Between Eternities: And Other Writings Read online

  One of the best films ever made, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, doesn’t show us that future life either, but it forces us to imagine it. It is a Western that marks a milestone in the history of the genre, for various reasons, and not just those I have mentioned already, and which I will discuss later. It contains a brief treatise on politics, a Shakespearean dissertation on freedom of expression and freedom of choice, and a clear ethical dilemma. The protagonist, Ransom Stoddard, again played by James Stewart, is a lawyer from the East, who is shocked and horrified by the brutality of the bandit Liberty Valance, by the impunity in which he lives (for he is protected by the big ranchers who occasionally hire him), and by the fear he inspires in the population of Shinbone, another one-horse town in which Stewart chooses to settle, again because that is where he was attacked and beaten, this time with a whip handle. He, however, intends to use the law to bring Valance to justice and to prison, an ambition that meets with general ridicule and fear. (Those who already know the story, please bear with me.) The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon (whose tale is one of the saddest I have ever heard), warns him from the start that he should get a gun and learn how to use it, because there is no law in Shinbone and no justice worthy of the name. Stewart resists, but, in the end, against all probability and against all the odds, he kills Liberty Valance in an apparently unequal duel: the boastful, much-feared, expert gunman falls to the ground before a man in a kitchen apron who has never shot anyone in his life. Later, when Stewart refuses to accept a political nomination – the beginning of a long career that will eventually take him all the way to the Senate – because his fame is based on a violent crime that goes against all his principles, John Wayne explains what really happened. He had been hiding down an alleyway, and he, not Stewart, had killed Valance with his rifle, which he fired at the exact moment that Stewart unleashed his one wildly inaccurate shot. Stewart expresses his amazement and asks why he did it, why he saved his life, thus condemning himself to losing the woman he loves, Hallie, who had realized that same night, when she saw Stewart close to death, that he was the man she loved. Wayne replies soberly (no other actor could express so much with a simple glance, in this and other films): ‘Cold-blooded murder? I can live with that.’ What better summation of the profundity and complexity so often found in Westerns: they understand that not all men are the same, that some are capable of living with certain actions, their own or someone else’s (the Stewart character, of course, is not); that some care nothing about the future, even if it exists, as is the case with Tom Doniphon, who wanted Hallie’s happiness above all else, even if that meant destroying his own chance of happiness, and to do that, he murdered a man in cold blood, thus allowing the survival of the man Hallie would then marry (Hallie, it should be said, in Vera Miles’s memorable portrayal, is one of John Ford’s most touching creations, and that’s saying a lot).

  The film begins and ends many years after these events, with Wayne’s funeral, to which a much older Stoddard, now Senator Stoddard, and his wife, Hallie, travel from Washington. The journalists in Shinbone, who want to know why such an important politician has travelled all the way to this godforsaken place in the West merely to attend a funeral, ask initially: ‘Who’s dead?’ They don’t even know. And when they are told the name, Tom Doniphon, they have no idea who he is. As I said before, the alert viewer is forced to imagine Doniphon’s long years of solitude and obscurity on his little ranch on the outskirts of town, alone apart from his faithful black servant, Pompey, and watching the decades pass with no hope and no change – his fate fixed for ever – doubtless trapped in the memory of that far-off night when he committed a cold-blooded murder (of a vile individual, it’s true; ‘A murder. Nothing more,’ as the musketeer Athos once said), and one that worked entirely to his disadvantage. It is one of the few Westerns in which we are obliged to imagine the hero’s dreadful future – once he has done the deed, once he has made his choice.

  Our society does not accept that all men and all women are different. It does not accept that while some are horrified by what they are obliged or choose to do, others are not, and are prepared to bear whatever responsibility or sentence falls to them. It believes, rather, that everyone should think the same or at least abstain from doing what the majority deem reprehensible. It does not accept that some crimes are not as criminal as others, depending on who commits them and against whom, depending, too, on why. Society knows all about hatred, envy and revenge, but prefers to clothe itself in virtue and pretend ignorance, and, for that reason, it hates not only those who do not pretend and thus remind society of the truth about its past, but also those who harbour an undying hatred or choose to take justice into their own hands. And in the latter case, there’s no denying that they’re right. ‘This isn’t the Wild West,’ people say. Fortunately so. But perhaps we live in an age so pusillanimous that it cannot even tolerate serious stories from another age, when men were less respectful of the law and less obedient and less fair, but also more complex, more contradictory and more profound.

