Frederic Remington: sculptor of action

Remington is great not just at painting action, but sculpting it, as well. Rarely, does he present a bronze horse that isn't acting up in some manner. Often, the horse is a sun-fishin' son-of-a-gun. At other times, the horse is a chargin' fool. Regardless, it is obvious that Frederic had intimate knowledge of the equestrian physique:

The Rattlesnake

The Cheyenne

The Bronco Buster

The Outlaw

Frederic Remington: painter of soldiers

The first painting is not particularly impressive on its technical merits, but the subject matter is interesting. Imagine such a scene today. Arresting a deserter. No doubt, the cameras would be out and the pieces sympathetic to the deserting soldier would be flooding the papers from coast to coast. Columnists would be demanding what is so horribly wrong with our military establishment that this fellow felt compelled to go AWOL?

Arresting the Deserter (1885)

This portrait of The Trooper, like some of the Indian portraits, is directly linked to our collective image of a cavalry officer – charging, full of confidence.

The Trooper (1892)

The Advance takes the portrait of the Trooper one step further, so far as action is concerned. The man in the lead appears to be the same officer. Does anything sit more erect in the saddle that a U.S. cavalry officer?

The Advance (1898)

This next picture, again, could’ve come directly from a John Ford picture. Some things are worth fighting for. In this case: water.

Fight for the Water Hole (1903)

This final picture looks like a Canadian Mountie, not a U.S. soldier, but regardless, he’s still done a bang up job getting his man.

Single Handed (1912)

Frederic Remington: painter of naturals

As Rob mentioned on the previous Remington post, Remington is one of the few big artists whose work can be enjoyed first hand by an Okie. When I think of Commanches, Apaches, Cheyenne, etc., his work definitely springs to mind.

Pretty Mother of the Night (1880s)

His use of day for night paint was extraordinary.

Cheyenne Scouts Partrolling the Big Timber of the North Canadian, Oklahoma (1889)

Radisson and Groseilliers (1905)

A beautiful dusk to go with this picture that tells a little story:

Coming to the Call (1905)

And, of course, the eco-friendly forms of communication:

Apache Fire Signal (1908)

Frederic Remington: pencil, pen & ink artist extraordinaire

Take a gander at the gander pull. Remington knows how to show men out west at play. This drawing could almost fit right in to John Ford's cavalry trilogy - the camaraderie and spirit are there, just change the hills in the background to plateaus and you're in business.

The Gander Pull (1888?)

And just check out the skill!

Remington knows how to frame a picture and has a great sense of depth - much like John Ford. Plus, he can create dust out of pen and ink:

In the Desert (1888)

A Troop Picket Line (1901)

Damn you, 70's grit!

Why'd you have to go and make Will Penny so lonely?

Okay, so the movie was from 1968...but it brought to mind 70s grit. And those were my words when the credits rolled and I threw my wet hanky at the screen. Will Penny's got to be one of the best Charlton Heston performances I've seen. I was sad with him, nervous with him, embarrassed with him...hell, I even wanted to learn to read with him. Everyone should be able to read. The little button could read - and read real good.

Don't know what I'm gum flappin' about? Watch the movie.

Winchester '73

The second installment of the Anthony Mann series is actually the first collaboration between Jimmy Stewart and Mann. Winchester ’73 is everything that Wagstaff charges that The Far Country is not – fresh, energetic, and full of spirit. Supposedly, it was an afterthought tacked on to a two-picture deal between Stewart and Universal that included Harvey. With the exception of the premise, Harvey is a forgettable picture, yet Winchester stands up. It was a break-out film for Mann, following on the heels of several noir flicks that began his steady ascent to a major A-list director. For Stewart, it was a reinvention of his screen persona that, according to him at least, saved his acting career and gave him focus.

