This Day in Film History (Death of Ward Bond, Prolific Character Actor and Wayne Sidekick)

Nov. 5, 1960—Ward Bond, an actor with more than 200 credits on the big and small screen—including his starring role on the long-running TV western Wagon Train—died of a heart attack in Dallas.

Most likely, you have seen this busy character actor with the gruff voice and everyman persona in at least two films during the course of a year: on March 17, as a fishing- and boxing-loving priest in The Quiet Man; and, at Christmastime, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as James Stewart’s small-town cop friend Bert. 

In all, he appeared in 13 movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (though he himself was never cited).

It is doubtful that Bond, when he heeded a recruiting plea by USC football teammate John Wayne to serve as an extra in the 1928 John Ford film Salute, expected to enjoy a three-decade Hollywood career.

Bond made 23 movies with Wayne and at least that many with Ford, and offscreen the trio would form a boisterous friendship marked by hijinks and epic drinking bouts, often on the director’s yacht. Ford even had Bond play his alter ego (a director named "John Dodge") in the 1957 film Wings of Eagles.

Despite their friendship, the cantankerous Ford gave Bond (and Wayne) endless grief while filming. At one point, during location shooting of The Searchers, Bond had pulled the plug on a camera in order to use his electric razor, unaware that a scene was being filmed then. 

Knowing the director’s explosive temper and penchant to humiliate cast and crew members for an offense, the cameraman didn’t tell Ford what Bond had done till several years after the actor’s death.

Bond’s collegiate athletic career and continued burly build in adulthood encouraged the illusion of a vigorous physical health that he did not possess. He was disqualified from serving in World War II because of epilepsy and suffered from high blood pressure during the four seasons he spent on Wagon Train.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who questioned Bond’s professionalism or work ethic. But he was not universally beloved in the industry, particularly after he co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. 

In the postwar period, this organization became one of the most virulent forces behind the blacklists maintained to stamp out communist or even merely progressive views in Hollywood.

This right-wing activism turned off many Hollywood liberals so that, ironically, Bond found himself underemployed in any films that did not involve Wayne and Ford. 

It wasn’t until he secured the role of western scout Major Seth Adams on Wagon Train that Bond could reach something like his former presence on the screen. But at that point, his presence loomed larger than ever in Hollywood, as the NBC series placed #2 in the Nielsen ratings from its second through fourth seasons.

It came as a surprise in the industry, then, when Bond had his fatal heart attack. Wayne delivered the eulogy for his longtime friend, and, he observed not long before he died, he would think of what roles his friend and extremely versatile character actor might have played had he lived longer.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Darling Clementine,’ on Love)

Sheriff Wyatt Earp [played by Henry Fonda]: “Mac, you ever been in love?”

Mac [played by J. Farrell MacDonald]: “No, I've been a bartender all me life.”— My Darling Clementine (1946), screenplay by Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller, directed by John Ford

This bit of dialogue—not in the original script for this classic western—has been headlined, in this YouTube clip, as the “Greatest Bartender Line of All Time.” I heartily concur.

Quote of the Day (Elmore Leonard, on ‘Contention’ in the Old West)

“He had picked up his prisoner at Fort Huachuca shortly after midnight and now, in a silent early morning mist, they approached Contention.

“Entering Stockman Street, Paul Scallen glanced back at the open country with the wet haze blanketing its flatness, thinking of the long night ride from Huachuca, relieved that this much was over. When his body turned again, his hand moved over the sawed-off shotgun that was across his lap and he kept his eyes on the man ahead of him until they were near the end of the second block, opposite the side entrance of the Republic Hotel.

“He said just above a whisper, though it was clear in the silence, ‘End of the line.’”—American fiction writer and screenwriter Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), “Three-Ten to Yuma,” originally published in Dime Western Magazine (1953), reprinted in The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (2004)

In popular culture, even place names can be enough to foreshadow peril, and more: Starkville, the depressed Berkshire village of Edith Wharton’s wintry novella, Ethan Frome; Perdition, the Illinois town that might represent sanctuary or damnation in the Tom Hanks film The Road to Perdition; and Contention, the Old West train stop where thieves and killers stalk a cash-strapped lawman and his smug prisoner in this fine Elmore Leonard short story.

I haven’t seen the 2007 remake starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. But the sense of atmosphere of Leonard’s story is also present in the acclaimed 1957 movie adaptation with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin (left to right in the accompanying image) in the principal roles.

Even where the action breaks off in the quote above that begins this story, the reader senses that the overnight ride was fraught with danger for Paul Scallen, as he transports outlaw Jim Kidd to the train station that will take them to Yuba, where the criminal will be tried. The silence mentioned here is merely the calm before the storm. We wonder if this will be the “end of the line” for the taciturn Scallen, too.