  (2011)

  Riding Time

  Critics – as those of the literary variety have been demonstrating for centuries now – have a limitless ability to get things wrong; among the literary critics’ horrendous gaffes – to give just one out of thousands of possible examples, examples that are ever on the increase – was the almost unanimous drubbing they gave to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick when it was first published. Film critics have only had a little over a hundred years to prove their ignorance and bad taste and general dimwittedness, but in that brief space of time they have already succeeded in reaching the depths plumbed by their literary colleagues. (Of course there are always exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.) Critics have the advantage that, after a few decades, when a work they praised to the skies has been completely forgotten and one they denigrated is alive and well and deemed to be a classic, almost no one remembers what they said about it; and since they never lack for cheek, they’re more than capable of pretending that they didn’t say what they said and leaping aboard whichever bandwagon happens to be fashionable at the time.

  Nowadays, everyone – apart from the occasional conceited Spanish director – considers The Searchers (1956) to be not only one of John Ford’s greatest masterpieces, but one of the best films in the history of cinema. That wasn’t always the case. Initially, it was judged to be weak and flawed, then it was relegated to a prolonged spell in oblivion, and then it was dismissed as ‘racist’ (yes, there are still people who confuse a film or book with what its characters do and say). Only relatively recently, thanks to a handful of stubborn critics and a far larger number of fans who had been right all along, has this marvellous film found its rightful place in the canon.

  The same has not yet happened, however, with another John Ford film made only five years later and closely related to The Searchers: Two Rode Together, which is still considered by many to be weak and flawed and, of course, a lesser work in comparison with its predecessor. Well, it’s true that it is fourteen minutes shorter, that the plot is rather simpler and the script less daring, that the action takes place over a period of a few weeks, not five years or more, and that, for all those reasons, it is perhaps less epic. I suppose it’s actually a sourer, sadder, more cynical and more pessimistic version of the story told in The Searchers and it does leave a somewhat bitter taste in the mouth. In The Searchers, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) sets off in search of his nieces immediately after they have been abducted by the Comanches. He soon learns that the older girl has been raped and murdered, but this knowledge only drives him on in his search for the younger niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), with even more determination and with a growing feeling of hatred for the Indians. Accompanied by the girls’ adopted brother, the much younger and kindlier Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Wayne spends the film hoping to find the girl, from the point when he knows that she will still be a little girl right up to when he realizes that she’ll already be an adoles
cent and the wife of a Comanche. There’s a scene in which Wayne goes to see some white girls who have been rescued by the army and who have probably lived with the Comanches for as long as his lost niece. It’s hard to tell if the girls are in a state of arrested development or have been driven mad, but one thing is clear, despite their fair hair and blue eyes, they have become completely Indianized. The look Wayne gives them before leaving the barrack hut where they’re being held is perhaps the most chilling in the history of cinema, and it comes from an extraordinary actor with a remarkably wide range, an actor who, incredibly enough, a great many fools still caricature and damn with faint praise; in that one brief look there is hatred, grief, despair, sadness, pity and a desire for vengeance – all mixed up together. Wayne knows then that if he ever does find his niece, he will find someone not very different from these anomalous, alienated, half-mad girls with no place in the world, someone irrecoverable and incomplete. Each day that passes, therefore, counts against him, but he tracks and pursues her day after day, from the moment Debbie was taken and her parents murdered. And time, while it passes and we ride along on it, never ends. Not today or yesterday, but perhaps tomorrow.

  When Two Rode Together opens, the time that Wayne experiences in The Searchers – the time on which he rides and against which he continues to fight with growing bitterness and with ever more sinister aims – is already over for the person doing the searching. Nine, twelve or even fifteen years have passed since the abduction of the white children and women whom a group of settlers now want to recover, encouraged by the vain and frivolous promises made by a congressman in Washington eager for publicity. The person charged with recovering the disappeared – or, rather, with haggling over them with the Indians and buying them back – has no blood ties with any of them. Unlike Wayne, Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart) is in no hurry and isn’t filled with hatred or a desire for vengeance, nor does he have any personal interest in the matter. He is a mercenary who is prepared – most reluctantly – to carry out this mission and has no qualms about taking the life savings of the poor, confused settlers who initially welcome him as a Messiah who will restore to them their lost children and stolen womenfolk. But time has passed, and Stewart knows there’s nothing to be done, that the process of uprooting and transformation will already be complete.

  He knows that the five-year-old boy taken by the Comanches – frozen as a child in the memory of his family, who are in a similar position to Wayne, but lack his clear-sightedness – will now be a young warrior with stiff, stinking braids, that his chest will be covered with the scars inflicted on all Indian boys as part of their initiation into manhood, that he will have killed and scalped white folks and would rape his own fair-haired sister if he captured her. Stewart knows that the rosy-cheeked seven-year-old girl will be sixteen now and will have borne a couple of mixed-race children to some Indian brave, and that the mother lost by her good-for-nothing sons will have spent so long as the wife of an Indian that – as happens in Stewart’s moving encounter with the woman who was once Mrs Clegg – she will not even consider going back to her erstwhile husband and her now grown-up offspring (‘Oh, no, no, don’t tell them about me, they must never find me,’ she says to Stewart). In The Searchers, John Wayne, for all his hardness and anger and cruelty, still has some hope. In Two Rode Together, Stewart knows that there is no hope for the settlers. For him, they are people who are willingly deceiving themselves and who have equally willingly allowed themselves to be deceived by some congressman from Washington who has never even seen a real-life Indian. He therefore has no scruples about taking their money; he considers them mere dreamers, who will not learn until they see with their own eyes what their longed-for children and wives have become. Lieutenant Jim Gary (Richard Widmark), who accompanies him and urges him on, to some extent shares the settlers’ good faith and hopes, but realizes when he sees the captives that Stewart has been quite right to oppose the whole impossible, propaganda-driven mission. He understands that they cannot force Mrs Clegg to come back with them; she’s an old woman whom they must not and cannot expose to what, for her, would be terrible shame. The same is true of young Frieda Knudsen, who has had two children by a Comanche; they are her present and her future; and the past with her white parents is literally and irrevocably just that, the past. The Searchers and Two Rode Together complete each other and in a sense take their place as a pair of films that rank among the high points of the Western and of the history of cinema as a whole. The difference is that, in one of these films, time is still passing, and, in the other, time has stopped. It’s not hard to imagine which is the more bitter.

  (2008)

  Travelling between Eternities

  Critics who aspire to being always bang up to date have been prattling on for some years now about certain TV mini-series, saying, among other things, that they’re far more adult and more complex than most big-screen films. I have to agree that few things I’ve seen in the cinema have captured my attention in quite the way The Sopranos did, or Band of Brothers, The West Wing, Deadwood and Mad Men. On the other hand, I just do not see the point of The Wire, whose early episodes struck me as frankly plodding. And as for the much-lauded Lost, far from finding it adult and complex, I thought it somewhat facile and arbitrary. The prestige of the mini-series, however, does not extend to full-length features made originally for television, and yet, in the last ten years, I have seen two genuine masterpieces, which could stand alongside any made-for-cinema films. The only difference, perhaps, was their length (some three hours or more) and the fact that they went straight to DVD. I thus read no reviews or interviews, there was virtually no publicity, and so the general public probably never even knew of their existence. It seems odd that such masterpieces should go unnoticed, even by the most modern and astute of critics.

  One of those TV films dates from 2002 and was John Frankenheimer’s swan-song. Frankenheimer directed two of the best political films ever made – Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate (the original version starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, that is, not the ridiculous remake featuring Denzel Washington), as well as Birdman of Alcatraz. His final made-for-TV film was entitled Path to War, a thrilling depiction of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the grey man who replaced Kennedy, and his growing involvement in the Vietnam War. Michael Gambon plays the President, and Alec Baldwin and Donald Sutherland are equally unforgettable in their roles. It should be seen by anyone interested in that sub-genre of political cinema, ‘the White House movie’, or indeed in cinema in general.

  The TV film I really want to talk about, though, is one I discovered in 2006 and which I watched again a few days ago … on DVD. As far as I know, this magnificent film has never been shown on the big screen. To my and other people’s chagrin, very few Westerns get made nowadays, and those that do are rarely much to write home about (I’m not even that keen on Clint Eastwood’s award-laden Unforgiven). Broken Trail, however, directed by Walter Hill and starring Robert Duvall, seems to me one of the best Westerns ever made, almost on a par with the work of John Ford, Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann. In the film, Duvall and his nephew are driving some horses to Wyoming and, as in every road novel or film from Don Quixote on, they meet various people along the way. Their most important encounter is with five young Chinese girls, some no more than children, and all of them virgins, recently arrived in America and speaking no English. They are destined to be sold as prostitutes. Various incidents cause Duvall, his nephew and the violin-playing cowboy travelling with them to feel compelled to take charge of the girls and make them part of their journey, with all the inevitable delays and complications this implies. The relationships between the cowboys and the young Chinese girls, with whom they can barely communicate, are among the most touching I have seen in a very long time, never overplayed and never sliding into sentimentality. It’s the same with the non-relationship between the now elderly Duvall and the mature whore (Greta Scacchi), whom he also takes under his wing, along with a Chinese g
entleman getting on in years. Almost without realizing it, they come to form a strange, taciturn family, in which Duvall – playing an admirable character called Print Ritter – ends up, quite unintentionally, unheroically and naturally, taking on the role of kindly paterfamilias. He’s not always kindly, of course. He’s also perfectly capable of soothing his nephew’s conscience after the latter has hanged a man or of killing one of a group of men caught selling infected blankets to Indians as a more efficient way of exterminating them. Nothing about this masterly Western is over the top or gruesome, as is too often the case nowadays. It has its moments of violence, adventure, danger, muted lyricism and excitement, but there are also astonishingly quiet moments, among them a conversation by a river between Duvall and Greta Scacchi, which will inevitably remind film-lovers of another famous conversation by a river between James Stewart and Richard Widmark in Ford’s Two Rode Together. Broken Trail is one of those rare films, and getting rarer, in which one likes all the characters. They are simple, sensible, sober people, with good moral values and a sense of humour, but they are never cloying. As Duvall says when asked to give a funeral address: ‘Birth ’til death, we travel between eternities.’ Or, as he explains elsewhere in the film: ‘We didn’t go lookin’ to save no Orientals or a broke-nosed whore. It just happened. Sometimes you just gotta roll with what’s thrown at you.’

  (2010)

  A Hero from 1957

  When I was a child, the tebeos, or ‘comic books’, published in Mexico by Novaro and sold in Spain were, as for many boys of my generation, both my companions and my teachers. They weren’t called ‘graphic novels’ then, a term invented by those who feel ashamed of writing or drawing them and, therefore, ashamed of having been a source of pleasure and fantasy for many children and grown-ups, as well as being partly responsible for the literary vocation of many writers, including myself. For although I started reading books quite young, when I was about eight, I made little distinction between the novels of Salgari and Verne, Stevenson and Dumas, Crompton and Blyton, and the comic books of Capitán Trueno, Tintin, Hazañas bélicas or my favourites, Rip Kirby and Big Ben Bolt. Or, indeed, the Spanish translations of the American comics also published by Novaro: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy with his white hair, Superman, Batman and even Aquaman (a ridiculous superhero who, if I remember rightly, wore an orange-and-green uniform of scales and fins).