Movie Quote of the Day (‘Shane,’ With a Villain for the Ages)

[Wilson is trying to goad Torrey into drawing on him]

Jack Wilson (played by Jack Palance, pictured): “I guess they named a lot of that Southern trash after old Stonewall.”

Frank 'Stonewall' Torrey (played by Elisha Cook Jr.): “Who'd they name you after? Or do you know?”

Wilson (pulling on black gloves to match his black hat and vest): “I'm saying that Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him and Lee and all the rest of them Rebs. You, too.”

Torrey: “You're a low-down lyin' Yankee!”

Wilson: “Prove it.”

[Torrey draws, but Wilson is faster. Torrey stops, and for a split second it is quiet. Then the explosion from Wilson’s gun resounds in the air, and Torrey is propelled back into the mud, dead.]—Shane (1953), screenplay by A.B. Guthrie with additional dialogue by Jack Sher, based on the novel by Jack Schaefer, directed by George Stevens

I’ve wanted to write about Shane, among the most satisfying of westerns, for awhile now, but the 60^th anniversary of its premiere passed without my noticing it. One would think that today, the centennial of the birth of star Alan Ladd, would provide reason enough for a post. But I’ve never been that enamored of the onetime Paramount idol.

The release of the movie on Blu-Ray, however, allows for a broader consideration of its virtues, particularly the importance of this pivotal shattering scene.

Critics came up with the umbrella term “American Trilogy” to group together three films made by director George Stevens in the first half of the Fifties: A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), and Giant (1956).  That would not be a particularly helpful label if it were merely meant to distinguish these somber postwar dramas (all made after he was part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps unit that photographed the liberated Dachau concentration camp) from his frothier pre-war fare of musicals and rom-coms. But the term does recognize that each of the three films examines a major defect in American culture.

In the case of Shane, that defect was violence and its cost to both the individual and the larger community. That trait has long been associated by European intellectuals with both American civilization as a whole and our first indigenous artform, the western. D.H. Lawrence gave a highly problematic interpretation of the wider implications of this in his essay “Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels,” in the British novelist’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923):

“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.”

The epitome of this in the Western (or, at least, the early, literary version of it) was Cooper’s Deerslayer, a.k.a. Natty Bumppo, whom Lawrence described as “A man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white.”

The shorthand that Lawrence used for Natty—“a saint with a gun”—applies perhaps even more so to Shane. He is the mysterious stranger come down from the mountains, eager to help the Starrett family but not to talk about his past.

More than perhaps any other Ladd role, this one might have been tailor-made for him. Audiences carried expectations, from his film noir work of the prior decade (This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia), of a man handy with a gun—which, it turns out, exactly describes Shane. Moreover, Ladd's minimalist acting could be interpreted as stoicism—the exact opposite of the central figure in the sequence above, Wilson.

Woody Allen summed up the nature of the achievement of then-unheralded actor in this role: “If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil, it is Jack Palance.” For a medieval literature class, a college professor of mine, wanting to convey the terror spread by Grendel, likened the Beowulf monster to Wilson.

The Fifties may have been the apotheosis of the Western on film because it was the heyday of the psychological western, a subgenre that emphasizes heightened states of greed, jealousy, rage, and above all, fear. Shane does not have to take a back seat even to other exceptional examples of this kind such as The Gunfighter, High Noon, The Man From Laramie, and The Searchers, and the treatment of Wilson demonstrates why.

This bit of dialogue I've quoted above is only part of a tense four-minute confrontation between the villain and the hapless Torrey. (If you can put aside the annoying subtitles in this YouTube excerpt, you'll have a pretty good idea of what follows here.) It has been more than adequately prepared for, with the homesteader, stoked on whiskey-fueled courage, vowing to the rancher Stryker that he wouldn’t be driven away—and, in the same saloon, with a dog moving stealthily out of the camera frame to get out of the way of sinister Wilson, a malign presence from another realm.

Would that Torrey had shown more sense. Despite Shane’s warning to be careful of Wilson, the proud ex-Confederate gets drawn into a confrontation with him. We never get a close-up of Torrey, but Stevens allows us to infer his mounting fear through the scene’s composition, with the blustering little man caught between the taunting, black-hat-wearing stranger and his own, sensible Swedish friend, whose call—“Torrey…Torrey…Torrey!”—has to be ignored lest he seem a coward.