The Stewart/Mann films are credited with creating the psychological western and advancing the genre to a more sophisticated adult audience. Yet, all that wasn’t quite developed in Winchester. Aside from Lin McAdam’s (Stewart) quest for revenge, he doesn’t have the dark side present in Stewart’s other characters in subsequent Mann films. He’s pretty much wearing a Tom Mix hat under the sweaty William S. Hart hat shown on the screen. There’s an interesting dichotomy between good brother (Stewart) and bad brother, aka Dutch Henry Brown, (Stephen McNally ), which was well-trodden territory for noir, but perhaps a little bit of a novelty for the western. The conflict between the two characters is powerful and exceptionally depicted by the two actors, but ultimately not complex in a psychological way. That’s not to suggest Winchester has little to say. Almost every shot has an alpha male in it, either establishing dominance or losing it – a natural theme since the story more or less follows the Winchester rifle exchanging hands.

When the Winchester, one in a thousand, is first seen, it is by little prairie dust urchins gazing through the shop glass as if at a toy store. They can lick their lips all they want, but none of them are man enough to win it.

That’s right, win it! It wouldn’t be right to sell such a beautiful precision crafted thunder stick. It’s for special men. President Grant has one. To get this one, it’s going to take a shooting contest that will stretch the audience’s suspension of disbelief so taut that for the rest of the picture it will be like the exhausted elastic band on some old threadbare underwear. After the bulk of sharp shooting contestants are weeded out, two remain – two brothers, who happen to be arch enemies with a shared hate so strong that earlier in the picture they tried to shoot each other without guns. When armed, these two men can shoot. After it was determined that the targets weren’t good enough to pick a winner, they shot at coins – and finally a piece of hollowed out silver off the neck of Chief Yowlachie.

“Looks like another miss”

"I wouldn’t wanna say you’re wrong, Marshal, but I didn’t miss it."
"I don’t see any mark, except maybe this scratch on the inside rim."
"That was my mistake. I shot through it."

Yeah, sure you did, you lying son of bitch!….or so I thought. But he proved me wrong with a postage stamp.

Still, winning the Winchester is not the same thing as keeping the Winchester. His bad seed bro lays out for him in the hotel room and steals it.

Evil Bart Dutch Henry Brown and his posse escape Dodge City with the Winchester, but not their other guns, since Dodge City makes folks check in their arms and they sorta had to leave in a hurry. Where are they headed? Everybody goes to Riker’s.
Dutch Henry Brown has the rifle, but not much else. There’s scuttlebutt that the indians are on the war path since the victory at the Little Big Horn (which would've happened 3 years after the story, but I digress)[actually, as the comment below the post points out, the shooting contest was in 1876, evidenced by the screenshot of the rifle behind glass, not 1873 as I assumed, so the historical timeline is accurate]. His posse needs guns. They meet a gun peddler (John McIntire) at Riker’s. He’s got a deal with some indians. If Anthony Mann pictures teach you anything, it’s that you should never sell repeating rifles to indians – especially when they're on the warpath. Yet, the peddler is like a cockroach, an inevitable opportunist.
If you never thought that Rock Hudson would don redman blackface and scalp your sorry ass, well you better think again. He ends up getting the rifle off the peddler.
While Lin (Stewart) trails his bad bro and the rifle, the rifle changes possesion countless times. A few of its brief keepers:

Young Bull – apparently he earned his name by claiming he was an indian.

Steve Brody – he was never man enough to have the Winchester in the first place. He’s plagued by a yellow streak. On his arm is Lola Manner (Shelly Winters). Poor bastard, his rifle is too much gun for him and his fiance is too much woman for him. And see the white horse in tow?
Waco Johnnie Dean (Dan Duryea) – at first glance, he’s just a wild brute, but because he’s the only character smart enough to understand his place in the food chain, well, that makes him pretty much the deepest character in the picture. Dan Duryea is one hell of an actor and the cocky S.O.B. steals every scene he’s in, which is quite an accomplishment as the film is brimming with excellent performances.

The film ends with the good brother chasing the bad. See the giant cacti?
Those things are crawling all over Kansas.

The climax is a rifle duel on the side of a mountain:

“…The old man told you never to waste lead! Now you’re short!" Lin says to his evil brother.
End picture.

