Western Union

Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941) is a big, gaudy Western, apparently derived from a Zane Grey novel.  Shot in Technicolor, the film is exceptionally beautiful.  In all respects, the film represents a genre of moviemaking primarily concerned with "spectacle" -- that is, with achieving memorably spectacular images.  This can be accomplished in two ways -- that is, by staging action in a way that seems a little excessive, even, potentially dangerous and, second, by providing superfluous pictorial details or action to decorate a canvas that is already scenic with crowds of extras, gorgeous sunsets, red rock canyons and immense Utah and Arizona landscapes.  Two examples spring to mind, although these could be readily multiplied.  In the film's first scene, the hero Slade (Randolph Scott) has committed a bank robbery and flees from a posse.  Slade's escape causes him to ride his horse at full speed through a big herd of bison.  The bison scatter around the lone horseman and, then, stampede so that they are running alongside the rider.  The stunt seems gratuitously dangerous -- the horseman rides straight into the surly-looking bison without slowing at all, trusting that the huge animals will part for him.  Then, the buffalo stampede alongside this horse -- this latter effect doesn't seem to have been staged:  it's just something that occurred.  Of course, no one in their right mind would take the risk that Slade takes in this scene.  But the image shows his desperation and pays off with some spectacular images.  (Slade's desperation to escape the posse is significant in that the hero will reveal his true character in the next scene when he stops to aid the badly wounded Creighton and, indeed, risks his life to rescue the man notwithstanding the posse's pursuit.)  Another example should suffice:  Robert Young plays a 'dude' from the East.  Some scalawags decide to test his mettle by putting him on a wild bucking bronco.  Young turns out to be an accomplished horseman -- he rides the wild animal around the corral, breaks out of the corral, and, then, the horse, still lunging violently, bursts into a saloon on Main Street and rides right through the bar before he gets the horse under control.  Notably, when the horse breaks out of the corral, one of the livery stable ne'er-do-wells is watching from the fence-rail -- he has to dive off the rail and, when the bronco jumps over the fence, the top rail is kicked-off narrowing missing the extra huddling below.  (This stunt is too dangerous to have been staged intentionally -- the close-call occurred, apparently, by accident.)   The details of the falling rail and the horse rampaging through the saloon are wholly excessive to the purpose of the scene -- but they contribute to its spectacle and the make the sequence memorable.  

Western Union's plot is similarly excessive:  the story takes place during the Civil War, a conflict embodied in the story of two brothers from Missouri, one a staunch supporter of the Union, albeit a former bank robber, and the other a bad man who rustles horses and beef-cattle from the workers erecting the Western Union telegraph lines, blaming the theft on the Ogallala Sioux.  The good brother is in competition for the film's romantic interest with the Harvard-educated Dude from the East Coat -- the girl, who happens to be sister of the Western Union's ramrod, Ed Creighton is a saucy platinum blonde who seems to have wandered into this picture from a boulevard in the Weimar Republic -- the girl has kittenish features but she positively glows with malicious lust as she flirts with the two male leads, the stolid and manly Randolph Scott and the weirdly ebullient Robert Young.  The action is shot against towering buttes and brilliantly colored painted desert and Lang makes even the frequent, incongruent studio sequences equally beautiful -- he stages the studio scenes against glowering skies full of thunderheads or against rear-projections of great sandstone mesas, charging the images with a sort of expressionistic fury.  The Technicolor landscapes don't come close to matching the studio sequences -- it's as if the characters are periodically wandering out of the desert and into some kind of lavish opera set -- but both types of images are extravagantly beautiful.  For an added measure, Lang throws in a variety of secondary characters, almost Shakespearian in breadth and depth -- there's an overweight, drunk Indian who staggers as he strides toward his White foes, a cowardly cook who continuously lacerates his fingers as he peels potatoes because of the roughness of the prairie road, illiterates who can barely tell time, even, an old Indian fighter with a arrow still stuck in his clavicle and a gory-looking bald patch where he was scalped a dozen years earlier.  Lang's taste for flamboyant violence is always on display -- there are fights with the Indians, gun battles, fiery attacks on the Western Union camp at night, as well as fisticuffs and horse chases -- in one memorable scene, a man rides his horse down an almost sheer cliff, seemingly defying gravity.  There's nothing profound about the film but it is a magnificent, fast-paced entertainment technically accomplished and, even, a model of craft with respect to its elaborate and cunning mise-en-scene.  In the end one brother is goaded into killing the other.  A big gunfight ensues, resulting in the death of both brothers (and incidentally clearing the romantic field for Robert Young) and, then, Lang treats us to an elegy poetically compressed into a signal extraordinarily gorgeous shot -- we see the long, endless rows of telegraph poles receding across the barren prairie while the sun sets amidst a toppled, statuesque landscape of orange clouds.