And now, perhaps the most expertly choreographed, symbolic cold-blooded killing in all of cinema follows, with Torrey gingerly stepping across and slipping in the treacherous mud, surely aware that he is now, literally, in too deep, as the far taller Wilson, with the sleek grace of a panther, follows him on the dry plankboard above, closing off his path, stalking his prey. Wilson is far physically superior to Torrey, even without a gun. The fact that Wilson has observed the central legal nicety—letting Torrey draw first so Wilson and Stryker can claim self-defense to the sheriff—doesn’t change the fact that we are not watching a shootout but an execution.

The tension building for the entire scene, starting with the ominous thunder and darkening sky, now ends with a sickening sound and sight—the loud report of Wilson’s gun, followed by Torrey’s sudden jerk backward (accomplished by a harness-and-pulley underneath actor Elisha Cook Jr.’s outfit that yanked him six feet back). “You know, the one thing I wanted to do with Shane,” the director recalled some years later, “was to show if you point a .45 at a man and pull the trigger, you destroy an upright figure.”  It’s impossible to imagine anyone watching this scene without being jolted, with their perspective on every subsequent action in the film from here on drastically changed—including Warren Beatty, who, more than a decade later, consulted with the veteran director to see how he could pull off something similar with Bonnie and Clyde.

Stevens had balanced this technical gizmo with some human sleight-of-hand. Just before the scene was shot, he took Cook aside and hissed, “You know, I've got you eight weeks on the picture, and I'm stuck with you. You're the worst actor I ever saw in my life bar none.” This piece of manipulation, along with the mud Stevens made the actor walk through, got the director what he wanted: fear and fierce anger, the combination that gets Torrey killed.

A monster like Wilson of nearly mythic proportions requires a hero of similar epic qualities. But gunfighting takes something out of a man—if not his life, then his soul. There is some debate whether, in the film’s great ending, Shane is riding off away from the Starrett house and into the mountains to die from his wound in the gunfight with Wilson and his confederates. In one sense, it doesn’t matter—if he doesn’t die here, he’ll die someplace else, profoundly alone and removed from the community he’s permitted to live through his own self-sacrifice.

There’s nothing in the slightest romantic about Torrey’s miserable murder in the mud, anymore than there is in Shane’s last explanation for his nomadic career and sudden departure to the little boy who’s grown to worship him:

“Joey, there's no living with... with a killing. There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks. There's no going back.”

A brand…a mark of Cain, making its wearer an outcast in the community he wishes he could join. In George Stevens’ frontier America, the “winner” of a gunfight gains nothing but isolation—and, perhaps, the satisfaction that he has rid the world of a menace to all order and goodness.

Photo of the Day: The Glory of a Porch

The homes in which I have lived virtually my whole life have had front porches, yet I have seldom taken the opportunity to enjoy them. Often, it has seemed, I’ve had to be elsewhere—at work, meeting a friend, even heading out to Starbucks. 

In my later years, I’ve haven’t even been that inclined to experience them. Summer, the season when I could spend the most time outside, has not only become more uninvitingly sticky but also, consequently, more hospitable to the mosquitoes that like to pester me. All things considered, I’ve felt too often, it’s simply more comfortable to stay inside with the air conditioning.

That’s my loss. The Rev. Otis Moss III, in a sermon at the Chautauqua Institution seven weeks ago, praised the value of porches, as a kind of low-tech community-building medium:

“Porches forge community. When you have people gathering out on their porches, they get an opportunity to interact with the other community members who are walking by — an opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have. Porches help you avoid getting sequestered into your own world.”

A confidence shared on a porch doesn’t have the instantly available, explosive quality of a Facebook post, and, hence, rarely gets labeled "viral.” But it’s remarkable how quickly something uttered on a porch can make the rounds.

From an aesthetic point of view, porches add to the visual appeal of a house. I can’t think of a better example than Chautauqua itself. I chose this image from among many in this upstate New York throwback to the Victorian Era, but it’s not necessarily even among the best. 