What makes Winchester ‘73 so worthwhile in the end isn’t some chase after an adult themed western, but its purity within the genre. Winchester ’73 doesn’t pretend to be ambitious, but it’s expertly paced. For a 90 minute picture, it packs it all in: good shooting, nice scenery, lots of horses, indians, gamblers, thugs, cheats, dancers. Every time there’s a change in the film, the audience is taken to a new scene in medias res. The indian menace, as in many Mann pictures, plays out largely off screen. By the time the main characters face the menace for the first time, it's when they stumble upon an army unit that's already near the end of a Zulu-like siege. Unlike most recent westerns, all the action and multiple characters doesn’t bog down the film. It remains streamlined and focused and ends with one clearly defined climax. Realism doesn’t have a place in Winchester ’73, but nevertheless, Mann’s west is richly textured and full of life. Once “The End” flashes on the screen, you know you’ve really seen a western.

The Far Country

For the next few weeks, we here at Liverputty will be looking at some Anthony Mann westerns. Sounds good, huh? So settle in, get comfy, break out the beer and the diapers. We start with 1954's The Far Country.

Our first Mann out of the gate is a bit of a disappointment. This northwestern took sleeping pills, and only occasionally rouses itself to muster a few moments of tension. Stewart is Jeff Webster, a socially disaffected serial killer who is one step ahead of the law. He rides with a little bell on his saddlehorn that was given to him by Ben Tatum (Walter Brennan) a couple years back. It's a reminder of their dream of settin' up house together in Utah. Says Ben:

"we're going to hang it right over our front door, on the inside, so when you open the door the bell jingles, you see, on account of I like to know when my friends is comin' so I can put on another pot of coffee."

Jeff and Ben figure that if they can drive their Wyoming cattle up Klondike way, where beef's bringin' a dollar a pound on the hoof (that's better than ten dollars a pound dressed in Dawson) then it'll bankroll that ranch they want in Utah. Geographically, we're looking at a Seattle- by steamship to Skagway- through mountain passes to Dawson progression, but most of the locations were actually filmed in the Canadian Rockies. Here's Ben...

... his love of coffee will get him killed. When Jeff and Ben finally get their cattle to Dawson, they end up grubstaking a claim in yet another detour to that ranch in Utah.

I love James Stewart, but I think he's coasting a bit in this one. It is commonplace with critics to remark how directors liked to use Stewart's charm and boyishness as a platform to walk the audience through some of the weirder, darker regions of one of his roles. I'm not sure what Mann and screenwriter Borden Chase had in mind here, but Stewart's character looked at objectively is an asshole. We get some of this:

"Nobody ever did anything for nothing. What do you want me to say?"
"Say thanks."
"That's a term I seldom use."

and

"You don't like people much, do you?"
"Any reason I should?"

And we get a lot of this:

"I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me."
"I take care of me, when you're older you'll find out that's the only way."

Poor coffee lovin' Ben. This old-timer has followed Jeff all over the west, from one scheme to another, and pretty much done whatever Jeff told him, and still Jeff is ready to up and leave him with hardly a moments notice. I'm not sure what's going on here. It's not exactly a George and Lennie relationship, and anyway I'm too endeared to Walter Brennan to call him dimwitted. He's just a simple man who likes his coffee.

"Now look, Jeff, you and me's been together a lot of years. It's been good, real good. I ain't gonna be around much longer. I'm gettin' old, but I sort of figured we'd go on together until my time comes."

And what does Ben get in return for all his slavish devotion? Well, near as I can tell, every once in a while Jeff puts his pipe in his mouth and lights it for him.

"And in a pinch," strikes a match, "I can take care of you too."
"I guess you can at that."

Some friends of mine used to have a silly running joke about how we each had our own Boris Karloff monster that did all of our bidding. When we got together to play cards or watch t.v. we would leave our monsters parked in the hall or at the dining table. Well, now I think I want to update my model to a Walter Brennan. Just so that when my life takes a nasty turn, and I feel I'm all out of options, and I want to light out west, I can turn to him and hear something like this:

"How much do we have left? Uh, fifty dollars or thereabouts. Enough to buy flour and salt and coffee, and a shovel and a pan. We can kill our meat."

