three of them go. The Western as tin-can spectacle for an unsteady postwar country, the tender whittling down of its macho bluster, pot roast in trailer parks and buried toy pistols. "A world full of prizes" for "a bunch of crazy men paying for the privilege of getting themselves killed." Ray dismantles the genre's iconography with salt and rue, his contrasts are always surprising: The nomad's beloved "freedom" is really an unending cycle of bucking contents, as locked-in as cars in a racetrack, while the wife's insistent domesticity exudes its own perverse fire. (Mitchum and Kennedy's fluctuating bromance is briefly mirrored by Hayward's flirtation with Maria Hart's scrappy trick-shooter, an early flash of Johnny Guitar.) A key American vision, with Ray's aching sense of failure and transience and grace pulled together into Mitchum's wink of soulful nonchalance. Peckinpah in Junior Bonner takes up the analysis. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. With Arthur Hunnicutt, Frank Faylen, Walter Coy, Carol Nugent, Lorna Thayer, and Burt Mustin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |