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Cimarron (Anthony Mann, 1960)

Hannah Long revisits the 1960s film Ride the High Country, a Western fable of decline, inheritance, and hope.

Ride the High Country is about the death of a generation and the sad inevitability of change. It’s a story about the 1960s. About the end of an era of film and a style of acting. About a director wrestling with his father’s legacy. The passing away of a generation of Christian men.

Of course, it’s not really about any of those things, it’s just that they are its context, the frame that turns it into a mythological encapsulation of an era. It possesses a hope and strength of purpose, coupled with a bracingly candid social realism, that has made it a classic since it hit theaters sixty-one years ago.

#Ride the High Country #Sam Peckinpah #Joel McCrea #Terry Teachout #Randolph Scott #Classic Westerns #revisionist Westerns #the Bible #John Ford

stingrayextraordinaire

Character Moodboards // Will Kane

I’ve got to. That’s the whole thing.

(requested by @longishthoughts)

girlfriendsofthegalaxy

i do not fully understand Why elsa knudsen is like There in the narrative in peckinpah's Ride the High Country.

she doesn't do a lot to underline peckinpah's most beloved themes, she's mostly there to get assaulted many times, i think her naivety and black-and-white sense of morality could have been collapsed into. what's this fucker's name. heck longtree. the young jaded one, without really affecting the plot very much. judd and elsa aren't even a great parallel to the more vicious pair of westrum and longtree.

the whole inciting incident, the "am i gonna double cross my old best friend in order to steal (checks notes) the $11k in gold we're transporting down a big mountain instead of the $250k i thought was here at this mine" more than fills the "honor and ideals compromised by circumstance, the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world" themes peckinpah likes so much. the "will they help this girl get out from under the thumb of her abusive father in order to marry some guy who's also abusive and then help her get out of that also" b-plot seems to be there to fill time. which like. fine. i get you need a ninety minute movie and not an episode of television but think of a better b-plot. there was a whole ass carnival you didn't do shit with.

was it a competently made, well shot film? sure. did i enjoy the four separate assault scenes? no! why are those there at all! it's not like an equal amount of time is given to "wow the west sure sucks for guys too" bc mccrea's character is just like. poor and a little creaky and is not smothering under a life forced on him like elsa. i think getting shot four times over the course of his career is bad but on a different level of bad than being sexually assaulted four times in the course of three days and if THAT was the parallel peckinpah was trying to draw it's not a very good one

i acknowledge this movie is trying to draw Some parallels but i don't think it executes them well OR in a way i think is interesting. again, why is elsa here at all

longishthoughts

The two plots don’t cohere as nicely as I’d like, but Elsa’s plot is very much an important part of the story. The question the film asks, after all, is whether it is possible for honor culture values to be maintained into a nasty, brutal, commerce-based future. Elsa flees the old repressive religion of her father just to find the same sort of brutality in Coarse Gold. The fact that Heck - who’s admittedly not a very well-developed character - can find that redemption and help save her is a powerful testament to the fact that the honor culture isn’t gone forever.

kingstoken

The McKirk bridal carry moment from TOS’ The Empath

trek-tracks

I will never get over how sweetly and gently Jim carries Bones over to the bench…

…and then how he absolutely SLAMS him down on it as though he’s delivering the coup de grâce in a professional wrestling match. The man has about 50 internal injuries, Jim!

Methinks either Shatner ran out of energy, or was peeved that someone else got to have his shirt ripped on camera.

longishthoughts

McCoy just gave him one salad too many and created resentment.

I suspect the actual reason is that while it’s difficult to carry another grown person while standing, it’s MUCH more difficult to let them down gently because gravity starts to take over once you start bending. DeForest Kelley is thin but he’s still an adult male.

Relatedly, with the ripped shirt emphasizing his thinness and his position in this shot it always evoked a Pietà for me (which would fit with some of the rather more obvious and clumsy Christological imagery in the episode).

fictionalwaltz

marsvioletsixtyfour

KATHARINE HEPBURN AS PEGGY CARTER

lemonsharks

I HAVE A POWERFUL NEED

dreverybodyilovedies

I SCROLLED FURIOUSLY THROUGH THIS MOST MUMBLING TO MYSELF “if Katherine Hepburn isn’t Peggy I’m gonna punch a bro” AND SHE IS BRAVO ALL THE CASTING POINTS FOR YOU.

