William Wyler (27 page)

This societal conflict is largely relegated to the background during the first half of the film; it comes to the fore in the second part only when the comedy disappears and the struggle between the cattlemen and the homesteaders turns violent. The film's main focus is three interlocking “love stories”: the evolving bond between Hardin and Bean; Hardin's love for Jane-Ellen Mathews, which draws him into the conflict between Bean's cattlemen and the homesteaders; and Bean's love for Lillie Langtry, a woman he worships but has never met and whose pictures adorn his bar and his bedroom.

Bean's adoration of Langtry is based on fact, and the real Bean did indeed see the real Langtry once—during an American tour in the spring of 1888 (the year the film is set), when Bean, dressed in his Prince Albert suit, bought a front-row seat for her appearance in San Antonio. The film, however, plays with the facts. In the movie, Bean sees Lillie during an American tour in the town of Fort Davis, where he buys out the house and is the only one in the audience, dressed in his Confederate Army uniform, complete with sword. He later changes the name of his town from Vinegarroon to Langtry. In fact, the historical Bean did preside over Vinegarroon in 1882, but he followed the railroad to the town of Langtry later. The judge claimed that he named the town after the girl of his dreams, but the railroad claimed it was named after one of its own officers.

Bean's infatuation with Langtry fits in with Wyler's other studies of men obsessed with women they cannot truly possess. Bean, however, goes beyond Wyler's other protagonists, falling in love, like Pygmalion, with an image, a dream of beauty and womanhood he can only imagine. His absurd obsession is manifested by her pictures plastered all over his walls and in the comic episodes as he attempts to get the lock of her hair that Cole tricks him into believing he has. It is because of Lillie that Bean develops his relationship with Cole, who claims to know her in an elaborate ruse to save himself from hanging. (In earlier drafts of the script, of course, he actually does know her.) Wyler's amusing portrait of Bean's “love” sometimes serves to take the edge off his abuse of the law. Bean's love of Lillie and of Cole humanizes him and complicates our reaction to his behavior, but Bean's world is a masculine one without real women—Wyler depicts the cattlemen as a male enclave of drinkers, gamblers, and killers. Bean's form of justice may have been a necessary step in the evolution of the West, but it must now make way for a society that includes families and schools. His infatuation with Lillie is perhaps a subconscious recognition of that need.
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Bean's fixation on a romantic ideal is also equated with death, for hanging alongside Lillie's pictures is his sword from the Civil War. An officer who fought in the battle of Chickamauga, he still clings to the myth of the Old South. As noted earlier, when he rides to Fort Davis to see Lillie, he wears his Confederate uniform and his sword, suggesting that he is victimized by nostalgia and illusion, trapped in the past and unable to face the future of a state and a nation he once helped nurture. In the film's final act, Cole shoots Bean in the theater, and he gets to see Lillie just before he dies. As he looks at her, her image fades to black in an instant. Illusion must give way to reality—the theater is both a perfect setting for Bean's illusory world and the appropriate place for him to die. Just as the past must give way to the future, men like Bean must yield to the progressive social forces represented by Cole.

The film's first image is of a lone rider, in shadow, on the open range. He is Cole Hardin, the “westerner” of the title who will help transform the wilderness into a garden. The gray, dark tinges in the sky give the film a twilight look, which Toland maintains through much of the outdoor shooting. He manipulates light and dark into shadings that visually place
The Westerner
in a transitional moment in American history. The evolution of the West was not pretty, and this western is not full of imposing, picturesque vistas. The outdoor scenes take place in dusty, empty, and largely uninviting landscapes that are more Depression-era Dust Bowl than grand, mythic frontier.

In the opening shots, Wyler's lone rider is followed by pictures of wagon trains of settlers heading west in the hope of finding free land where they can farm and raise their families. The director then cuts to shots of enormous herds of cattle being driven across the land. When their path is impeded by barbed wire, the cattlemen cut it. When the cattle roam onto the cornfields of the homesteaders, a gunfight ensues. When a farmer mistakenly shoots a steer, he is seized.

