By John Exshaw
Being
reports of certain events which would have appeared earlier, had fate and the
need to earn a buck not intervened.
Western Season
Irish Film Institute,
24-28 August 2011
Waiting
at the station for the 3:10 to Tara Street, I was feeling good – deep down
good, the way a man can feel when he’s got a bunch of Westerns to watch and a
passel of press passes in his pocket. Leaving the Iron Horse at Westland Row, I
cut across Grafton Street (no sign of them pesky Rykers) and on down to the
Irish Film Institute, where they were about to let rip with a four-day,
eight-film season called ‘The Western: Meanwhile Back at the Revolution ... The
Western As Political Allegory’. Well, I reckoned they could use all them fancy
five-dollar words and dress it up whatever they damn well liked, long as it
meant seeing some real Westerns on the big screen. As Randy Scott would’ve
said, “There’s some things a man can’t ride around—but Cowboys & Aliens ain’t one of them.†Ride clear of Diablo,
hell, ride clear of dumb CGI special effects movies is more like it . . .
Anyhow,
I figured not only was this a chance to see some Westerns the way they were
meant to be seen but also an opportunity to have my say on films which wouldn’t
normally fit into the Cinema Retro
corral, being as they were made before 1960. Not that this is either the time
or the place for what you might call in-depth chin-stroking and
head-scratching—more like a chance to throw out some thoughts and see where they
go.
First
up, perhaps predictably enough, was High
Noon (1952), described in the programme notes by season curator Declan
Clarke as “a commentary on the McCarthy witch-hunt and the failure of U.S.
intellectuals to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee.†This,
of course, has become pretty much the standard interpretation of High Noon but it would be interesting to
know to what extent it was perceived that way on its initial release; the
British critic Robin Wood has recalled that he was completely unaware of any
political subtext when he first saw the film, and it seems rather doubtful that
many citizens of Main Street, U.S.A., came out of their local cinemas saying,
“Gee, honey, that sure was one in the eye for Joe McCarthy!â€
Although,
generally speaking, I prefer to see something of the West in my Westerns (even
if it’s AlmerÃa, west of Rome), High Noon
remains one of the best “town Westerns†ever made, notable as much for its
characterisation as for its celebrated manipulation of real time to build
suspense. In particular, one is struck by the refreshingly adult depiction of
Helen RamÃrez (Katy Jurado), a “woman with a past†who is required neither to
apologise for that past nor to expiate her supposed sins by catching one of
those stray “moral†bullets which usually account for such characters (e.g.,
Linda Darnell’s Chihuahua in Ford’s My
Darling Clementine, 1946). Other details I’d forgotten include the church
scene in which Thomas Mitchell appears to be lending his support to Marshal Kane
only to end up giving him the shaft, Howland Chamberlin’s nasty-minded hotel
clerk, and Harry Morgan urging his wife to tell Kane that he’s not in, that
he’s gone to church.