Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead, by Charles Marion Russell (1916)

Here is a wonderful action painting by our friend, Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the Cowboy Artist.  Charlie is a good saddle pal to us here at The Jade Sphinx, and Your Correspondent has been trying to get a sense of the man and his philosophy through his pictures. 

We can start with the obvious: the title of this work, Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead.  In the survey of Western Art we have done here over the years, we have had occasion to look at several pictures that include bears in an attitude of menace.  In fact, after Native Americans, bandits and over-zealous lawmen, perhaps the bear is the most frequently represented foeman in Western Art.

However, most any of Charlie’s contemporaries would take the obvious route, and paint a picture of Western figures shooting and killing the bear.  (Or, reaching for their rifles to do so, or putting them down after they have done so.)  Not Charlie.  His cowboy heroes, though obviously well-armed, rope and scare the bear away to safer climes.  Always more Roy Rogers than Clint Eastwood, Charlie didn’t see the West as a vast panorama of hardship and cruelty, but, rather, a boyish paradise of freedom and fun.

This is where Charlie differs most significantly from the artist frequently associated with him, Frederic Remington (1861-1909).  For Remington, the West was unending hardship, merciless desert and physical exertion, a battle for survival to be won or lost.  It is Remington, of course, who created in his work the now-familiar Western trope of the bleached steer skull that can still be seen in countless depictions of the West.  Make a wrong move, Remington implied, and you’ll end up the same.

If this picture is any indication, perhaps Charlie’s vision was the truer one.  Loops and Swift Horses now hangs in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and is based on a true-life incident.  This painting came about by way of his friends, the Coburn brothers of the famous Circle C Ranch in eastern Montana, where they described the roping of a giant brown bear. Artistic license was taken when Charlie turned the bruin into a Grizzly, but the rest of the story was true right down to the landscape in the background: the scenic Coburn Buttes.

The dominant color of the picture is blue, but Charlie manages to mute or pop shades of it to represent everything from trees to sky to mountains, to foreground scrub.  Yes, the color never becomes monotonous or gimmicky. 

Charlie was also the master of figures in motion.  His horses move.  Many of our greatest artists have been able to depict horses of majesty, of size, of monumentality, but Charlie’s horses are seen in dramatic action, twisting or jumping with a febrile life of their own.  I can think of no finer painter of American horses than Charlie Russell

Finally, Charlie underscores the tumultuous action of the picture with a rainstorm in the middle-distant horizon.  Like all Western landscape pictures, the view-horizon is vast, going on for miles.  Thus the far-off rain storm underscores the ‘storm’ of action going on between cowboys, horses and bear. 

Speaking of movement, take a moment to look at the bear.  It twists and pivots on unsteady ground … you can almost feel the weight of the animal as it is pulled and slides down the natural incline.  The cowboys, too, move as if in motion, alternately pulling or swinging their lariats.  And notice the cowboy on the right, looking over his right shoulder, with right leg raised as counter weight to keep in saddle.

This is a really good picture, and something mysteriously akin to the essence of Charlie – not only is his West a world of action, freedom and camaraderie, but it can be a fairly bloodless one, too.  Charlie loved the animals he found out West (when visiting cities, he always went to the local zoo, where he said he felt most at home), and it’s not surprising that he would depict his heroes scaring away the threat of a grizzly, rather than killing it. 

Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook, and produce work that preserves the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the myth of the best part of ourselves).  The more I look at Charlie’s work, the more convinced I become that we need more artists like him now.

The Adventures of Zane Grey

There are several authors of our great American Western Myth.  Certainly the fountainhead of it all was William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846-1917), the great frontiersman, scout, Indian fighter, actor, showman and mythologist.  We have written about Bill in these pages previously, and he remains one of the few historical personages whom we would have liked to have known personally.

But the myth of the West quickly evolved – dime novels (often written about western heroes currently alive when they were first written, such as Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp), the nascent film industry, and, of course, both literary and visual arts.  We have looked at several Western artists in-depth, but up till now have not given the written word its due.  And there is no better way to write this wrong than by starting with one of the most prolific – and successful – western writers of all time, Zane Grey (1872-1939).

Born Pearl Zane Grey, the young writer had a supportive mother and an abusive father.  (His father was a dentist, so obviously he had a taste for inflicting pain on others.)  This baleful influence would often leave Gray surly and distant.  He would be plagued by intense moodiness or depression for most of his life, and one wonders if the root of his black mood was his oppressive father.

