Read an Excerpt
Ride, Boldly Ride
The Evolution of the American Western
By Mary Lea Bandy, Kevin Stoehr UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Mary Lea Bandy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95347-5
CHAPTER 1
Diverse Perspectives in Silent Westerns
Landscape, Morality, and the Native American
The movie "oater" was born during the last decade of the nineteenth century, as the world of cinema was first emerging and around the time that the American West was closing its final frontiers. In the decades between the Civil War and World War I, by which time the territories of Arizona and New Mexico had been granted statehood, the nation could savor a nostalgia for a fading frontier while hearing news of the actual dangers of its concluding scenes. One could traverse the continent on the Southern Pacific in the 1880s, riding through territory not far from where the escaped Apache leader Geronimo was holed up in the Chiricahua Mountains. Or one could read of daring journeys, thanks to the new publication venture of inexpensive paperbacks known as dime novels, which had appeared as early as the 1860s in a series brought out by Erastus Beadle, appealing to a mass audience eager to enjoy adventures of outlaws and cowboys. Edward Judson, who wrote under the pen name Ned Buntline, was the best-known dime novelist. On the stage, a national celebration of the taming of the wilderness was initiated in the 1880s, in typical American style, as a form of highly successful commercial exploitation by some of those who had played key roles at historic moments. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, a former chief scout for the U.S. Cavalry, famously launched the story of the Wild West as a form of live spectacle that included representations of Custer's Last Stand and appearances by Sitting Bull.
Live spectacle soon became filmed spectacle. American history and the American cinema were inevitably fused, especially when it came to depictions of the post–Civil War Old West. Among early film documentaries were Edison's 1894 recordings of reenacted scenes from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, including quick glimpses of a Native American buffalo dance, a sharpshooting demonstration by Annie Oakley, and in the case of Bucking Broncho, a cowboy's horse-riding demonstration before a group of entertained spectators. In 1902 the popularity of the Western surged with a novel about a lonesome cowboy, The Virginian, by Owen Wister. It became an instant best seller, and this was followed in 1903 by Edwin S. Porter's movie The Great Train Robbery. Shot at Edison's New York studio and in New Jersey along the Lackawanna Railway, the eleven-minute-film created an illusion of reality. A violent robbery takes place aboard a seemingly moving train, an effect created by intercutting studio shots with matte shots of the passing landscape, the exteriors of the moving train, and later the escape and chase of the robbers. The shot of a gunman firing directly at the audience, the bright colors tinting the puffs of gun smoke, and the strongbox's explosion all added to the film's broad appeal.
The year 1904 witnessed the release of Biograph's Cowboy Justice, along with Edison shorts such as Brush between Cowboys and Indians, Western Stage Coach Hold Up, and The Little Train Robbery, a follow-up parody of the film company's earlier success. These early silent productions contained many of the elements that would be repeated throughout Western movies for decades to come: bold adventure, broad humor, impressive horse riding, outdoor-location shooting, and violent conflicts. By 1909, the genre had come to dominate the American film market, and Western films were being produced in great numbers to satisfy public demand. In his informative book Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood, Andrew Brodie Smith details the process by which early Western movie production in the silent era helped to establish cinema's white male hero, contributed strongly to the development of the American film industry, and led to the founding of that industry's future "headquarters" in Los Angeles.
With increasing advances in film technology came new creative possibilities in depicting more complex storylines. Movie companies such as Biograph, Pathé, Essanay, Kalem, Bison, and Selig produced many of the genre's pioneering one-reelers and multireelers in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The best of these motion pictures, and most especially those made by D.W. Griffith for Biograph between 1908 and 1913, helped to establish the Western film as a specific form of visual and narrative art, at least for those who could see beyond the "mere" value of these films as recurring vehicles of public entertainment. Griffith regularly utilized cinematic techniques—such as dramatic camera angles and crosscutting between parallel scenes for purposes of suspense-building—that helped to advance the new art form.
Griffith's early Westerns, made between 1908 and 1909, were shot chiefly in New York and New Jersey and used the wooded river and lake country of the East Coast as a substitute for Western landscapes. The lush eastern countryside offered serene settings, in which the Native American is presented positively and not merely as some antagonistic "savage." As Scott Simmon has suggested in his book The Invention of the Western Film, the idyllic presentation of the landscape in these films echoes an appreciation of the Native Americans, who were connected more intimately to the natural world than the white settlers were. The presentation of a tranquil landscape echoes symbolically the idea of a general "natural harmony" that exists (or should exist) between humans and nature, as well as between various human beings, whether "red" or "white."
The Biograph Company produced enough early movies about Native American life that their own promotional reviews and plot summaries, called Biograph Bulletins, began to refer to the narrative subject matter as a well-established category of film. The bulletin for Griffith's "East Coast Western" The Mended Lute (1909) leads off with the following statement: "Moving Picture Stories based on the life and customs of the American aboriginals have ever been attractive, and we conscientiously doubt if there has ever been a more intensely interesting subject matter presented than this Biograph production." The bulletin for Griffith's The Redman's View (1909) begins with this declaration: "The subject of the Redman's persecution has been so often the theme of story that it would appear an extreme exposition of egotism to say that this production is unique and novel, but such is the case, for there was never before presented a more beautiful depiction of the trials of the early Indians than this."
The Mended Lute focuses on the rituals and values of Native American life, with its plot centered on the rivalry between Standing Rock and Little Bear for the hand of Rising Moon. Standing Rock, Rising Moon's "rich" suitor, is favored by her father because of his potential dowry. The film ends with a ritual test of courage involving torture, in which Standing Rock binds Little Bear and slices his chest with a knife. Little Bear passes the test and earns the respect of Standing Rock, allowing Little Bear and Rising Moon to run off to a "land of happiness" (as the final title card reads). There is also effective use made of the natural landscape, particularly the impressive shots of canoes gliding down streams and rivers. The movie, subtitled A Stirring Romance of the Dakotas, was deemed a "master-piece" by the Biograph Bulletin, which also called the film a "combination of poetical romance and dramatic intensity."
Griffith's The Redman's View shows a similar though predictably limited appreciation of indigenous life, expressed primitively by the very title of the movie. Here we are introduced to a young Indian couple in love, but when the white men (called "the Conquerors" in the title card) invade their lives, the young man is forced to make a choice between, on the one hand, staying with his beloved and protecting her and, on the other, caring for his father on their long trek after they have been banished from their home by the whites. Eventually the father dies and his body is placed on a pyre in ritual fashion. The young man returns to reclaim his girl from the white men who had taken her captive. Here the white men, not the "Injuns," are the disruptive savages.
The Redman's View expresses a tension between the initially idyllic, seemingly authentic view of native life and the subsequent threats against that life in the form of white civilization. As Armando José Prats observes in his book Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western, it would appear that Griffith offers us an explicit contrast between two perspectives, each of which seems to possess its own independent integrity and historical truth: the opening scenes of Indian life, soon followed by a depiction of that existence as endangered and embattled by another culture. In reality, according to Prats, both views are actually subsumed under the "myth of conquest," so that any appearance of a distinct portrait and honest appreciation of the Native Americans, even by way of contrast, is mere illusion. As he tells us in reference to Griffith's film and its opening sequence:
When The Redman's View produces its first shot of the conquerors, it transforms the significance of the opening scenes (the Indian idyll) to produce something like Parkman's image of an unsuspecting culture about to be crushed by empire's relentless march. Thus "the red man's view" designates not a scene from a culturally independent way of life but a dialectical response to history's intrusion in the ahistorical scene. The camera, it turns out, though it witnessed the opening idyll, never gave us the Indian's "view" but rather the view of the Indian, and its presence in the village initiated the dialectical process whereby Conquest could be introduced only so that it might be thereafter condemned.
The "redman's view" in the film's opening sequences is, in other words, defined by the overall narrative and its implicit ideology, one typical of the Western genre and its underlying mythos. The Indians, even when shown in their native setting before any signs of conflict arise, are inevitably the waiting victims of American expansionism and must confront enemies who are the necessary vehicles of Manifest Destiny. Any such perspective that pretends to depict native existence apart from the story of their gradual conquest is a false or at least derivative viewpoint, according to Prats's interpretation. And so the depiction of the Native American in certain scenes of these early silent films, especially those made by Griffith in his East Coast productions, is ultimately anti-idyllic in its overall framing of a people on the verge of conflict and eventual genocide—particularly in light of our retrospective historical knowledge and, of course, given the unfolding of the overall narrative.
The plots of some of Griffith's early silent Westerns present the relationship between the white man and the Native American in terms of this kind of tension and so with a degree of moral ambivalence. To take another example, in The Broken Doll (1910), the whites are presented as both kind and cruel to the natives, though in very different contexts. On the one hand, a white girl, at the suggestion of her mother, gives her beloved doll to a young Indian child who admires it, and the two girls hug and kiss. On the other hand, a small group of Indian men visits town, and one of them accidentally bumps into a drunken white man who has just stood up after sitting in front of the saloon. The white man shoots him dead on the main street, and the Indian's shocked friends bring his corpse back to their village of tents. Subsequently, they go on the warpath to avenge the man's unjust death. Meanwhile, the chief discovers his daughter's new doll and throws it away. The daughter runs to get the doll, finds its head broken off, and decides to give the doll a proper burial. She subsequently becomes aware of the impending attack by her tribe and runs off to warn her new friend and her family. The Indians travel to town to wage destruction, while the white girl's father goes to town ahead of them and warns the townspeople of the impending "invasion." They manage to scare off the Indians, later praising the young Indian girl for her warning once they have learned of her action. But when the white men fire on the attackers, the girl is accidentally shot. She tries to stumble back home, but in a tragic and sympathetic ending, she dies near the doll that she had previously "put to rest."
This type of ambivalence in presenting the white man's relationship with the Native American is echoed in later multireel silent Westerns such as The Invaders (1912) and The Covered Wagon (1923). The former movie, produced by Thomas Ince, is a three-reel film that uses genuine Native American actors, a casting idea that was too seldom revisited in later Hollywood Westerns. The film depicts the battle between the United States Cavalry on one side and Sioux and Cheyenne warriors on the other, devoting substantial attention to details about the everyday lives of the Indians and not solely focusing on action fights or glimpses of cavalry existence. Francis Ford, older brother of director John Ford and a pioneering filmmaker in his own right, portrays the leading officer of the cavalry. It is more than probable that Ford, as with other Ince productions in which he acted, took a hand in the directing of the movie under Ince's supervision.
In the opening scene of The Invaders, Ford's character oversees the signing of a peace treaty between the government and the Sioux. The treaty expectedly turns out to be a temporary agreement of convenience for the expansionist whites, especially considering their plans to extend the railroad through the Indian territories, land that is supposed to remain off limits by virtue of the treaty. The initial scene presents a peaceful gathering of former enemies, a gathering that ends with an apparently happy handshake. And given the fact that the film presents the perspective of the Native American, focuses sympathetically on the heroic daughter of the Sioux chief and her love for a white man, and emphasizes the violent consequences of the railroad surveyors' treaty-breaking, the viewer is led to realize that it is the white "conquerors," not the "noble savages," who are the invaders of the film's title.
Both sides of the conflict between red and white, even if subsumed by the wider myth of conquest, are also considered in James Cruze's The Covered Wagon (1923). This movie was wildly popular, making possible John Ford's production of his saga about building the transcontinental railroad, The Iron Horse, a year later, since it was now demonstrated that an historical epic about the labors and trials of American expansionism could win over audiences. Cruze's film ambitiously reconstructs the experience of a great migration of pioneers from the Missouri River to Oregon and anticipates later wagon train movies like Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) and Ford's Wagon Master (1950). Driving the story is the conflict between the settlers and the gold-seekers, for this tale is set in 1848, when gold was discovered in California. The travelers are split between their greed for land—in their Jeffersonian aim to establish an agriculturally self-sustaining territory—and their greed for the gold that would enable the creation of a potential urban environment based on trade and industry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ride, Boldly Ride by Mary Lea Bandy, Kevin Stoehr. Copyright © 2012 Mary Lea Bandy. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
