Two drifters, a frontier dentist and his sidekick, a big handsome lug, slip into Lawrence, Kansas. It's a few months before the Civil War and the townspeople are divided between supporters of the slave-owning South and the abolitionist North. Politics doesn't concern our two protagonists. Their grift is to stir up brawls in which the big thug damages people's teeth with his fists. This creates a market for the dentist's services. Raul Walsh directs Dark Command (1940) in his typically nonchalant, casually cruel style -- a lot of the comedy in the first reel arises from people's pain as the dentist yanks out their teeth with a greasy-looking pliers. The big lug, played by a doe-eyed John Wayne, complains that Kansas is unimpressive and not at all like Texas from which he hails and that he wants to lay his eyes on the mountains of the golden West. But, then, he gets a look at Mary McCloud, Lawrence's resident beauty and the spoiled daughter of the local banker, and decides that there are attractions in Kansas worth attending to. Wayne's Texas cowboy, called Bob Seton in this movie, immediately proposes to Mary. Of course, as a self-respecting frontier belle, she rejects him. Indeed, she's betrothed to the town schoolmaster, Mr. Cantrill, a handsome brutish fellow with a sleek, waxy handlebar moustache Bob Seton, who is illiterate, decides to remain in town, even after his partner, the much older Dr. Grunch, the dentist, has exhausted most of Lawrence's possibilities with respect to pulling teeth, the only therapy he can provide except for some desultory tonsorial work. There have been breaches of the peace in town and the place needs some law enforcement and the sheriff's job is vacant. Bob takes lessons from Cantrill who teaches him some rudimentary reading and writing. Then, he and Cantrill square-off in the election for Sheriff. Cantrill, an eloquent fellow, preaches to the crowd that he will apply the laws of the territory as written and bring order to the place. Bob's pitch is less subtle: he says that too much law hampers law enforcement and though he can't spell too well, he can "smell out cattle rustlers" and, instead of applying the law, will enforce swift frontier justice on malefactors. It's the perennial duel in American politics between the subtle literate sophisticate who promises competency and adherence to statute and the rough-and-tumble gunman ("Dirty" Harry, for instance) who promises to exterminate the bad guys. Needless to say, John Wayne's Bob Seton wins the election. Cantrill vows revenge to his dour housekeeper who turns out to be his mother and, surprisingly, she says that she's had three sons turn to outlawry and that, if her last boy, schoolteacher Cantrill becomes a criminal, she'll gun him down herself. It's to no avail; hellbent on revenge Cantrill rides out of town, assembles a private army, and begins pillaging and looting across the Kansas-Missouri border. Cantrill doesn't care about the rift between North and South; first, he impersonates a figure like John Brown, liberates some slaves, but, then, sells them to buyers in Missouri. (("You can get killed running slaves like that John Brown feller",he proclaims.) Then, he has his men don some captured Confederate uniforms (the War between the States is now in progress) and, in that guise, continues to pillage the villages along the border. Historically minded viewers will grasp that the story is a heavily fictionalized account of Quantrill's raiders and their depredations in Kansas, inexorably leading to the savage guerilla assault on Lawrence.
Walsh's movie is well-written and packed with violent action and the meandering plot takes some interesting twists and turns. The film was Republic Picture's biggest budgeted movie and didn't do well at the box office (I think the plot is too complex and politically problematic) -- Republic owned Roy Rogers and the actor plays an interesting character, Banker McCloud's son, a dandy impersonating a cowpoke and Rogers, who often seemed to have minimal acting chops, does a good job with the part. The film didn't really please anyone and bankrupted Republic, a studio that specialized in low rent Westerns. Dark Command is full of ambushes, gun battles and wild horse chases with, at least, two spectacularly dangerous stunts and it features an army of cavalry, in fact, several armies. Although the picture uses montage sequences with crowd shots seemingly lifted from other movies, it's still an impressively ambitious production and some of the action sequences are pretty thrilling. The film is notably ambivalent about the Civil War. The viewer's first impulse is to ascribe the movie's equivocating stance on the War between the States as a cynical attempt to curry favor with both North and South -- after all, Republic wanted to sell tickets in Boston and Atlanta as well. But, on closer inspection, the ambiguities are pretty much baked into the narrative and, I think, reflect some legitimate quandaries arising in this historical context. After all, the War was a Civil War, pitting brother against brother, and the movie perceives the situation in terms of a domestic, even bourgeois, family conflict in which kinfolk find themselves on opposite sides of various battle-lines. For instance, Mary McCloud's father, the town banker, is apparently sending money (or so it is alleged) to the South to support the Confederacy -- although this may just be a malicious rumor. This starts a run on McCloud's bank, a near-riot that is stanched by Bob Seton, the Texas cowboy's, intervention. John Wayne's character is caught in the middle in various ways -- his politics are never articulated, an