Houses like these double down, in effect, on their most prominent characteristics with upper-level porches. Yes, you will find porch sitters there with tablets and smartphones, but you’re more likely to find them engaged with a book or, better yet, conversations with each other. In the case of the latter, you’ll catch storytelling, humor, persuasion—the qualities that build a functioning democracy.

Quote of the Day (Noah Smith, on Technology and Labor)

“What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the ‘endowment of human capital’ with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we'll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction.”—Noah Smith, “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots,” The Atlantic, January 2013

(The image accompanying this post is from, of course, Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last embrace of silent film—a movie about the disruptive effects of new technology, made nine years after sound had rendered obsolete a whole style and generation of film personnel.)

Theater Review: ‘Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin,' From the Roundabout Theatre

Is the concept of shame dead in the U.S.? In politics, the answer is emphatically yes, as Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer have dared to run for office again. When it comes to financial chicanery, however, the odor of disgrace still lingers, at least judging from Woody Allen’s new film, Blue Jasmine, and  The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin, which closed a week ago at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre.

As I watched Steven Levenson’s drama, the comparison that came to mind was with another work that viewed an economic calamity through the lens of a family: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Though Miller’s work does not mention the Great Depression, the playwright noted in his memoir Time Bends years later of the devastation wrought on his father by the Great Depression. This time, Levenson has sought to examine the collateral damage wrought by the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.

Yet unlike Miller, Levenson never reaches—or, to be fair to him, tries to attain—the level of grand tragedy.  Moreover, though Miller’s Willy Loman is essentially a victim, the father figure in Tom Durnin is a victimizer—a sociopath who screams about wanting his life back, but heedless of the damage he has wreaked on family and friends.

It took a while for this to unfold, despite the lack of an intermission and a running time of only an hour and 40 minutes. Early on, Levenson was slow to reveal the full dimensions of his characters’ emptiness, so the pace felt more leisurely than it had to be.

The confined space of the Laura Pels Theatre might have led some in the audience to think initially that the plot concerns only a confined group of people, but it soon became apparent that the play’s setting was a stand-in for post-crash America. “The prices have pretty much tanked” …,” explains twentysomething James Durnin. “Most of the other houses are empty. It’s like a ghost town, the whole subdivision.”

Into James’ cluttered apartment comes his father Tom, asking for a place to stay while he attempts to re-establish himself with a barista job at Borders. (The play is set in 2009, before the bookstore chain liquidated, so we already know how long that job lasted.) James’ muffled, sullen, contingent agreement signals not merely an estrangement between father and son, but one of catastrophic proportions.

It turns out that Tom, in his former job as a high-powered corporate lawyer, had dragged down his family and friends into a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme. After a jail term for the notorious crime, Tom wants desperately to “get my life back.”

Easier said than done, particularly with so many people victimized and with a sociopath with so little recognition of the damage he caused. Director Scott Ellis, normally sure-handed with many Roundabout productions over the years (e.g., The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Harvey, Twelve Angry Men), let the pace slacken in this show and permitted at least one poor acting choice, but he had, in David Morse, an actor of dominating stage presence and creative courage, unafraid to follow his character to some truly dark places. 

Morse opted not to pursue audience sympathy at the expense of finding the key to his character, a reprobate given to browbeating James about his lack of a good job and loss of his marriage (both stemming from the fallout from Tom’s own crime, of course), blackmailing a son-in-law, and badgering his ex-wife for another chance. The play was all the better for it for his daring.

In the supporting cast, Lisa Emery delivered a scalding performance as Tom’s ex-wife Karen, giving vent, late in the show, to the rage the audience has been feeling. Mad Men’s Rich Sommer ably conveyed the haplessness and rising anger of Chris, the legally compromised son-in-law left in Tom’s firm. In James, Christopher Denham managed perhaps the most difficult transition of any character. The one acting misfire is Sarah Goldberg’s jittery, annoyingly sing-song Katie, whose budding relationship with James comes under a severe test with the presence of Tom.

At 27 years old, Levenson is still young enough to deliver eventually on the promise of this uneven but frequently quite well-done piece.

Quote of the Day (Jeremiah, on How Trust in God Is Like a ‘Tree Planted by the Water’)

"But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." —Jeremiah 17:7-8 (New International Version)

I took this image of Chautauqua Lake seven weeks ago while on vacation at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.