Leonard’s editor at Dime Western certainly made him work for the $90 received for this submission, pressing for more details: “You can do it better. You’re not using all your senses. It’s not just a walk by the locomotive. What’s the train doing? How does it smell? Is there steam?”

It all pays off on the printed page, and Leonard retained the lessons he learned here for the remaining six decades of his writing career. Maybe that’s part of the reason why, though he turned towards crime fiction in later years, he retained an abiding affection for the western.

Movie Review: Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1’

Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1 has attracted all kinds of attention, but not for the reasons that actor-hyphenate Kevin Costner would prefer. 

Even before the premiere of the first “chapter” (when was this phrase ever associated with a movie?), the film was being reviewed not for its plot, acting, or direction, but for its budget—or, more specifically, Costner’s budget.

A director friend of mine insists that its rumored expenditure has been distorted—it’s amortized over the four films projected rather than this first one. But whatever the correct amount (I’ve seen ranges from $38 million to $100 million), it was evidently enough that Costner felt compelled to sell one of his properties to help finance the series.

Speaking of “series,” Costner’s involvement in Horizon ended up being so intense and protracted that he decided to forego appearing on the last season of his long-running TV show, Yellowstone.

All of this is beside the point. Costner’s money is his to spend and no concern of yours or mine. To the extent it matters at all, it is whether the box office for the first installment in this “American Saga” allows the remaining ones to be seen first in theaters (Costner’s preference) or to be streamed at home.

Ah—that’s the rub.

Though Costner might have looked to John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Anthony Mann for guidance on how to fill a magnificent Western landscape, he seems to have gravitated more towards the multi-character, multi-plot P.T. Anderson 1999 movie Magnolia—only not in that film’s three-hour running time, but over the three remaining in his series, too.

The ideal audience for this kind of project—patient, willing to follow characters over time—is not sitting in a theater, but in front of a suitably large home theater projection screen. Maybe that’s why “Chapter 1” did not perform up to expectations, leading the second part to be delayed past its August 16 premiere date.

Evidently, Costner’s production company, Territory Pictures and Horizon's distribution partner New Line Cinema, hope to grow the audience for the second installment through widespread exposure in the next few weeks, including on PVOD and Max.

Perhaps more than any star today, Costner has found the western a congenial genre. Silverado provided him with the first signature onscreen time, and Dances With Wolves briefly made him the king of Hollywood, with Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.

Wyatt Earp and Open Range continued his fascination with this form as old as Hollywood itself. And, when his career hit a trough a decade ago, it was a small-screen modern western, Yellowstone, that thrust him back squarely into the forefront of Hollywood again.

It took the actor 35 years—even before he started work on Dances With Wolves—to begin bringing this new sprawling work to the screen. With Horizon, Costner and co-screenwriter Jon Baird want to tell a story unlike any the actor has tried before.

Promotional men, farmers, gunslingers, soldiers, gamblers, prostitutes, and Native Americans all contest a narrow space along Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley, starting in 1859, a couple of years before the Civil War. In a sense, this convergence of different groups on the frontier represented the first American “clash of civilizations.”

The plot contains so many threads that Costner himself doesn’t appear onscreen, as grizzled horse trader Hayes Ellison, until nearly an hour goes by. Worse, so many characters are introduced before being quickly shuffled off to the next segment that keeping them all straight becomes confusing at times. Viewers may find themselves wishing for longer glimpses of the more recognizable other actors (e.g., Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson, Michael Rooker) in the large cast.

However much money Costner poured into the movie, viewers get their money’s worth.

Shot mostly in Utah, the vistas—low-angle shots of the sky, open plains and mountain ranges—are as sweeping as anything in John Ford’s Monument Valley oaters. Some sequences—including 45 minutes of a family withstanding an Apache attack—are breathlessly tense.

Theodore Roosevelt, an advocate of continental expansion, titled his history of the western movement The Winning of the West. But in this first installment of Costner’s saga, few viewers will regard anybody in this struggle “winning.”

Far from being “wide open spaces,” this land was already occupied, and entailed the displacement of those already there and the shock and alienation of those who, in oncoming, unstoppable waves, moved in.

Native Americans, of course, lost their lands. But settlers lost family members in every conceivable situation (natural disasters, Indian attacks, homesteader-cattle baron conflicts); soldiers saw too much corruption and violence to hold onto their innocence about government’s good intentions; and even opportunists and bullies learned not to trust their good fortune for very long.

As the Baird-Costner screenplay makes plain, debate and division even within each side often further complicated this struggle for the American interior.