ambiguity that arises from the character's near illiteracy and apolitical disposition. Bob courts Mary, who is Cantrill's fiance (an alliance that the old banker strongly endorses since Cantrill is ambitious and a man of some means). Mary's brother, Fletch (played by Roy Rogers) is a would-be Southern cavalier, although this is merely one of the greenhorn's affectations, and, when he gets in a brawl with a Northern sympathizer. Fletch impulsively guns the man down. Bob has to arrest Fletch, who idolizes him as a real cowboy, and puts him in jail pending trial. Mary offers herself to Bob if he will release Fletch and let him escape. But Bob, who loves Mary, does his duty and rejects her blandishments. This results in a trial in which the silver-tongued Cantrill persuades the jury (who have been intimidated and terrorized as well) to acquit Fletch, even though the man is guilty of the homicide. (In the midst of the trial, word arrives that the South had seceded and that there is War, but Bob Seton keeps the information to himself to assure that Fletch gets a fair trial -- in fact, the trial is only notionally fair because Cantrill's closing argument is nothing more than a naked appeal to pity. The film understands that in situations of this sort there are winners and losers and, throughout the movie, the murdered man's widow keeps popping up demanding vengeance for her husband's death. Everyone is tangled up in complex webs of loyalty and betrayal. Fletch joins Cantrill's raiders and becomes an outlaw. When her father is killed, Mary makes a marriage with Cantrill, although immediately after the ceremony, the guerilla chieftain departs for the field where his marauders are burning towns and stealing everything that can be looted. (When Mary comes to Cantrill's sordid guerilla camp -- everyone drunk with prostitutes brawling -- her husband gives her a whole box of pillaged finery: brooches, rings, and necklaces thieved from murdered townsfolk.) Bob Seton is captured after a bloody ambush, but Cantrill in an elaborate display of courtesy offers him wine and dinner with Mary (while plotting to have him killed). Bob escapes with Fletch who is badly wounded -- it's the second of two chases in which a hundred mounted guerillas pursue a wildly careening wagon from which Bob and Fletch gun down the pursuers with unerring accuracy. At the climax, the film cuts between three opposing forces: a local militia affiliated with the North rides to the rescue of Lawrence, Kansas; the townsfolk in Lawrence erect barricades and herd their women and children into a church preparing to defend the town; and Cantrill's raiders in a force of several hundred riders storm across the dark prairie toward the town. All of this is effectively staged with the action funneling down to the deceased banker's ornate mansion in Lawrence where Mary's two suitors, Bob and Cantrill, converge for a final duel while Dr. Grunch, the corrupt dentist, undertakes surgery on the unconscious Fletch to extract a bullet that is, apparently, killing him. There's war in the streets with the townsfolk fighting with Cantrill's raiders and the town is set afire -- flames surge out of all the buildings as Lawrence is reduced to ashes. True to her word, Cantrill's ferocious mother (Marjorie Main) tries to kill her reprobate son; she gets shot down but Cantrill is also killed by Bob. Fletch comes to, surprisingly cheerful for all the mayhem surrounding him, and cites Shakespeare: "All's well that end's well" but there have been a thousand casualties and Bob Seton has never heard of a guy named Shakespeare: Was he from Texas? The movie is notable for two stunts devised by Second-Unit Director Yakima Canutt. In the first, a wagon chased by an army of cavalry lunges off a rock cliff plunging about fifty feet into a lake, a spectacular shot showing the poor horses falling head first into the water as the men drop through space and the wagon explodes on impact. During the fight in Lawrence, Bob gets between two horses, drops down onto the ground, and gets dragged under a wagon through the battle lines -- another spectacular and obviously dangerous stunt.
The movie has a blithe, rambunctious surface and, like many Hollywood productions of its time (and today for that matter), the narrative reduces serious political issues to a romantic rivalry between two robust and aggressive leading men. But the picture has dark undertones. Fletch is acquitted due to Cantrill's nihilistic eloquence, but, also, because the raider has bullwhipped jurors and told them that their families will be murdered if Fletch is convicted. So Fletch's weird jollity at the end of the movie rings more than a big hollow. Killing on a mass scale requires lots of capital -- hence, the central role of the banker in the film. War breeds outlaws. The principled dispute between North and South, exhibited in a montage in the opening scenes, has spawned a pure predator, Cantrill -- a man who exploits the chaos of war for his own grim benefit. Local politicians are cowardly. The Banker wants to play both sides against the middle and is killed as a result of his machinations. At the climax, Cantrill's own mother aims a shot gun at her son, calls him a devil and says something like: "I guess I birthed a snake." Walsh's direction is eerily without affect. It just takes all of this in stride. The Civil War is embodied in violent, even homicidal, conflicts within the family. This is one of those movies that is better that it seems -- individual sequences feel flat, sometimes, even inert, but the movie's cumulative effect is bigger than the sum of its parts.
No comments:
Post a Comment