DVR Diary: RAILS INTO LARAMIE (1954)

 

Here's an unpretentious Hollywood western from the genre's golden era. Jesse Hibbs will never be mentioned alongside the major western directors of the Fifties like Mann, Boetticher and Daves, but he was a western specialist for the most part -- his best-known work is most likely the Audie Murphy-as-himself biopic To Hell and Back -- before becoming a TV director in the Sixties. The cast interested me more than the director. John Payne has fresh credibility as a tough-guy star with the rediscovery of Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, while Dan Duryea needs no introduction as a reliable villain. At his side is Lee Van Cleef in one of his more substantial early roles. The story, for which two writers share credit while Borden Chase did some doctoring, is a fairly typical town-tamer affair given a little extra grit by Payne. He plays Jeff Harder, an underachieving Army sergeant with a habit of starting brawls in saloons -- he doesn't like cheating. After getting his ass kicked in one such brawl, he's given a choice between the guardhouse and a mission to expedite railroad construction in Laramie WY. Widespread malingering has slowed progress and local business interests are complicit in it -- they don't want the workers and their regular paychecks to leave town. Among these businessmen is Jim Shanessy (Duryea), the archetypal corrupt saloonkeeper, who happens also to be an old crony of Harder's. Their friendly reunion is short-lived, however, once Harder realizes that Shanessy is the power behind the construction slowdowns. He also happens to resent the Harder gang's attempts to bribe him, and he doesn't like Ace, Shanessy's enforcer (Van Cleef)  on general principles.

After inspecting the construction site and beating workgang leader Pike Murphy (Charles Horvath) into temporary submission, Harder realizes that only drastic steps will restore discipline and get the rails laid on schedule. Authorized by the army to take any steps necessary, he goes over the head of Graham (Barton McLane), the men's actual employer, and fires the entire construction gang, allowing them to return to work only on his terms. This move scandalizes the town fathers, since no income for the workers means no sales for them. At a public meeting they urge Harder to rescind his order. He doesn't back down, telling them, "I don't think there's an honest businessman in this town." Here's another instance in which westerns seemed to subtly challenge entrepreneurial values. It isn't the first time I've seen a Fifties western in which town fathers hinder a hero's town-taming because they like the untamed folks's money as much as anyone else's. If these films aren't challenging entrepreneurship itself, they do suggest that there are higher values than making money, and that civilization wouldn't get very far if people cared only for profit. Harder chides Shanessy at one point, noting that with his brains he could get rich honestly. "Not as rich and not as fast" is Shanessy's answer. More than many contemporary westerns, Rails hails women as a civilizing force. Taking advantage of Wyoming history -- the territory was the first to grant considerable civil equality to women, Harder tries to secure Shanessy's conviction on a murder charge -- he'd had Ace kill Harder's deputy -- by seating an all-female jury in a criminal trial for the first time in American history. Before this, the town's all-male juries had routinely acquitted Shanessy's men. It looks like the deck is still stacked against Harder when one of the jurors is Lou Carter (Mari Blanchard), Shanessy's partner in his saloon. It seems unlikely that someone with such a conflict of interests would be allowed on the jury, but she surprises everyone by voting to convict Shanessy. If anything, the film is too quick to have her emphasize that she did this for sound legal and moral reasons, and not to take over the saloon. By now she's become Harder's love interest so I guess she has to be a good girl.

Being a town western, Rails lacks the sweep of many of the decade's best westerns. Hibbs's focus is on personal confrontations, and he invests the several showdowns of Payne and Van Cleef with a decent crackle of hostile energy. The biggest spectacle in the film is its use of trains. Shanessy's men jump Harder and dump him on an outbound train so he can't testify at the trial; when Harder comes to, he orders the engineer to back the train all the way to Laramie. Later, Harder and Shanessy fight on a train on a collision course with another engine on the same track; once again the train goes backwards to get out of harm's way while the other train brakes. There's no real revelation here, though Payne readily projects a take-no-crap attitude and Van Cleef shows his promise. Duryea is relatively uninspired in a too-generic villain role, neither too crazy nor too torn over his failing friendship with the hero. Rails Into Laramie goes in a few interesting directions but never quite escapes a tolerable mediocrity. Tolerable counts for something, though, and there's enough going on in the picture that western fans won't think their time wasted.

