Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Moo-vie Cows: The Trail to Hollywood

Moo-vie Cows: The Trail to Hollywood "As we heard some one say, this picture is all very well if you like cows." -The New York Times review of Sundown, 1924 irst there were cattle drives and then there were cattle-drive movies. The time span between the end of the trail drives and the beginning of motion pictures was surprisingly brief: about ten years in all. As early as 1898 the essential elements to make a trail-drive film were in place. That was the year Thomas Edison produced segments of film portraying typical ranching activities. The titles indicate the subjects: Branding Cattle, CalfBranding, Cattle Leaving the Corral, Cattle Fording Stream, and Lassoing Steer. All that was needed to make a narrative film of these segments is a commanding leader, some cowpokes, including a garrulous cook, a hothead , and a green kid, and maybe toss in a fragile beauty who has a slightly tarnished past, a couple of stampedes, a soup<;on of water 213 Giant Country 214 moccasins (for the Cattle Fording Stream scene), and you've got a Trail Drive Epic. You've got, in fact, Lonesome Dove. A mere five years after the Edison documentary footage, the first successful narrative film, The Great Train Robbery, appeared, making the western the first popular genre of the nascent art fonn. That same year (1903), Andy Adams published The Log of a Cowboy, his classic account of trailing cattle from Texas to Montana, but it would be a while yet before a big cattle-drive film would be made. For one thing, there were as yet no exciting narratives of the cattle-drive era. The Log ofa Cowboy was too authentic to offer much in the way of cinematic whoop-ti-do. Adams hewed hard to factual authenticity and refused to inject romance and shoot-'em-up elements to spice up the story. He scoffed at the suggestion that he add a female to his list of characters , and without a lithesome young thing along for the ride, there wasn't going to be any romance. Zane Grey, who always used sex to spice up his plots, didn't get around to writing a cattle-drive novel until 1936. Instead, it was another writer, Emerson Hough, not much remembered today, who breathed life into the cattle-drive narrative and gave it epic proportions. The novel was North of 36, published in 1923. It was an epic sequel to his big-canvas novel of the Oregon Trail, The Covered Wagon, which had itself been made into a significant popular and critical movie that same year. North of 36, released in 1924, was shot on location on a ranch thirty miles from Houston and in many frames carries a very authentic flavor. In one shot, for instance, the cattle are being driven through a shallow dry arroyo and in the background are trees with Spanish moss, something you don't see in those 'Texas" films shot in Arizona where you do see a lot of saguaro cactus, those great tall crooked-cross-like cacti that do not in fact grow in Texas. The other authentic element of North of 36 is the cattle themselves, the five thousand longhorns that were used in the making of the film. J. Frank Dobie, no admirer of shoot-'em-ups, liked the realistic manner in which cattle were handled in this film, as he wrote in Cow People: "Often in recollection I see the lead steer, Old Alamo, a mighty long- Moo-vie Cows horn, dun in color, standing at the edge of a lake where the other steers were standing, watering. They looked serene, as cattle at water naturally are. Those in the picture had been furnished by Bassett Blakeley from herds on the prairies of the Gulf Coast in the region of Houston. To be sure, there was a stampede, but the picture furnished views of the herd quietly grazing along and strung out in a long line behind Old Alamo." Apart from location and bovine authenticity, North of 36 introduced themes that would reappear in most cattle-drive movie epics. One was the presence of a woman, a heroine, on the long drive-that figure spurned by Adams. The film works hard to make the willowy young beauty, Taisie Lockhart, integral to the plot. Miss Taisie loses her father to a Yankee carpetbagger's cowardly bullet, leaving her with a ranch, thousands of cattle, but no money, not a cent. She's so broke she can't pay the ranch hands-the year is 1867, the era, Reconstruction Texas-but the cowpokes admire her so much they're willing to work for nothing, willing to risk everything on a trail drive north to railheads in Kansas, north of the 36th parallel. So Taisie puts on her best trail-driving outfit, saddles up her pinto pony, and with an old geezer sidekick and a band of loyal cowboys, sets out to find new markets for Texas beef. The unmarked prairie trail is long and filled with danger; it's clear from early in the film that she's going to need the gunfighterly skiIls of a taIl, dark, handsome hero to help her and the herd out of various jams. But she misunderstands the hero's intentions, and so for most of the drive he has to provide help sort of in absentia, operating on the fringes, doing what he can to erase difficulties and obstacles. The biggest obstacle is the state treasurer of Texas, a Yankee carpetbagger appointed by an unforgiving Yankee government, and the very same man, it turns out, who murdered Taisie's father. He wants her ranch and wiIl stoop to anything to accomplish his nefarious ends. Pardon the melodramatic language, but with fat oily villains who wear black suits and smoke big cigars, you find yourself falling back on adjectives like nefarious to describe them. This villain is so despicable that in a sub-plot, he comes upon two Comanche women bathing nude in a stream (they 215 Giant Country 216 really are nude: the silents took a sort of National Geographic view of undressed native women), and he rapes one of them. The title for this sequence is "Virgin Wilderness." Later at film's end, after the cattle have been safely escorted to Kansas and the hero and heroine are properly squared away, the villain is turned over to the Comanches, who promptly make fajitas out of him. The grand intentions of North of 36 at the thematic level are what make it the archetype of all subsequent cattle-drive epics. North of 36 wants nothing less than to make its story-the taking of cattle to market-the saga of a nation's destiny being made manifest by means of a sizeable achievement that has its origins in both economic need and ideological necessity. Among the prologue titles to North of 36 was a quotation from historian Phillip Aston Rollins that might have explained every cattle-drive movie: ''The Texas Trail was no mere cowpath. It was the course of Empire." According to standard southern interpretations of the Reconstruction era, carpetbaggers came south after the war to plunder a ravaged and defeated nation. In Texas, people had no money, they only had land or cattle, neither of which was worth anything. The solution lay in new economic opportunities: cattle could be driven to railheads in Missouri and Kansas, to Indian reservations in Nebraska and Montana. Cattle drives, so the myth went, redeemed Texas from a bankrupt economy, allowed its citizens to believe and take part in an epic enterprise, contributed to the economic well-being and health of the rest of the country, and made money for cattlemen. After overcoming the standard number of obstacles, including a grass fire, crossing a river, stampedes, attacks from Comanches and outlaws, Taisie and her cowboys, with the help of the two-gun hero, Dan McMasters, reach Abilene, Kansas, and deliver the first herd to that emerging boom town, driving the wild cattle down the middle of the street. The epic drive accomplishes exactly what the young hero foresaw: ''The North and the South are going to build a new world above the old slavery line! It will be the West-the heart of America." Reviewers to the contrary (they didn't like this Hough- Moo-vie Cows based film as much as they had The Covered Wagon), North oj 36 was truly a pioneering movie. It wasn't the only cattle-drive movie of 1924, however. That same year there appeared a film called Sundown that, though lost today, seems to have been a notable effort to capture the majesty of the trail-drive enterprise. Filmed on location near EI Paso, Sundown contains some of the best landscape shots from a time when there was still a great deal of empty country available to a discerning cameraman . One still photograph is simply remarkable: a herd of cattle is stretched across the plains in a kind of leisurely line, issuing out of nowhere and headed to some remote destination. There are no cowboys in the picture, no barbed wire, no 7-11, no mobile homes, nothing but land, sky, and cattle. Regardless of its superlative visual elements, Sundown apparently suffered from the same plot problems as North oj 36. The New York Times reviewer put it succinctly: "But as soon as one gets back to the story in this production it becomes unusually boring." The reviewer did enjoy, however, the "impressive scenes of thousands and thousands of cattle which are photographed from the mountains and from the plain leve1." He also liked other scenes of the cattle (much as Dobie did in his remarks on North oj 36): "It is interesting and satisfying to see the steers and cows plunging into the river and enjoying the water." When the talkies came along, the cattle-drive film followed-now audiences could hear the cattle lowing and the cowboys singing. North oj 36 was remade twice in the 1930s, as The Conquering Horde in 1931, and as The Texans in 1938. The Texans had a solid cast (Randolph Scott in the lead, with Walter Brennan as the crusty sidekick, a role he would reprise beautifully in Red River), and it had location-shooting -at a ranch near Cotulla, in South Texas-but neither element was strong enough to overcome other problems. The Texans rode the Reconstruction myth hard and added a racist dimension missing from