Wyler cuts to Vinegarroon, a ramshackle town with dirt roads that is dominated by Bean's bar/courtroom and a couple of other equally nondescript shacks. This is clearly an emerging town, but it has no restaurant, no hotel, and not even a sheriff. Bean, the town's leading citizen, is the sole interpreter of the law. Wyler's camera does not suggest that the town has any life other than what transpires in Bean's court. The only other establishment he lets us glimpse is that of the dentist/embalmer, whom Bean keeps busy because his “rulings” invariably involve hanging. Indeed, the town of Vinegarroon is mostly presented as the interior of Bean's establishment—as if Wyler has grown uncomfortable with anything but indoor settings.

Wyler cuts from the capture of the steer-killing farmer to a series of exterior shots of Bean's courthouse/bar as we hear his voice pronouncing the verdict for committing the worst crime west of the Pecos: “shooting a steer.” The condemned man is then seen in a medium shot with a noose around his neck—the juxtaposition is jarring. The prisoner pleads for mercy, claiming that he shot the steer by accident. The first view of Bean is also a medium shot, isolating him in the frame; he blames the prisoner for not being able to shoot straight, prays for his soul, and then kicks the horse out from under him. There is a cut to the prisoner's silhouette as he dangles from the noose and then another of Bean fingering the dead man's money—confiscating the property of the dead accounts for a substantial part of his income.

This painful image is juxtaposed with a shot of the embalmer/dentist abandoning a patient so that he can go and collect the new body. He changes the sign on his door to “Funeral/Back Later” as he hurriedly leaves. Having broken the darkly ironic mood of the hanging with this brief comic moment, Wyler follows up with a cut to the townsfolk gathered to drink at Bean's bar, where the judge toasts Lillie Langtry as “the fairest flower that ever bloomed.” This association between Bean's “dream,” which remains linked to the past, and the notion of a blooming flower—a symbol of the future of the West—is his blind spot and will ultimately doom him. (In fact, when the real Lillie finally visited Langtry, Texas, in 1903, Bean was already dead from the effects of drinking.) The man he has just hanged is a harbinger of what will turn the wilderness into a garden, and the irony of this thematic concurrence is enforced when Wyler cuts from Bean's toast to the arrival of the undertaker's hearse.

This highly problematic introduction of Bean is followed by the entrance of Cole Hardin, who is led into Vinegarroon on his horse, with his hands tied behind his back. We first see him framed by the rope used to hang the homesteader (Wyler repeats this image from
Hell's Heroes);
here, it forms a triangle, echoing the image that concludes
Come and Get It
. Cole is led into Bean's court and accused of stealing the horse he was riding, which belongs to Chickenfoot, an officer of the court. Bean calls his court into session by placing a Bible on the bar and a gun on the Bible, a composition that is emblematic of his form of justice. Informed that the penalty for horse theft is hanging, Cole is asked how he pleads, and he answers, “Innocent.” The horse is then brought into court, and when Chickenfoot asks the horse if it belongs to him, the horse nods its head up and down, and Bean rules that the horse does indeed belong to Chickenfoot. Cole does not dispute that fact but claims that he bought the horse from someone else. Wyler films these proceedings in tight group shots, making the small room seem even smaller.

Cole's trial is interrupted by Jane-Ellen Mathews, who stands up to Bean, disputes his credentials as a judge, and mocks his notion of justice. Admiring her moxie, Bean declares that if not for Lillie, he would marry Jane-Ellen. Cole can see that he is in trouble, and Cooper plays him as a shrewd, calculating charmer. When the jury retires to consider the verdict with a bottle of the judge's “rub of the brush,” Wyler repeats his undertaker/dentist joke—the sign on the room is changed from “Table Stakes” to “Jury Room.” The humor of this action, in conjunction with the heroic persona of Gary Cooper, who shows no fear, is an indication that nothing serious is going to happen to Cole. Having noticed the pictures of Lillie on the wall, Cole begins to rhapsodize about her beauty. He claims to know her and asserts that he owns a lock of her hair. The jury then returns a guilty verdict, but Bean suspends the sentence in the hope of getting that lock of hair from Cole. Meanwhile, the actual horse thief enters the bar, Cole recognizes him, and they fight; eventually, Cole knocks him out and takes the $60 he paid for the horse from the fallen man's pocket. When the thief recovers and pulls a gun, Bean shoots him. This exchange becomes the basis of the two protagonists' friendship.

