In Jacques Tourneur's The Way of a Gaucho (1952), someone says: "He's a fool, but very gaucho!" This assertion epitomizes the theme of this rather curious film: Gauchos are intractably stubborn, courageous, and bound by an iron code of honor. Tourneur sees his hero, and their kind, as insufferable, but, also, noble. But the gaucho way is doomed. At one point, a saturnine Richard Boone playing Salazar, a military officer, sentences the film's hero to ten lashes for "ignorance of history" -- this means that the gaucho way of life, featuring much galloping about and knife fighting, is passing away and that it is useless to oppose the course of history. (Of course, this is a time-honored theme in American Westerns particularly those directed by Sam Peckinpah -- the film anticipates in some ways, The Wild Bunch and The Ballad of Cable Hogue and, of course, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie that ends on the last frontier of the Andes foothills.) The movie is exciting and features fascinating landscapes of a kind that are unfamiliar to North American landscapes -- although, in point of fact, the west in Argentina looks recognizably like the American west. The movie represents an odd compromise -- a somewhat childish theme is developed with Tourneur's customary eloquence and sophistication. Visually, the film is impressive and its imagery tracks its ideas -- the movie begins with a frieze of hard-riding gauchos galloping hell-for-leather across an endless, featureless pampas; the movie ends with complicated shots full of walls and formal gardens, cloisters and black carriages at a crumbling monastery. The gauchos, in the first scene, call the couch rolling toward the estancia where some of the action takes place, a "hearse". In the end, the hero consents to be arrested and imprisoned -- the freedom of the vast open plains has been cabined and its centaur-like hero locked away in a prison. (Tourneur equates civilization with death -- in a scene near the end of the film, the hero escapes from a posse hunting him during an elaborate funeral conducted at an ancient crumbling cathedral.)
The Way of a Gaucho begins with a reunion. Miguel, the son of an old gaucho rancher, has returned from the city to his estancia. His foster-brother, Martine, the hero of the movie, greets him with a mixture of contempt and warmth -- Martine accuses him of become soft and bringing to the pampas city ways. Tourneur doesn't let the film linger -- within five minutes or so, Martine has killed a man in a knife fight (a dispute over an insult, and he is in jail. (It's a rather commodious jail in which another gaucho sings a mournful minor key song while strumming his guitar -- when Martine sardonically suggests that the man has been jailed for his crimes against music, the other guy says: "I've killed men for less", suggesting the insane code of honor to which these men subscribe). Martine is spared jail on the basis of being sent to a remote and primitive army encampment -- it's like a rudimentary Fort Apache made of thorny twigs and mud and, in fact, there's an Indian war underway. Martine clashes with the educated and cynical Salazar, the commander, and ends up being flogged and, then, tortured by being exposed to the sun staked out in a corral. Some of the other soldiers, including the guitar player from jail, free the delirious Martine who promptly challenges Salazar to a knife fight. Salazar tries to shoot Martine but gets slashed across his forearm, a wound that disables him and renders his right hand useless. Martine then escapes to the Andes foothills and leads a band of outlaws who may be allied with the hostile Indians (this is a bit unclear.) The outlaws attack a group of cavalry escorting railroad workers to the frontier and hurl their ties and rails into a huge muddy river flowing between barren cliffs. This exciting sequence is scored to some of the best music I've ever heard in a movie -- a sort of thumping, galloping melody that is underscored by wild squealing chromatic scales. The plot is a little bit redundant. Martine first deserts the army after a battle with the Indians fought in a wide, dusty dry river-bed. (South American Indians are, more or less, identical to the Ogallala Sioux and Cheyenne in John Ford's cavalry movies -- they are great horsemen, wear impressive head-dresses, and carry feathered lances.) While fleeing the cavalry, Martine comes upon an Indian who has a maiden literally slung across his saddle. Martine kills the Indian and rescues the woman, Theresa, played by the fabulously beautiful Gene Tierney. Theresa turns out to be pious and, after some exquisite day-for-night scenes, that suggest the filigree light and shadow of Joseph von Sternberg, Martine returns her to the estancia where he is, then, captured by Salazar and taken back to the army camp to be tortured (these are the scenes with Rory Calhoun as the gaucho spread-eagled and enjoying the blazing sun with a big tarantula for company.) After his second desertion, Martine and Theresa who are now "married" in their own eyes (and she's pregnant), try to cross the Andes into Chili. They get to a snowy and barren pass where Theresa collapses -- we see her kneeling to a humble cross on a cairn among the blue-grey glaciers. Martine takes her back to Argentina where he tries to persuade a priest to marry them -- this is the priest who taught Martine and Miguel to read. Salazar is nosing about, eager for revenge because of his damaged right hand, and he chases Martine back into the wilderness. Miguel's role in all of this is unclear and the part is under-written -- the film sets him up as a rival for the love of Theresa, but this putative plot never really develops. (The fact is that the movie recognizes Martine and Theresa as a "married couple" at least in the eyes of God and, since she's pregnant with Martine's child, Miguel really never gets a shot at her.) There's another big horse chase with Miguel participating. Martine escapes by riding through a huge herd of cattle and stampeding them -- this results in spectacular shots of a sea of horned beasts tumbling across the screen while tiny lone horsemen try to head them off. Miguel gets trapped in the herd and crushed to death by the stampede. Martine escapes, but realizes in the end that the gaucho way is doomed. He turns himself in to Salazar who seems inclined to forgive and forget -- after all, Martine was only following the archaic and heroic gaucho way -- and Salazar may be returning a favor: Martine spared his life a half hour earlier when he caught hm in an ambush in the Sierra foothills. Martine admits that he was a fool not to be persuaded to give up the gaucho way of life and, even, acknowledges that Salazar was trying to talk him into living in a more domesticated and rational way. The film's ending is another curiosity: everything seems aimed to deliver a climactic duel between Salazar and Martine, but fighting is avoided; Salazar doesn't try to kill Martine and the gaucho agrees to go to jail for three years. And, on this anti-climactic note, the film ends.
The movie is impeccably shot and very exciting. It can afford to end on a dying fall because of the effectively staged action sequences that precede the denouement. The picture is full of vast landscapes: huge desert canyons on the flanks of the Andes, endless flat prairie ("I can ride a horse for a hundred miles without turning its head"), badlands that look a bit like the wilderness around Lone Pine in California with the white summits of the mountains towering over the moonscape of rocks and gulches, and, of course, the huge mountain vistas in the scenes in the pass. There are oddities -- for instance, in one scene, the gaucho snatches huge eggs from an ostrich nest and people fight with bolos. Why are there ostriches on the pampas? The men stand on horse back to survey the distant horizons (we see a small boy doing this in an opening scene) and, in one memorable sequence, the hero stands on his horse, gazes around, and, then, drops into his saddle effortlessly and gallops away, a spectacular feat of horsemanship. There are some florid poetic speeches, implausible but, perhaps, intended to seem "translated from the Argentine Spanish" and everyone is very Catholic. This is a large-scale and effective Western, with an intelligent if a bit repetitive script, and well worth watching.
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