MOOLAADE (2004)

It's been a long time since I saw an African film, and as I try to catch up with the late decade in order to compose a Top 25 for the Wonders in the Dark poll I thought I should check out the final movie by Sembene Ousmane, the Senegalese auteur generally hailed as the father of the African feature film. This valedictory effort got a lot of positive attention in the art house community when it reached America because Sembene was tackling the subject of female genital mutilation and taking the understandably progressive view that it's a bad thing. He was bound to be cheered for his message alone, but how was Moolaade as cinema?

Sembene's main character, Colle, is the middle wife of a middling villager. Like most women, she underwent the Purification as tradition dictates, but it didn't go well. The botched ritual operation by the Salimbana made pregnancies difficult for Colle, who lost two babies before a daughter was saved by caesarian section. That daughter, now a teenager, is a Bilakoro. Never having been cut, she's considered unfit to be a bride. Because Colle got away with sparing her daughter the ordeal, a group of four girls seek her protection when their cutting time comes. She grants them "Protection" by invoking the Moolaade tradition. Whoever crosses the sacred thread to seize the girls will be cursed. The great irony of the film is that Colle's traditionalist enemies are kept at bay by tradition, even while they try to stomp out other incursions of modernity.

They cut girls terribly young in Moolaade's African village, but not if Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly) can help it.

The village has an ambivalent relationship to the modern world. Their main daily link is the local merchant, Mercenaire, who seems to make most of his money from batteries and day-old bread from the big city. The batteries run radios and the radios play modern music and commentaries that challenge local traditions. The elders will blame radios for subverting their authority and confiscate them from their wives, building a mound destined to become a bonfire of vanities. Mercenaire himself has seen the wider world; he was a UN peacekeeper who was busted for exposing corruption among his superiors, or so he says. We learn later that he's ripping off the villagers, overcharging them for the bread and probably for other stuff. On the other hand, he clearly disapproves of how the elders (including the female Salimbana) try to break Colle's will, and he's the one who finally steps up to defend her when her husband publicly whips her (albeit goaded himself by his cousin) in an attempt to force her to say the word that will revoke the Moolaade. He pays a dire price for interfering. But while Mercenaire is scapegoated as a representative of subversive modernity, the village is really very dependent on the chief's son Ibrahima, who brings home the big bucks by working in France. Among the things he brings home on his latest visit (when Colle's daughter hopes he'll marry her) is a TV set. Ibrahima is quite westernized, switching back and forth from native to European dress and recognizing Mercenaire's literary references. You expect him to become the hero of the picture, but Mercenaire beats him to the punch, and his own conflict with his father sometimes looks like that of a spoiled brat with a petty tyrant bickering (literally) over TV privileges. It's not until a critical mass of village women take Colle's side after another botched Purification that Ibrahima takes a decisive stand that seems to assure a happy ending.

Moolaade is mainly about female empowerment and it has a bit of an agitprop quality to it. I have to admit that the genital-mutilation question is pretty one-sided one for most American observers, but I can't help feeling that making that the battleground between tradition and modernity kind of stacks the deck in favor of the latter. I'm not saying that I'd be receptive to the case against modernity (what would that be anyway? Powaqqatsi?), but I think a deeper film would give that case more of a fair hearing than Sembene did this time out. I'd also concede that there are times and places when Sembene's approach is the appropriate, even necessary one.

Watching the film in cinematic-tourist mode, I was dazzled by Moolaade's artistry. Its village setting (in Burkina Faso) at first seems so abstract to the western eye, what with its eccentric mosque and Gaudi-like giant anthill, that it looks like a Tim Burton set. In time it takes on a lived-in quality and its strangeness doesn't stick out as much, but Sembene still exploits the architecture for starkly powerful effect. The defining shots of the film may be those that juxtapose three rival monuments: the mosque, the anthill (said to house the spirit of a defeated king) and the growing pile (later pyre) of radios -- some of which the elders don't even bother turning off. Sembene and cinematographer Dominique Gentil also have a strong shared eye for color in landcape and costume; this film is always great to look at. The actors are constrained by their good guy/bad guy assignments. Fatoumata Coulibaly is appropriately stalwart as Colle, but Dominique Zeida nearly steals the film, in my eyes, as Mercenaire, the most complex character.

I suspect my mild reservations about Moolaade's agitprop qualities won't trouble most people who give it a try. It's a strong crowd-pleasing story that should have any viewer on its side from the start and a good indicator of what African cinema can do. If someone wants to try a film from the continent, I'd have no problem recommending this one.

The English-language trailer was uploaded to YouTube by k364: