Hombre

My Summer of Western Research™ has provided me a couple of opportunities to read books in conjunction with their film interpretations. Both examples were worthy adaptations. We’ll start with Hombre. (Novel by Elmore Leonard. Screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. Director Martin Ritt.) I wrote about both the book and the movie individually over the past few weeks. Today I’ll do the compare and contrast.

As I’ve said before, Hombre may be Leonard’s best novel. The story is tight and the

characters are a diverse mix. He also shows the dialog traits that would serve him so well in his crime fiction, with undertones of smart-assery throughout. The movie does well to keep all those and uses them to good effect.

There are two key differences that may have had more to do with the facts of moviemaking in 1967 than any artistic choices. In the movie, John Russell (Paul Newman) visits the boarding house he has inherited and meets Jessie Brown, the woman who runs it. (Diane Cilento.) She learns Russell plans to sell the house and decides to make her exit on the same mud wagon he’s leaving on.

None of this is in the book, including her. Instead of both Jessie and Doris Lee Blake, the book has a woman referred to throughout as “The McLaren Girl.” She’s apparently a teenager taken by the Apaches and later rescued by the Army, on her way back to her parents. She serves the role of conscience played by Jessie in the movie. All Doris Lee did was whine and stand in to show what a bastard Cicero Grimes (Richard Boone) is. (In another interesting change, the heavy in the book is named Frank Braden, which is the name of the lawman gone bad in the movie, who also does not appear in the book.)

This is all frosting on a delicious cake compared to the core change made for the film. In the climactic scene, Newman’s Russell gives everyone a chance to carry the bag of money down the hill, which is what Grimes says it will take to save Mrs. Favor from dying of dehydration. Everyone passes until it comes Jessie’s turn. When she says she’ll go, Russell decides he will. The strong implication is that he just wanted to see if anyone else would do it.

In the book, everyone passes and Russell goes anyway, pretty much throwing it in their faces that for all the shit they talked about him, he’s the only stand-up one in the bunch. He and the McLaren girl bond a little before he leave, which shows a little more of his humanity.

I have to wonder if the reason for this key change might have been a perception that the audience wasn’t ready to see everyone bail on a woman in need, redeeming Russell’s sometimes questionable character when he won’t allow Jessie to go to her death. In the book, he makes them all understand they’re nothing but talk. They can plead all they want that the Favor woman can’t be left there to die, but no one will do anything about it but him. Either way, Russell gets his pound of flesh for the shabby treatment he’s been afforded. Only he, who freely admits he doesn’t care about the woman one way or the other after what she said about “those dirty Indians eat dogs,” has the humanity to save her. That’s quite a difference.

That’s not to say it makes the movie any less wonderful; its interpretation of Russell’s character is just as valid. If any of my film student friends has any thoughts on why these changes were made, I’d love to hear them.

Westerns as Noir

Beth Kelly hit the ground running with her first OBAAT post, and got me to thinking why I enjoy some Westerns so much, others only a little and (unfortunately) the rest, not at all. It was The Beloved Spouse who reminded me: the best Westerns are very much noir stories, set fifty to seventy-five years before film noir became a thing.

The stereotypical Western has become a cultural cliché: white hats = good guys, black hates = bad guys. Anyone with a true understanding of “American Exceptionalism” can figure that can’t have been how things really were. Better and more honest histories have since been written, and we now know “good guy” and “bad guy” were often situational, as many Western legends walked on both sides of that road, sometimes simultaneously. (Wyatt Earp a prime example.)

The earliest Western I know of to embrace these noirish roots was Shane

(1953).  Alan Ladd plays a gunfighter who tries to give it up, only to learn his past is not so easily eluded, and good intentions cannot alter one’s destiny. There’s no secret how the film will play out once Jack Palance makes his screen debut, but earlier Westerns would have Shane clean up the town and ride off into the sunset as the adoring citizens wave. In the movie, he rides into the dark mountains with only a child to see him, presumably to die.

Ride the High Country (1962) takes things another step down the road. Randolph Scott, the stock Western good guy (In Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little rallies the people of Rock Ridge to follow him by saying, “You’d do it for Randolph Scott”), betrays old friend Joel McCrae. Scott can’t go through with it and dies for his sins—classic Western stuff—the tone of the film is what matters. The mining camp and its residents place one in mind more of Deadwood than of Dodge City, and you’re really not sure how things will fall out with Scott and McCrae until the final scene.

Ride the High Country was directed by Sam Peckinpaugh, who’d break the mold with 1969’s The Wild Bunch. The film created a stir with its ground-breaking graphic violence, but holds up over time thanks to its portrayals of the Wild Bunch as not only ruthless outlaws, but men who care enough about a comrade—the one they’re least close to, no less—to sacrifice themselves for him. It’s the

alleged good guys—Robert Ryan and his posse—who are the low-lifes, stealing the clothes off dead men and fighting over who killed who for the bounty money. Let’s also not forget, Peckinpaugh’s violence is graphic, not gratuitous. Over forty years later, the Battle of the Bloody Porch is still a difficult scene to watch, not least because of how the viewer has come to identify with William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson. (Yeah, Sam had a decent cast to work with, too.)

Television got into the act in 1989 with Lonesome Dove. While many would not think of it as noir, the final scene establishes its credentials. Woodrow Call

(Tommy Lee Jones) has returned to Lonesome Dove, where a reporter recognizes him as the man who ramrodded a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to be the first man to graze cattle in Montana, and tells Call people say he is a man of vision. Call reflects on how his quest has resulted in the deaths of everyone he was close to, and mutters, “Yeah. Hell of a vision.” A key element of noir is that of someone who kicks off events that will spiral out of his control and end badly. If this doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what does.

Clint Eastwood (you knew he’d show up sooner or

later) takes Shane’s premise to its pinnacle with Unforgiven (1992). (Eastwood made several movies that deserved mention here: A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and The Outlaw Josie Wales. I chose Unforgiven as his masterpiece.) All characters are multidimensional. That Eastwood’s character William Munny comes out on top at the end is recognition that the most dangerous man is one who has no boundaries.

All of which brings us to what may be the darkest—and most realistic—depiction of its chosen Western element: Deadwood (2004 – 2006). Intended by creator

David Milch to show how order will of necessity arise in any situation, HBO’s brilliant series played self-interest against moral compass (or lack thereof) against greed against a desire to do what’s best for the most people, a morality play defined by the acrimony and marriages of convenience between Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Al Swearengen (Ian McShane, playing what may be the ultimate multidimensional villain). Extremely loosely based on real people and events, Deadwood shows how society inelegantly climbs from anarchy despite—and because of—the baser natures of all involved.

It’s no great surprise Elmore Leonard was able to transition so well from

Westerns to crime fiction, the core elements are so much the same. (The movie Hombre (1967) could also have made this list, and may well be Leonard’s masterpiece; a brilliant book.)  A casual disrespect for the letter of the law, the use of violence as an acceptable means to an end, and characters who, when done right, are not what they seem to be, link both genres.