In extended dialogue rendered in subtitles, young Native American warriors angry at white seizure of their lands burn with indignation as tribal elders warn of the dangers of massive retaliation. On the other hand, soldiers trying desperately to keep a tentative peace bemoan the continuing wagon trains that make this well-nigh impossible.

Chapters 1 and 2 of Horizon will premiere in early September at the Venice International Film Festival. I hope industry observers who have written off this ambitious saga will use the opportunity to see it on the big screen to rethink any urge to call it “Kevin’s Gate.”

Whatever its flaws in marketing and execution, Horizon is an honorable attempt to tell the true story of the American West in all its complexity, with skill and love. If it doesn’t find its audience in 2024, it surely will in years to come, if given the chance.

Quote of the Day (Geoffrey O’Brien, on the Rise and Fall of the Western)

“Westerns were reliable, minimal, direct, mindless, a series of clear actions occurring in an empty world where there was ultimately nothing to worry about. Indians, outlaws, rustlers, and crooked railroad men emerged out of nowhere and were duly erased. A Western was not expected to depart from precedent any more than a baseball game would experiment with new rules or novel plays. The genre was an antidote to complexity, enjoyed precisely because of its apparent lack of any subtext to parse or interpret. Ironically, the simplest of genres ultimately succumbed to a host of problems it had never anticipated: problems with history, with gender roles, with racial stereotypes, with faded notions of heroism and honor.”— American poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian Geoffrey O’Brien, “Killing Time,” The New York Review of Books, Mar. 5, 1992

The image accompanying this post, coming from the film Colt. .45, features Randolph Scott—an actor so associated with the western that in Mel Brooks’ parody of the genre, Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little invokes the name of the star to win over racist-ridden Rock Ridge.

For this quote’s picture, I could have used John Wayne, James Stewart, or Gary Cooper, stars more prominent in the cultural landscape, then and now, than Scott.

But none of these were so defined by the western as Scott. Of his more than 100 movies across three decades, he made 60 in this genre—including one I regard as one of the very best in the form’s history, Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac Ride the High Country—the farewell movie of both Scott and co-star Joel McCrea.

Quote of the Day (Larry McMurtry, on the Past and Regret)

“Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry (1936-2021), Lonesome Dove (1985)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1989 TV miniseries adaptation of Lonesome Dove, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as the former Texas Rangers, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call.

Quote of the Day (Charles Portis, on a Most Unlikely Western Hero)

“He stirred as I came through the curtain. His weight was such that the bunk bowed in the middle almost to the floor. It looked like he was in a hammock….The brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed. Rooster [Cogburn] coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and coughed some more. He asked me to bring him some coffee and I got a cup and took the eureka pot from the stove and did this. As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”—American novelist and journalist Charles Portis (1933-2020), True Grit (1968)

It can be pretty fascinating to see how two different actors portray the same character. Both John Wayne and Jeff Bridges kept Deputy U.S. Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn’s character-defining eyepatch. Both the 1969 adaptation of the Portis novel and the Coen brothers’ 2010 version featured this bedroom scene with the cat.

But, while Wayne embodied the character’s considerable heft, Bridges—at least as pictured here—depicted him as grungier. He’s not only got the mustache that Wayne decided not to grow, but a beard.

This Rooster Cogburn is just the kind of “billy goat” that the narrator of the above quote, Mattie Ross, would have recoiled from—if, that is, she wasn’t looking for the toughest U.S. deputy marshal in the district.

Cogburn, having killed more than a few men in the line of duty (all justified, he claims), more than meets her requirements—and then some.

Quote of the Day (Elmore Leonard, on How He Used Research to Become a Published Writer)

“I wrote about a gunsmith that made a certain kind of gun. I have no idea now what the story was about when I sent it to a pulp magazine and it was rejected. I decided I’d better do some research.  I read On the Border with Crook, The Truth about Geronimo, The Look of the West, and Western Words, and I subscribed to Arizona Highways. It had stories about guns—I insisted on authentic guns in my stories—stagecoach lines, specific looks at different little facets of the West, plus all the four-color shots that I could use for my descriptions, things I could put in and sound like I knew what I was talking about.”—Crime and western novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) quoted in Gregg Sutter, “A Conversation With Elmore Leonard,” in The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (2004)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Rio Bravo,’ As Sassy Angie Dickinson Messes With John Wayne’s Head)

Feathers [played by Angie Dickinson, pictured]: “In case you make up your mind, I left my door open. Get a good night's sleep.”

John T. Chance [played by John Wayne]: “You're not helping me any.”—Rio Bravo (1959), screenplay by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett based on a short story by B.H. McCampbell, directed by Howard Hawks

You know Rio Bravo, don’t you? It’s the classic western where The Duke discovers, courtesy of Angie Dickinson, that even a big, tough guy still has a thing or two to learn when it comes to women. Not a bad lesson, especially the morning after Super Bowl Sunday.