Fortunately, Zane was befriended by an older man named Muddy Miser, who encouraged Zane with his interests in baseball, fishing and the outdoors.  He also was a great reader of Zane’s early writing … how many mentors like Muddy have made all the difference in an artist’s life, one wonders?

Zane and Muddy shared a taste for early Western fiction, and would devour pulp adventure novels about the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody.  Zane’s first story was a Western, Jim of the Cave, written when he was only 15.  His father found the story and tore it up before beating young Zane. 

Like many abused children, Zane followed in his father’s footsteps, going into dentistry like his dad.  He would assist his father on dental work, until the state board of Columbus, Ohio, where they were living at the time, intervened. 

Young Zane went to the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, where he studied dentistry.  He was something of a baseball star, and juggled aspirations of being a writer or sportsman.  Upon graduation, he bunted and became a dentist, setting up shop as Dr. Zane Grey in New York City.  (Oddly enough, another figure who shaped the image of the American West, Doc Holliday, was also a dentist.)

While on a canoeing trip in 1900, Zane met the 17-year-old Lina Roth, known as Dolly.  It was, after his friendship with Muddy, the most important meeting of his life.  Unhappy as a dentist, frustrated as a sportsman, Dolly copy-edited and encouraged his writing.  Dolly was the secret of Zane’s success, and an extremely patient woman.  Dolly found the money for Zane to self-publish his first novel after it was rejected by publishers, was a tireless editor and polisher, managed his extensive business affairs once he became successful, and, most generously, turned a blind eye to his many marital indiscretions.

Zane’s earliest novels include many Westerns, and it is clear from the beginning that he found his muse among the cacti.  He was an avid traveler, hiker, fisherman and hunter, finding the raw material for his Western tales in the great outdoors.

Zane was never a darling with the critics – he was a successful popular novelist, and, to boot, wrote within a genre that had not yet gained critical respect.  However, he was in incredibly successful author and one of his novels, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) has since been evaluated as something of a masterpiece.

If you are to read only one Zane Grey novel (and your correspondent recommends reading many!), then Purple Sage is the one to pick.  It is the story of a woman, Jane Withersteen, who struggles to escape from Mormon influence in Old Western Utah.  Zane is not a fan of religious fanaticism, and he sees polygamy and religious control as smokescreens for greed, lust and oppression. 

It is with his protagonist, Lassiter, that Zane hits a deep and resonant cultural note.  Lassiter – like Owen Wister’s Virginian – is a black-clad loner, soft-spoken, laconic, respectful of women and the weak, and quick on the draw.  It is the template for Western heroes from Randolph Scott to Clint Eastwood.

There are five film version of Purple Sage (one even staring Tom Mix!), and it was in the movies that Zane found his greatest audience.  Many of his Westerns were adapted into films, and was even the baisis for a television series, Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre (which ran from 1956 to 1961).  Nearly every major Western film star has appeared in an adaptation of his work, including the focus of tomorrow’s post, Randolph Scott (1898-1987).

Riders of the Purple Sage is avaialbe for free download nearly anywhere on the Internet, including the invaluable www.ManyBooks.net.  It, along with most of Zane Grey’s Western corpus, comes highly recommended.

Brad Bird’s Iron Giant

Just as some gifts keep on giving, some wars are still fought long after the cease fire.  A dramatic case in point is the Cold War, where the more fanatical fringes of our Right Wing continue to harp on the Red Menace and lionize sad pathological cases like Senator Joe McCarthy.  At times, it seems as if bunches of our population are happily marching towards Bedlam.

But it was fascinating to your correspondent to find the debate still raging in an animated cartoon marketed to children.  The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird (born 1957), was released in 1999 to universal applause and empty theaters.  I believe that Warner Brothers only looked at the text of the story – boy is befriended by giant robot – and slept through the subtext.  It was one of the most adult movies of the decade, and an indication that Bird, if given half the chance, would have a brilliant career before him.  (And he did – later directing such marvelous animated films as Incredibles [2004] and Ratatouille [2007]).

The storyline of The Iron Giant is deceptively simple.  In Rockwell, Maine, 1957, young Hogarth Hughes discovers a gigantic, metal-eating robot in the woods outside of his home.  Of course he keeps it a secret, telling only his beatnik friend (Harry Connick, Jr.).  However, a rapacious agent of the US government has tracked down the robot, wanting to take it to Washington to better serve the Pentagon.

I cannot help but wonder how Warner Brothers missed such a bet with The Iron Giant.  The film opens with shots of Sputnik circling the globe, and also imaginatively recreates 1950s Superman comics, science fiction movies, duck-and-cover drills and Red Scare paranoia.  In an age where most 20 year-olds are a little vague on the identity of Clint Eastwood, perhaps a film that so slavishly recreates, and then comments upon, 1950s tropes should be marketed to older adults.