North oj 36. Said the prologue: 'The South was ruled as a conquered enemy. Northern politicians wallowed in an orgy of power--of 217 Giant Country 218 plunder by organized mobs--of tribute and tyranny and death." In one early scene drunken black soldiers bully defeated Confederate veterans, while white straw bosses make Anglo Texans perform "nig_ ger work" unloading cargo at Indianola, a port on the Gulf Coast. After this sensationalized historical frame, the film goes on to tell the familiar story of Texas frontier enterprise overcoming the oppressive policies of northern Reconstruction rule by forging a new market for Texas beef. Contemporary reviewers gave The Texans a failing grade on two counts: history and form. Philip Hartung in Commonweal called the film "sugar-coated History" and felt that the Reconstruction period in Texas "deserves better treatment," something, incidentally, that could be said of virtually every western ever made about the state. Frank S. Nugent in The New York Times criticized the movie's pretensions: 'Theoretically it's 'epic,' that convenient Hollywood word for any Class A picture filmed on location, but practically it is just another romance." But give J. Frank Dobie the last word on The Texans. As he reports in Cow People he happened to be in Los Angeles at the time the film was released: "I saw a sign announcing it, 'now running.' I bought a ticket and went inside. I wanted to see the A and Bbrands on La Mota cattle. I wanted to be back home. I looked and listened through the entire film. The only glimpses of the cattle I got was while they were running like scared jack rabbits. I tried another cattle picture or two. Had I not known better, I might have concluded that a herd bound for the Blackfoot Indian Agency on the CanadianMontana line crossed the Rio Grande in a run, slept in a run, grazed in a run, drank in a turmoil, and never quit running over the entire two-thousand-mile trail." Between The Texans and Red River, a decade of westerns used cattle -drive sequences as a constant ideological reference point. A standard opening scene showed cowboys leisurely riding along accompanying a vast herd spread across the terrain. In such de rigeur cattledrive sequences, the ideology was always the same: this was America's epic moment, the creation of its historical and commercial destiny, the act of empire. Moo-vie Cows During the late thirties and forties empire was not a word that embarrassed Americans; in fact the country liked the idea, in this "American century," of being reminded of its grand designs. But even so, there were dissident strains apparent in films ostensibly endorsing the concept of empire building. In a 1942 film called, inevitably, American Empire, the idea of empire was perfectly acceptable, but the trouble with building an empire was the effect upon the builder. As long as the enterprise was linked with national aims, it was laudable. In American Empire, the original intention is noble. A verdant valley encircled with mountains and teeming with cattle provides the "biggest job in the U.S." That the valley and mountains are located along the Sabine River in East Texas is something that would bother only people who know what Texas east of 1-35 looks like-wooded flat farmland giving way to piney woods and lakes and marshes along the Sabine. In any case, the prime motive for marketing prime beef in this film is spelled out as part of a national agenda. "We must get beef to all parts of the US, North and South," says one of the men who claim the land, found the ranch, and trail the herds north to Kansas. The noble purpose soon changes to selfishness and greed, however , which undermines the larger social vision. One of the two ranchers begins to translate their success into personal despotic terms and refuses to cooperate with neighboring ranchers who need to send their herds across his land to reach market. He orders barbed wire to close off his lands and refuses to grant the railroad the rightof -way it needs. Such anti-social and anti-progressive actions represent the opposite of the pragmatic optimism that launched the original venture. Eventually the bad rancher sees the error of his ways: he builds gates in his fences for his neighbors to use and he accepts the coming of the railroad. The cattleman must give way before the inexorable march of progress. Although in no sense a memorable movie, American Empire is instructive in its themes and its forecast of the end of the open-range cattleman. In 1948, with Red River, the cattle-drive movie achieved its apotheosis . Red River could easily have been called American Empire since it 219 Giant Country 220 too traces the imperatives and consequences of empire-building. Red River utilized more successfully than any of its predecessors the drama of the cattle drive to stand for the American epic experience. It opens with a historical scroll, a sure sign that something significant is afoot, then moves swiftly into the primal act of Tom Dunson's seizing the land and holding it. His purpose, announced in Dunson's own words, is to grow beef for America. But the way he says it indicates a potential problem. In a rhapsodic peroration, the egotism of possession is apparent: "Wherever they go, they'll be on my land. My land! I'll have the brand on enough beef to ... feed the whole .. . country. Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make 'em strong .. . make 'em grow." After the building up of his bumper-sticker empire ("Good Beef for Hungry People"), Dunson-John Wayne-is thwarted by the Civil War and its attendant post-war crisis: in Reconstruction Texas, Dunson owns plenty of land and cattle but he has no money, no currency . A pioneer, a builder, Dunson doesn't understand money or the new economic forces in the postwar world. All he knows is that he must get his cattle to market in Sedalia, Missouri. But even this is wrong and backward-looking, because the real future is in Abilene, Kansas, where the railroad has already established a beachhead on the twentieth century. Too fearful, Dunson lacks the necessary confidence to trust in an unseen future. His adopted son, Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), has to wrest control of the herd from the tyrant Dunson in order to lead the Texas cattle industry-and cattlemen -into the modern era. Dunson's empire was feudal in conception , hardly different from that of the previous Mexican grandees from whom he took the land by force. Garth's method involves cooperation, teamwork, and good faith in society and its citizens. Garth offers a benign corporate model; Dunson, a rugged individualist one. But rugged individualism is no longer enough; in Red River as in American Empire, it leads to tyranny and cruelty. Red River is deeply indebted to North of 36. Tom Dunson, the economically desperate rancher, is a male version of Taisie Lockhart; and Moo-vie Cows Old Groot (Walter Brennan), Dunson's cook and conscience, recalls Taisie's faithful comic foreman. The arrival in Abilene, with the cattle flooding into the overjoyed and surprised town, is strikingly similar , too. But the chief advance of Red River over its forerunner is to replace the external melodramatic Reconstruction villain with interior psychological obstacles. Dunson himself becomes the vilIain. His ruthless commitment to empire leads him to ignore the claims of others; he hardens himself and cuts himself off from common humanity. Fortunately his "son" is strong enough to bring him back into the human fold. You will notice that throughout these comments I have accepted unquestioningly that the Red River of the title designates the actual river that separates Texas from Oklahoma. This is how all the actors in the film regard the River as weIl. After all, they have to cross it; for them and for the real cattle drivers of history, the Red River was there, an indisputable geographical fact. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across Jane Tompkins' discussion of the film in her book West oj Everything: The Inner Life oj Westerns (1992). To Tompkins "Red River" refers to something else entirely. To her it stands for the blood of the slaughtered animals. That Tompkins is a self-admitted vegetarian may account for her reading of "red" as blood, first the blood of slain Mexicans and Indians, of Dunson's cowboys and of his sweetheart , but most of all, she says, red "stands for the cattle." In this kind of criticism the floating signifier of semiological criticism falls into the Grand Canyon of indeterminancy-thirteen ways of looking at a longhorn. Although Tompkins also hints at some sexual implications of the text, pointing out that Dunson's sidekick Groot's first name is Nadine-an unusual name for a male, surely-she does not pursue these implications. Allow me to do so. If "red" can refer to the cattle's blood, why can't it refer to menstrual blood? Hear me out on this. At the film's beginning Dunson, the male principle, abandons his sweetheart , named Fen. A fen, of course, is a bog-wet, sodden land. Fen doesn't want him to leave. She says she has "knives in her knees," 221 Giant Country 222 obviously a displacement of pain from menstrual cramps. He leaves her on the Oklahoma side of Red River; Oklahoma with its soft, lilting vowelization, is obviously a feminized and softened sign, while Texas is: Tex As-Land of Possibility, or Tex Is-Land of Macho Assertion. With Fen gone (now she probably has arrows in her chest), Dunson has no counterbalancing female principle. Not, that is, until the curiously androgynous boy, Matthew Garth, shows up with a cow to complement Dunson's bull. The symbolism here is pretty direct, but what do we make of the fact that one of the other gunfighters is named Cherry Oohn Ireland) and admires Matthew's "gun" and wants to see it? Or that Cherry is actually a womanizer and Matthew is virginal? Once on the trail, Dunson's