Friday, April 09, 2010

When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Menu

Wagon Master (1950)
directed by John Ford
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The dozen or so stray dogs following Ward Bond’s Mormon wagon train west typify the friendly, ragtag nature of both the narrative and the production. I don’t think I’m used to seeing cold openings in westerns from 1950, but Wagon Master begins with the execution of a bank clerk by a gang of closely related killers - among them “old Mose,” too wizened and affable to ever be cold-blooded. Post-credits, though, the future brightens considerably. Harry Carey, Jr. plays the usual sap, although with more of a spine and more of a brain than he was sometimes permitted, and “gentle” Ben Johnson Eagle Scouts his way into the good graces of the knockout with a heart of gold.

If there’s novelty in the idea of Mormons as heroes – or, at the very least, average Americans – it seems to me that here they’re just one more variation on the motif of Western outsiders. Like hookers, I guess Mormons have never sat well with the general public, even in 1950, but Ford gives them both a fair shake as one more incongruous band of pioneers. He shoots the Mormon women at a Navajo "squaw dance" like judges from The Passion of Joan of Arc, but increasingly, I watch westerns the way my grandfather did, happy to luxuriate in the trappings of the genre. The details, like a side of bacon pulled out of a barrel of salt and slapped upside an outlaw’s head, are perfect; I could live on that bacon, and that scene, for a month. The spirit of the picture, aside from the dogs, is in the way the characters fill their spare hours, and I've never seen any Western where so many cowboys whittled wood.