There is a long and honorable tradition of adults savoring cartoons.  The surrealist Popeye, Betty Boop and Felix the Cat cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s were considered adult fare (and often “intellectual” to boot).  It’s only after television completely homogenized cartoons, and played them in the daily mid-afternoon “kiddie ghetto,” that cartoons themselves were viewed as strictly kiddie concerns.  Bird, with his films for Pixar, and films such as Up (2009), have all worked to return animated films to their original, adult base.

The Iron Giant is wonderfully animated, beautifully played and crammed with both wit and meaning.  As an entertainment product, it was miles ahead of anything that Disney was doing at that time, and avoided Disney’s trap of smarmy, self-congratulatory narcissism.  The focus was on plot, exposition and character – a rarity in live action films of the decade, let alone animated features.

The Iron Giant is based upon the children’s book of the same name by English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998); the screenplay by Ted McCanlies (born 1953) jettisoned all but the barest outline to craft an original story.  Hughes, however, praised the final script, thinking it in many ways an improvement on his original novel.

In many ways The Iron Giant was a victim of its own excellence – when people wanted a disposable cartoon about funny giant robots, they got instead a mediation on the Cold War, the American gun culture, free will, conservatism vs liberalism and how we educate our children based on the toys and myths common in the playground.  It could never play in Peoria….

If you think you are too adult for animated films, then by all means rent The Iron Giant.  It is a particularly successful example of the heights to which this particularly American art form can soar.

The John Wayne Statue at John Wayne Airport

Not all contemporary statues celebrating iconic figures of American history are as dire as the recent travesty at Frederick Douglass Circle in New York perpetrated by sculptor Gabriel Koren.  During a recent trip to John Wayne Airport in Southern California, your correspondent had the pleasure of seeing the massive nine foot statue of Wayne sculpted by Robert Summers.  It is a terrific piece of work.

The airport was renamed the John Wayne Airport in 1979, shortly after Wayne’s death, and is the first airport named after an actor.  The statue was dedicated in 1982, and stands on a two-tier platform so visitors can get close to the figure. 

Artist Robert Summers (born 1940 in Cleburne, Texas) began creating figures of animals with bread dough as a toddler, and drew and sculpted consistently during his school years.  He has had no formal art training, except for a brief course mixing colors when he was 15 years old, but he managed to master a variety of mediums, including pastel, pencil and oil.  He now divides his time between painting and sculpting.  His western-themed landscapes have a pleasing command of color and a real sense of composition.

Summers also serves as an Associate Director of the Creation Evidence Museum, proving once and for all that there is not necessarily a correlation between artistic talent and intelligence.

The Wayne statue stands in the lobby of the airport’s newest terminal, gazing out into the California desert through large plate-glass walls.  It is somewhat kitschily augmented with an enormous American flag behind the figure; but, even with that misstep the effect is impressive.

Summers paid enormous attention to detail, and western film buffs would be gratified to see that he has captured Wayne’s inimitable walk and stance, let alone face and expression.  Summers is also sure to include Wayne’s belt buckle, first worn in 1948’s Red River (directed by Howard Hawks), and worn subsequently by Wayne in western films for the rest of his life.  The costume would appear (at first glance) to be the one worn by Wayne in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), and Summers accurately captures the drapery of clothes on the moving figure. 

The question of whether Wayne was an accomplished actor or not is the topic of perhaps a future post, but his impact on western films and Americana in general is mighty and immeasurable.  Perhaps no figure has done more for the modern Western film (inheriting the mantle of both Tom Mix and William S. Hart) than Wayne, though perhaps the genre needed Clint Eastwood to maintain its vitality for the Baby Boomer generation.  Searchers of western Americana would find a visit to the John Wayne Airport a worthy pilgrimage, pilgrim.

Ride the High Country of 1962

Looking at Remington’s An Assault on His Dignity yesterday put in mind of one of my favorite Western films, Ride the High Country, directed by Sam Peckinpah in 1962.  Though hailed by many as Peckinpah’s first great film (a view with which I disagree – I think Ride the High Country is his only great film), High Country is, I believe, more significant as a ‘transitional’ Western, bridging the gap between the great Hollywood fantasies of the American West and the latter mud-and-muck ‘realistic’ aesthetic first championed by the Italian westerns of Sergio Leone.