Happy Valentine’s Day, folks!

This Day in Film History (Death of ‘Bloody Sam’ Peckinpah, ‘Wild Bunch’ Director)

Dec. 28, 1984—Sam Peckinpah, a writer-director-producer who revised notions of the American West with films of beautiful landscapes, ugly violence and blurred moral lines, died at age 59 of heart failure in Inglewood, Calif.

Writing about Peckinpah now is my way of compensating for inability to write about The Wild Bunch, his most famous and controversial film, on the 50^th anniversary of its release this past summer. While denying neither its importance to the cinema of the Sixties nor the qualities that have led many critics to hail it as a masterpiece, I find it deeply problematic for the way it immerses audiences in violence. 

This carnage—especially slow-motion action sequences that bracket the film—has influenced the likes of Martin Scorsese, John Woo and Quentin Tarantino. (An image from the film accompanies this post--the famous walk to the climactic shoot-out featuring, from left to right, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine.)

Roger Ebert, in a contemporary review at the time of its 1969 release, defended the movie for presenting “death and violence in such a definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence, and a reaction to it.”

I am not so sure of this. In recent years, psychologists have debated whether prolonged exposure to violence, rather than acting as a prophylactic against killing (as Peckinpah said he intended), instead desensitizes witnesses to it. 

I will say this: in depicting a small unit of Americans in 1913 Mexico, The Wild Bunch held up a distant mirror to the audiences of its time. As Richard Slotkin observed in his 1992 cultural history, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, the movie opened just as American newspapers were reporting on the My Lai Massacre. 

Just as Pike Bishop and his outlaws were using a machine gun to kill soldiers and even civilians, U.S. forces were using the latest destructive firepower in a foreign country where their options were limited and poor at that. The fear that had gripped some observers of the frontier—that Americans would, by crossing a border, “go native”—had come to pass.

 

Nicknamed “Bloody Sam” for his predeliction for onscreen bloodshed, Peckinpah was also nicknamed “Mad Sam” for his volatile ways on and off the set. He boozed and brawled from one set to another—and, as if that were not enough, added cocaine to the mix—shortening his filmography and, ultimately, his life.

Television work in the Fifties and early Sixties in series such as The Rifleman and The Westerner gave Peckinpah a thorough grounding in the genre he would come to revise, as well as give him the reputation for being difficult that would dog him for most of the rest of his career.

His second full-length feature, Ride the High Country (1962), starring two western veterans, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, demonstrated a mastery of the genre it eulogized. It includes an unambiguous hero, McCrea’s Steve, who, with his strict moral code ("All I want is to enter my house justified"), was likened by a number of observers to Peckinpah’s own father.

In his following film, Major Dundee (1965), the director enraged the normally equable Charlton Heston to such an extent that the star was sorely tempted to run him through with his character’s cavalry saber. 

Though the star eventually came around to support him vigorously, Peckinpah’s disputes with Columbia Pictures over the final cut were so tumultuous that they led to him being replaced on his follow-up, the Steve McQueen film The Cincinnati Kid (1965), by Norman Jewison.

A triumphant return to TV, an adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's 'Noon Wine" for ABC Stage 67 (1966), revived Peckinpah’s big-screen career, and the critical acclaim and box-office success of The Wild Bunch afforded him more creative control. 

But he continued to test the patience not only of studio bosses but of his admirers. A scene in Straw Dogs (1971) involving Susan George led the normally supportive critic Pauline Kael to claim that he endorsed rape by depicting the protagonist's wife seemingly enjoying an assault by her ex-boyfriend. 

Straw Dogs placed front and center another charge often made against Peckinpah: misogyny. His films are filled with desirable women equally dangerous to males—and frequently subject to their outbursts of violence. (In The Wild Bunch, a woman shoots Holden in the back, whereupon he retaliates with a shot of his own and “Bitch!”) 

John Patterson’s March 2016 Guardian retrospective of the director's work noted the speculation that much of this animus may have derived from bitterness toward his mother, who had sold the family ranch that he and his brothers worked in their youth on the expectation that they would inherit it.

That same work in his youth also gave him a deep appreciation of the beauty of the West, the folkways of men in constant contact with it, and the agony of the passing of this way of life. All of these, along with the formal artistry of his landscapes and the performances he coaxed from actors, inform the best moments of the 14 films that Peckinpah managed to complete before his death. 

The question is the extent to which the human values exhibited in his films compensate for their unbelievable body counts or the nihilism that fueled these. Thirty-five years after his death, the cinema of “Bloody Sam” continues to pose this troubling dilemma.