Cole Hardin is not a typical western hero. There is no indication that he is proficient with a gun, and he shows no propensity toward violence. (In that regard, he anticipates Jim McKay in
The Big Country.)
His survival skills seem to consist of caution and thoughtfulness and the ability to match wits with the sly, manipulative Roy Bean. When he finally shoots it out with Bean at the Fort Davis Opera House, he prevails not because of any superior skill with a gun but mostly because of luck. Cole is, in Robert Warshow's words, “a man of leisure.”
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When he is questioned by Bean, he admits to being “from nowhere in particular” and having no specific destination, although he later confesses that he wants to go to California. He is essentially a saddle bum, a man without a home or a family. His spur-of-the-moment decision to work for the Mathews family is apparently based not on the need for money but on his attraction to Jane-Ellen and his instinctive sympathy for the homesteaders' cause.

The growth of the relationship between Cole and Bean dominates the first part of the film. After the shooting of the real horse thief, Cole and Bean spend the rest of the day trying to outdrink each other. Wyler shows them sleeping together the next morning, Bean's arm around Cole, introducing a brief note of homoeroticism.
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When he awakes, Cole washes up and tries to check his appearance in a mirror covered with pictures of Lillie. Cole's vanity—he repeats this gesture several times—coupled with the plentiful evidence of Bean's obsession, makes for more comedy. When Cole rides out of town, however, he again passes the hanging noose and then a graveyard. Those images are juxtaposed with that of Bean standing at the bar with the pictures of Lillie behind him, again linking the looming death motif with Bean's seemingly comic fixation. Then, suddenly remembering Cole's claim to have a lock of Lillie's hair, Bean rides after him, eventually knocking them both off their horses. The shot of Bean and Cole crawling in the dirt while the judge reminds his friend of his promise to deliver the lock of hair is one of the film's comic high points.

The second plot involves Cole's romance with Jane-Ellen, the daughter of one of the homesteaders, and his growing involvement in their cause. His arrival at the Mathews house is given a comic touch as well. It is night, and Toland utilizes firelight that flickers light and shadows on the wall of the house, projecting an element of beauty onto what is otherwise a drab setting. Jane-Ellen tells her father about the stranger she met earlier that day, who she thinks was certainly hanged. “I kept on seeing his face all day,” she says. Then, as she carries a lighted match to a lantern, she sees Cole's eyes through the window. She is startled, but the coincidence is funny.
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Cole walks in and says he has stopped by to thank her for her help earlier in the day. More comic business follows, as her father urges Jane-Ellen to play up to Cole and romance him. (Mathews actually has a practical reason for wanting his daughter to ensnare this fellow, since most of his farmhands have been frightened away by Bean's men, and Mathews needs help harvesting the corn.)

Some of the homesteaders want to ride into Vinegarroon to lynch Bean. Getting wind of their plan, Cole rides ahead to warn the judge; then he succeeds in disarming the farmers and tries to negotiate a truce. First, he presents the cattlemen's viewpoint—namely, that the cattlemen had the land first, and the homesteaders often cultivated the land for only a year before their crops failed: “So the homesteaders moved out and the thistle and gypsum moved in. The land was no good for men or cattle.” Bean interrupts at this point, agrees with Cole, and throws the homesteaders out of the bar. Cole, however, continues the argument with Bean, insisting that the homesteaders “have a right to defend their homesteads…. When you make war on them, you make war on their women and children too.” He urges Bean to be a “real judge for all the people.”

Traditionally in westerns, the new moral order (or the rule of law) is dependent on the violent intervention of the western hero. But Wyler's film veers away from the traditional formula—its hero is not portrayed as a violent man or even a gunman. (In early drafts, Cole is an easterner who doesn't even know how to use a gun; in a later version, he is taught to shoot by Jane-Ellen!)
The Westerner
is, furthermore, the first important western to use the homesteader versus cattleman plot (which famously figures in
Shane
and, much later, in
Heaven's Gate)
, and Cole's defense of the homesteaders introduces a concept that would become a standard motif of the genre. Women would come to represent the Christian moral order of civilization, their presence in the western landscape denoting a decisive step forward from the male rule of violence that is clearly depicted here by the cattlemen and the “rulin's” of Bean's court.