High Country was written by N.B. Stone, Jr. and Robert Creighton Williams, and like many of the best westerns, focuses on the end of an era and the displacement of the men who defined it.  As a meditation on the end of the West, it is as memorable as Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), and boasts two wonderful, career-defining performances by Joel McCrea (1905-1990) and Randolph Scott (1898-1987). 

McCrea and Scott play two lawmen who helped tamed the West.  Now past their prime, each are looking to hold onto as much dignity (and make as much money) as possible.  The film eloquently depicts their obsolescence in the opening sequence.  McCrea rides into town to find the citizens lined against the sides of the road.  He naturally thinks this is a demonstration of welcome, but a policeman (looking like a Keystone Cop of the ‘20s and not a Western law figure) brushes him aside – the town is out to watch a race between horses and a camel.  Almost immediately after dismounting, McCrea is nearly run down by an automobile and the policeman calls him “old timer.”

At a nearby carnival, he spots Scott, now trading on his own legend as a two-bit carny.  In ridiculous wig, mustache and beard, Scott is tarted up like the world’s oldest incarnation of Buffalo Bill Cody or Wild Bill Hickok, using buckshot to hit targets.  McCrea explains that he’s in town to win the commission on guarding a gold consignment through what’s left of the badlands, and the two old timers set off.

Complications, of course, follow.  Scott feels that he has spent his life taming the West and has gotten very little in return – he and his young pard plan to steal the gold en route.  The trio also picks up a runaway (Mariette Hartley), who is running away from a stifling, violent religious fanatic of a father.

The real joy of High Country is the continual interplay between McCrea and Scott.  Originally, the roles were to be reversed, with Scott playing the honest and honorable lawman, and McCrea the more cynical, out-for-what-he-can-get ex-lawman.  However, in the reading, both realized that switching parts would be more effective, and they were entirely correct.  McCrea’s flat, Midwestern delivery is perfect for the moral compass of the picture, and Scott, in the role of a lifetime, uses his rich, Virginian accent to great effect as he makes sardonic, pithy remarks throughout the film.  In fact, his running commentary is one of the most satisfying elements of the screenplay, and the timbre of his voice is essential.  What also adds to the overall effect of their performances is that High Country is also a comment on their careers – throughout the 1950s (and much of the 1940s), both men focused primarily on Western films.  They bring to their performances the full weight of their screen images, and audience expectations of who they were and what they will do.

Also effective is Hartley, in her first film role.  This is long before she perfected her slightly arch, comedic delivery, and it is almost as if we are witnessing a different actress entirely.  Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones round out the cast, and they make definite impressions.

I had written that I think High Country is a ‘transitional’ Western – this is mainly because there is a stunning interval that takes place at a mining camp.  The camp is not a Technicolor-kissed bit of Warner Brothers mythmaking, but a muddy, messy, barren backwater.  Hartley is about to be married into a family of miners – each of them seemingly more brutal, more demented, and more dedicated to rape and rapine than the other.  The wedding ceremony takes place in a brothel peopled by characters that would make Fellini blanche.  Hartley is almost brutalized there, until McCrea and company save the day, with Scott cynically arranging a ‘miner’s trial.’ 

This sequence is wonderful, but it is also … ugly.  It is an abrupt sea change in the aesthetic of the Western as movie-goers knew it in 1962.  Indeed, it is more than the 20-odd years from McCrea’s own Buffalo Bill (1944) or Scott’s Frontier Marshal (1939), it is an eternity.  And while I much prefer the Westerns of Hollywood’s Golden Age to the later films that followed in the tradition of Sergio Leone, I find it significant that two of the most cherished figures of one era helped usher in another – which, again, underscores their coming obsolescence.

(Just a side-note here on the mud-and-muck ‘realism’ of later Westerns: ‘realism’ is always a loaded word when dealing with Westerns.  As historical events unfolded, many of the most significant figures of the West understood the mythic quality inherent in the pageant of their lives, and worked with publishers and early-filmmakers to help define it.  The ‘realistic’ Western is really an affectation of sorts, supplanting one myth with another one, and questions of ‘realism’ are injudicious.  Indeed, many towns and the people in them were cleaner in the Old West than they are today.)

High Country was not an enormous hit in the United States when first released.  (Oddly enough, neither was The Shootist, John Wayne’s farewell Western and the coda to his career.)  European critics, however, were ecstatic, and High Country beat Fellini's 8 ½ for first prize at the Belgium Film Festival and won the Paris film critics award for best film.  Critics do not always get it right on the first pass, but many of them do. 

Ride the High Country is available on DVD, loaded with several extras and commentary of little-to-no value.  The movie, however, is magnificent and essential viewing.