It turns out to be a long, hard trail to Dawson, with plenty of complications. Ruth Roman will serve as our Dark Woman, Miss Castle.


Ronda Castle is a saloon owner. She kindly helps the miners spend their hardearned gold on women, booze, and gambling. She owns the Skagway Castle and later, the Dawson Castle. She takes a shine to our Jeff the moment she sees that he's a killer who has troubles with the law. For a bad woman, she's boring.

More complications ensue when we meet our villain, the corrupt law in Skagway.

Mr. Gannon is the boss in Skagway. He likes hangin' people. He doesn't like it when somebody interrupts his hangin' people. He likes Jeff, but he still wants to hang him. And rob him of his cattle in plain sight. John McIntire's performance is the most spirited in the movie.

This here is Renee... or 'freckle face'. "I'm not a freckle face. I'm a woman."

Remember, them's boobs under that thar flannel. She's what I like to call our a priori love-girl. The a priori love-girl is that girl that seems always to have loved our hero unconditionally, while he looks past her with neglect, and craps on her emotions. Maybe he will come around to her by the end, but only at the very end, and sometimes that's too late. For an example of the a priori love-girl par excellence, see Shirley MacLaine in Some Came Running.

Here we get some movie romance between Jeff and Miss Castle. This happens only hours after Jeff wasn't going to bother himself to rescue her from an avalanche. He warned her. He told her to take the trail less traveled. But you see, she's a strong-willed woman.

"Nothing wrong with that (being strong-willed.) That is, if you don't mind getting a broken neck."
"If I had, would it have bothered you?"
"No."

This does not make Renee happy. "I'm a woman." (He doesn't think so, you're the a priori love-girl.)


You see, Jeff didn't know that avalanche was going to happen, he just figured it might happen and it did. "Well, let's move along."

"We've got to go and help those people!"
"Of course we do, they may be dead."
"I didn't kill'em."
"But you may be able to save them if they're still alive!"
"You're wrong, Jeff. You gotta help."
"Why?"
"Why, if you don't know why. Hyup!"

"You're wrong, Jeff. You're wrong."

Once we get to Dawson, and and Ben and Jeff start panning for gold, the movie becomes a conflict between the good folks of Dawson that want to make it a real town, and that sinful seductress Miss Castle and the evil corrupt Mr. Gannon who try to muscle in on the action.

"Sure enough, we're gonna have lamposts and sidewalks. Might even have a church."
"All this fool talk of schools and churches and law and order."

The good townfolk need a sheriff to stand up to Mr. Gannon and his thugs. Jeff is handy with a gun, up close and far away, but he'll have none of it. It's time for him to move on. The townfolk end up pinning a star on the local drunk, Rube.

As so often happens with James Stewart, he's very effective when angry or seething with a glaring intensity.

Say it through clenched teeth, "Did you sell Ben that coffee?!"

Over at the Hash House, Hominy, Grits, and Molasses entertain us on their new piano with 'O Pretty Little Primrose'.


This baddie's evil grin reaches an 8 on the Jack Wilson Thug-ometer.

There is some nice scenery photographed by William Daniels, but I found my mind wandering to other things like Stewart's tailored cowboy get-up, and the soundtrack's post-dubbing. With some of these locations, I don't see how the microphones picked up anything but a prevailing atmospheric roar.


I went into this movie with the single, modest desire to see the interior of a supply store stocked full with provisions for the 'far country'. The closest I came was this exterior in the background of the shot below. Oh well, maybe my desire will be fulfilled next time at the Bend of the River.



Others more dedicated can go spelunking through the caverns of this western's latent thematic content. They'll probably find about what they'd expect. The violence sanctioned by the public as a necessary foundation of law and order, or even the existence of a public at all. The dynamic between the roaming individual and those good town folk with their dream of streets, churches, and schools. Nation building. A civilization raised from a chaotic wilderness of corruption and greed. And other Liberty Valence type stuff. It's all in there somewhere, but really, why bother?
Not a great movie, or even a good movie, but western aficianados will have to look, and of course, this will be a must-own film for Jack Elam completists.