patriarchal nature takes over; he becomes a relentless and obsessive trail-boss bent only on achieving his goal. In the process he alienates himself from his feminized son, whose own masculinity is much softer, more pliable than Dunson's. But once again the dynamics of gender takes over, and a "soiled dove" named Tess Millay Ooanne Dru) comes temporarily between the two male friends. Dunson looks Tess over like a prize Jersey heifer and makes her an offer to produce, as she says, a "Dunson out of Millay." Now that he has lost his "son," he needs a biological heir to his dynasty. But at the same time, this "son" is realizing his own gender and phaIlic destiny, spurred on by a very sexy scene-for the forties -when he sucks the poison from a wound in Tess' shoulder, an area just north of what Zane Grey would have described as her "swelling breasts." Thus the suppressed and denied feminine blood reenters the story in a big, dramatic fashion. So Matt and the soiled dove fall in love, but the real love story is one between the two men, and they have to transact this love through the body, as it were, of the woman who loves one, the younger, and who will bear the sons of the now thoroughly masculinized and "legitimate" heir to the Dunson fortune. In the Saturday Evening Post novel from which the script was conceived, Dunson crosses the Red River on the trip back Moo-vie Cows and dies. In the film he remains alive and reunited with his "son" at the end, thanks to the wisdom and intervention of the female principle that he has so many times repudiated in his quest for empire. Most films folIowing in Red River's wake offered nothing more than postscripts to its operatic working out of the implications of empire-building. In The Longhorn, 1951, William ElIiott played a Texas rancher with the foresight and conviction necessary to lead the Texas cattle industry into its next phase. ElIiott drives a herd of Herefords from Oregon to Texas to prove that this breed of cattle can flourish as welI as the longhorn. Then there was The Rare Breed (1966), a minimalist variation upon The Longhorn and the entire cattle -drive movie tradition. The cattle in this film consists of exactly one Hereford bulI named Vindicator! The bulI is walked down to Texas from Kansas (again reversing the historical formula) and is delivered to a ranch in the Panhandle where it will have to prove its ability to survive a hard, cold winter. Although it doesn't survive, its semen does, because before cashing in his chips, Vindicator plants his lusty seed in a longhorn cow. The purpose, of course, is to sire a new kind of bulkier, leaner beef for discriminating Yankee palates. The Rare Breed is the first low-cholesterol cattle-drive film. The most recent cattle-drive epic is, of course, Lonesome Dove, a monumental TV miniseries that has become a standard crowd-pleasing alIusion in the speeches of Texas politicians. Lonesome Dove's indebtedness to movies is most apparent in its reliance upon female companionship to spur the narrative along when sandstorms, river crossings, stampedes, and Comancheros are thought to be growing a trifle tedious and repetitious. With its constant sexual concerns regarding the favors of Lorena, often purchased at discount prices-sort of like Attention, Lonesome Dove Shoppers-this film (and book) adds a whole new dimension to the meaning of the word cowpoke. Indeed Lonesome Dove might be seen as the culmination of McMurtry's career-long effort to humanize, or should one say, in current academic lingo, to empower the gender-specific hegemony of 223 Giant Country 224 the cowboys of Dobie and a host of other Western writers who present us with cowboys as sexless as newts. I don't know how to account for either the novel's or the film's achieving hit status. I can't explain why yuppies read the novel poolside all through the summer of 1985 and are still reading it. The novel was one thing; filming it was something else altogether. The big western movie had been dead since the $40 million debacle of Heaven's Gate in 1980 and when the galleys were making the rounds of producers on the Left Coast in 1985, there were no takers. Not only that, television miniseries were thought to be fading fast. So to combine two losers-the western and the miniseries-looked like a dumb idea. Nobody optioned it until a woman producer at Motown Records, in Detroit, took a chance and bought it for a song- $50,000. The rest is show-biz history: Lonesome Dove drew rave critical reviews as well as much popular support. It finished number 14 on the all-time list of successful miniseries. Why was the TV film so popular? The quality of certain performances , those of Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones in particular, is, of course, one explanation, as is the superior adaptation by Bill Wittliff, but there must be something else at work. Harry F. Walters of Newsweek made an astute point when he called Lonesome Dove the "first buddy mini-series," seeing in the complex, well-acted relationship of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call the key emotional appeal of the film. That could be part of the basis for its popularity; certainly Red River owed much of its power to a relationship between two men (although there the interest derived from generational differences). linked with the buddy plot-line is nostalgia for an earlier time, when men were men and women were women and both genders knew the difference and not Ie differance. Part of the appeal of Lonesome Dove must be that the problems of getting the cattle to market, difficult as they are, are mostly external--outlaws, Blue Duck's assorted depredations, natural obstacles, weather, etc. Compared with problems in the '90s-AIDS, terrorism, television talk shows-Lonesome Dove, though filled with violence and death, seems to offer a simpler world where Moo-vie Cows the heroic act and its attendant suffering still mean something, where dignity can still be observed in human tragedy. Or it may be that Lonesome Dove's appeal lies in its structural similarity to a baseball game, or, because it's so long and because one doesn't want it to end, a baseball season. To see Lonesome Dove as a baseball game, all you have to do is follow the bouncing ball. First, there's the playing field: a green and brown pastoral setting. Second, there are the players, the line-up: a garrulous, philosophical playermanager in the twilight of his playing days (Gus), a heavy-hitter (Call), a rookie (Newt), a former star whose career is ended because of an addiction problem-gambling and girls Uake Spoon), a talented black player cut down in the prime of his career (Deets as Roberto Clemente), and a groupie-Larena-who follows the team rather like the woman in Bull Durham or the woman in the Wade Boggs story. Third: the opposing teams: we might call them the Texas Rangers and the Cleveland Indians. Fourth: the drive/game is a team effort in which each player has his turn at bat and either does well-Call or Newt or Deets, for example--or fails: the kid who strikes out at the river crossing. Fifth: the pace and rhythm: Part of the charm of a basebaIl game-if you like baseball-is that the game theoretically has no ending; it can go on forever. Fortunately one never has, but as I said, theoretically, it could. All the great cattledrive movies reach a point in the narrative where the players feel that the drive is all, that it will never end. But it does end, and the team that delivers the most runs with the fewest errors wins; and the Indians or outlaws lose. Very satisfying, this narrative thrust, its exciting periods of intense action punctuated with leisurely moments, those seventh inning stretches in which a couple of cowboy teammates amble along on horseback smoking and chewing tobacco and scratching their privates and thinking deep philosophical thoughts about life and death and wimmin, whom they like to call filliessuch moments comprise the perfect expression of a male world of fantasy and escape, equally evident in a cattledrive or a basebaIl season . After the surprising success of Lonesome Dove, we might well ask 225 Giant Country 226 whether Hollywood will react, as it often does, to TV hits and revive the trail-drive western. So far the only response has been the comedy City Slickers (1991), which combined the dude-ranch motif of the 1930s and '40s with the cattle drive framework. The result was a poorly made but highly popular film that was meant to serve as a kind of allegory of reclaimed yuppie manhood beset by urbanism and feminism. Much ado is made about nursing a baby calf in this film, and lest anyone imagine that this motif is original, forget it. In 1924's Sundown a calf's mother is killed, leading one of the cowboys to feed the cute little critter with condensed milk run through a hole in the nipple-like finger of a glove. A cattle-drive film that showed a great deal of promise is one that never got made, that never even came close to getting made. During the summer of 1986 Ben Johnson, that superb actor in many John Ford westerns and an Oscar winner for his role in The Last Picture Show, told me about his plans to film Clair Huffaker's novel, The Cowboy and the Cossack, which is a story about a Russian prince who buys longhorns in the American West and transports them to Russia where cossacks and cowboys join together for a long drive across the steppes of that vast country. Johnson wanted to shoot on location in Russia, wanted to hire a train to carry all the tenderfeet while real seasoned cowboys drove the herd to the cattle pens in Moscow. I was ready to go with him, to write a book about the making of an epic, but Johnson died before he was able to bring his dream to fruition. The costs, one imagines, would be staggering. The first postGorbachev , post Communist western would be something to see. Until then, we will just have to settle for reruns. ...