Quote of the Day (Thomas Carothers, on Slow Growth and Western Democracy Woes)

“Broadly speaking, European and other Western democracies were built on the back of two centuries of remarkable economic growth, albeit with major shocks along the way. Now, the West is in for a protracted, possibly indefinite, period of slow growth or even stagnation. It’s not clear whether the liberal democratic consensus can withstand the inevitable public anger and alienation that will result. The toxic political fallout of the financial crisis does not bode well.”—Thomas Carothers, Senior Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “A Good Democracy Is Hard to Find” (review of Sheri Berman’s Democracy in Europe), Foreign Affairs, May/June 2019 Issue

Quote of the Day (Edwin Arlington Robinson, on the Passing of the Old West)

“Dark hills at evening in the west,

Where sunset hovers like a sound

Of golden horns that sang to rest

Old bones of warriors under ground,

Far now from all the bannered ways

Where flash the legions of the sun,

You fade—as if the last of days

Were fading, and all wars were done.”—Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), “The Dark Hills,” from Collected Poems (1921)

This Day in Western History (Outlaw Butch Cassidy Is Born)

Apr. 13, 1866— Robert Leroy Parker was born in Beaver, Utah, the oldest of 13 children in a family of Mormons. That name very likely means nothing to you. But if you’re fascinated by Wild West outlaws—and especially if you’re a film fan—you’ve almost certainly heard of the name he adopted as an adult: Butch Cassidy.

You’d never associate an emotion like guilt with the wry leader of desperadoes depicted in William Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But that does indeed appear to have motivated Parker’s decision to use the name by which he has become a legend: He did not want his mother to be embarrassed by his enormous deviation from the norms of his religion.

The “Butch” part of the name derived from a brief job as a butcher; “Cassidy” came from a rancher he admired, Mike Cassidy. As for Butch’s partner, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, “The Sundance Kid” got his nom de crime from his stint in a Sundance, Wyo., jail for stealing a horse.

You might recall a line from the start of the Paul Newman-Robert Redford film: "Most of what follows is true." I suppose that claim is not as blatantly false as the one from the Coen Brothers’ Fargo that it is “based on a true story,” but you do have to be rather careful. This is Hollywood, after all, as well as a Western, where the truth is whatever sounds good in a story conference.

In no uncertain terms, the film portrays Butch as the brains of the outfit. (Butch, to Sundance: “Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”) Butch and his partner did, in fact, plan their escapes carefully, minimizing the possibility that they might have to draw their guns and kill anyone. 

But one real-life incident makes me suspect that the movie pulled its punches about the true amount of Sundance’s gray matter. At one point while the pair were trying to make a new life for themselves in South America, Sundance got drunk and bragged to someone about his true identity and past exploits. It’s not terribly different from those stories you hear these days about crooks who stop to take selfies, then post them to Facebook.

Some other stuff that didn’t quite happen the way it’s depicted on the big screen:

*Our (anti)heroes are dogged through much of the film by a posse that includes a Native American tracker named Lord Baltimore. He didn’t, however, exist.

*That posse in North America is depicted as relentless. In real life, Butch and Sundance gave them the slip and managed to stay well ahead of their pursuers.

*The film identifies Butch’s underlings as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Actually, amazingly enough, the group was known as The Wild Bunch. But, with Sam Peckinpaugh’s western bloodfest with that title coming out the same year, 20th Century Fox didn’t want audiences confused, so the name was changed.

The film is far more interested in the present—and limited future—of Butch and Sundance, in a turn-of-the-century West where they are becoming anachronisms, than it is in their pasts. In actuality, Butch, for instance, appears to have gotten into his life of crime by rustling cattle near the ranch where he worked before graduating to robbing banks.

In one very large sense, however, the film was true to life. It ends in a freeze frame of Newman and Redford making a break for it against hopeless odds in Bolivia. Most historians do accept the Bolivian authorities’ contention that Butch and Sundance were, in fact, killed in 1908. But a small but persistent group believes that Butch somehow survived the shootout and made his way back to the Pacific Northwest, where he died three decades later. The movie's ending gives them the (admittedly very, very slim) chance that this did indeed occur, while sparing the rest of us the visual evidence of their demises.

Movie Quote of the Day (John Wayne, on Life)

Sgt. Stryker (played by John Wayne): “Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.”— Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), screenplay by Harry Brown and James Edward Grant, based on a story by Harry Brown, directed by Allan Dwan

A prior post of mine focused on the movie that won John Wayne an Oscar after four decades in the industry, True Grit—released on this day 45 years ago. That film dealt in a seriocomic fashion with the nature of courage. Bravery was a major theme—perhaps the defining one—in the career of the actor, who died on this day in 1979 of lung and stomach cancer.

As he had done for the past 15 years, when he defied a longtime industry taboo by disclosing his first operation for cancer, Wayne reacted to the recurrence of his disease with a candor and grace that won the admiration not only of those who regarded him as an American icon, but even of many of those who saw him as the embodiment of militarism and racism. The movie that helped to solidify these contradictory views was Sands of Iwo Jima, which had netted the actor his first Oscar nomination.

It is one of the characteristic ironies of Hollywood that this matinee idol, who never served a day in the armed forces even when so many of his contemporaries did so in WWII, played a career soldier in Sands of Iwo Jima. Over time, his character—a hard-drinking, hard-as-nails Marine sergeant who really does, appearances to the contrary, care about his men, a tower of strength as a soldier but not as husband or father—became a cliché.

Among the actors who played a similar type was Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge. The two actors, in fact, projected similar personas and charted similar career trajectories. Both men began as protégés of genre directors (Wayne, with the pioneer of the film western, John Ford; Eastwood, with “spaghetti western” auteur Sergio Leone and action director Don Siegel). Both were “personality stars” who, rather than utterly transform themselves for roles, played an infinite number of small variations on the same character type. Both made virtual trademarks of elements in their physiques (Wayne: the catlike walk; Eastwood:  the squint) and voices (Wayne: slow, with gathering force; Eastwood: raspy). Both finally achieved significant critical acclaims and Oscars at age 62—Wayne, for True Grit, and Eastwood for directing (and starring in) another western, Unforgiven.  Both, in late middle age, directed films that glorified the Marines (though New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that Eastwood had far the tougher task at this, for “It requires a certain crazy vision to transform the American invasion of Grenada into the equivalent of Iwo Jima”).

You might think that Wayne—who was so professional that he even worked well with co-stars who could not have disagreed with him more on politics, such as Katharine Hepburn and Kirk Douglas—would have welcomed the opportunity to act with Eastwood, whose screen personas and politics were a match for his own. Not a chance. When the younger man broached the idea of working together in the early 1970s, Wayne rejected it immediately. He simply recoiled at the level of violence in Eastwood’s recent High Plains Drifter, and said so. Likewise, the anti-hero that Eastwood played so often was inimical to the heroes that Wayne played in films about the West, which, Wayne noted, represented "the triumph of personal courage over any obstacle, whether nature or man."

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on the Wild West)

“From Salt Lake City one travels over the great plains of Colorado and up the Rocky Mountains, on the top of which is Leadville, the richest city in the world.  It had also got the reputation of being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver.  I was told that if I went there they would be sure to shoot me or my travelling manager.  I wrote and told them that nothing that they could do to my travelling manager would intimidate me.”—Oscar Wilde, “The Ethics of Art in Leadville,” in The Best of the Raconteurs, selected by Sheridan Morley and Tim Heald (2000)