But seriously all the casting is perfect. Peck for Sousa, ERROL FLYNN FOR HOWARD OH MY GOSH YES. Bacall for Dottie oh my GOSH!

longishthoughts

A perfect list! If I might expand on the concept a bit...

newgameplus

how do u pronounce eugenides

with great skill

……..a skill that i, personally, dont honestly possess sfgsdfg- my best approximation would probably be something like you-gen-ih-daze (or dez), but my brain always wants it to be “you-gen-ih-diedes” but thats because i cant read and like to shoehorn letters in and switch syllables around and otherwise ignore whats actually on the paper in front of me kfjgsdf

meganwhalenturner

100% correct.

steppingstonespoetry

The first time I read The Thief, I took a look at “Eugenides” and my brain gave up. I had been pronouncing “Gen” with a hard “G” in my head the whole time, so “Eugenides” somehow became “You-GEN-diss” (with a hard g) as my eyes henceforth skimmed over the name and refused to make sense of the letters I was leaving out. A couple reads later, one day I asked my Dad how to pronounce it, and either he or my brother (who was in the room) speculated that it may be “You-gen-EYE-deez” (soft g, of course) so that’s the pronunciation I prefer now.

meganwhalenturner

Also 100% correct

eugenidesstolemyheart

“you-jen-uh-deez”?

longishthoughts

My younger sister is reading the books for the first time and after the pained expression I pulled when she pronounced Gen with a hard G, she has taken to finding the most creative ways she can to pronounce his name. “Uh-gun-eye-deez” was a particular masterpiece. (I’m still in pain - she still thinks this is hilarious.)

kivrin

Reblog to answer: what do you think Mr. Foyle reads for fun? (other than Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock which he recommends to Milner in “The German Woman”)

I have theorized H.G. Wells and popular then-recent…

longishthoughts

Imichaelsbeautiful:

cmee57

Anglo-Catholic, did you say? That’s right up my street because myEpiscopal parish is one. All the lovely smells and bells and a statues and an icon or two of the BVM.

longishthoughts

What does Foyle read for fun?

@cmee57 It’s just a hunch. Honestly, I know little about Anglo-Catholicism, since I’m an American from the south. But Waugh is great.

kivrin - you mentioned that Foyle read T.S. Eliot, who, Wikipedia informs me, was an Anglo-Catholic (we’re up to three - it’s a conspiracy!!). Eliot described himself as one with “a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.” That gets me thinking. Could Foyle be someone aesthetically attracted to Catholicism - as portrayed in Waugh’s works - but with a no-frills, discipline-centric approach to doctrine - thus the Lutheran Bonhoeffer? (FWIW - that’s pretty much me.) Waugh, Greene, and Bonhoeffer all spent a lot of time writing about grace - there’s another commonality - and though this probably shows my ignorance of Catholicism - a focus on sola gratia strikes me as a Protestant emphasis. On the other hand, Foyle may have known of Bonhoeffer simply because, as Sam’s uncle mentioned, Bonhoeffer had been in England before the war.

I’ve been waiting for this conversation ALL MY LIFE.

kivrin

Eep! No pressure, me. :)

I note from wikipedia that both Waugh and Greene were converts to Catholicism in the 1920s/early 30s, and Eliot was a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism (and specifically Anglo-Catholicism). Converting to Catholicism in England at that period was probably only slightly less shocking than it would have been in the nineteenth century when there were still laws excluding Roman Catholics from full civil life. I imagine the iconoclasm and apparent reactionary-ness of those moves (from CofE to RC, and Unitarian to CofE) by highly educated men might be fascinating to Foyle the “bolshy” individualist.

Waugh and Greene are about 15 years younger than Foyle, the first cohort of men to be too young for service in WWI, so there might be a sort of fascination to that aspect as well - “this is what men who didn’t go through that are doing.”

Foyle has never struck me as personally devout, in the sense of practicing Christianity in any way apart from church attendance (though I can think of few people with a better track record for, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer’s charge to godparents, “renounc[ing] the devil and all his works, [and] the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same”) I tend to imagine him as having a middle-of-the-road late-nineteenth-century Church of England upbringing (neither evangelical nor Anglo-Catholic) with some Sunday School, but in adulthood being a churchgoer but not a communicant. (The distinction might not be very obvious to onlookers since - startlingly to an American Episcopalian of the early twenty-first century like me - Morning Prayer rather than the Communion Service was the main act of corporate Sunday worship in a majority of parishes of the Church of England up through the 1960s.)

re: English Roman Catholics, longishthoughts, have you read In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden? It is a terrific novel about a cloistered order of Benedictine nuns in Sussex (actually not far from Hastings!) in the 1950s-1970s.

In terms of fictional Anglo-Catholics, I have an affection for Susan Howatch’s Church of England novels that is out of all proportion to their literary merit. I like to call them “ER with bishops” - instead of going into cardiac arrest, the characters spiritual lives go to pieces and they are revived with heroic doses of monastic practices. The appeal for me, aside from all the minutiae of clerical garb and cathedral paraphernalia, is that probably that the tension driving the plots is usually about vocation and relationships and self-deception regarding those two issues.

Of more literary merit, though still somewhat soap-operatic content, is Catherine Fox’s Acts and Omissions, an account of a year in the life of a CofE cathedral with particularly attention to the clergy and choir.

Oh, and then there’s Robertson Davies’ The Cunning Man which involves the doings of a big Anglo-Catholic parish in Toronto. Not Davies’ best work, alas, but I reread it for the bits about St. Aidan’s.

cmee57, yes, the smells and the bells and the candles and the chant! (The only thing that disappoints me about my priest is that she can’t sing so we never get the Eucharistic prayers chanted.)

longishthoughts

Thinking back to this a few years later! I moved to New York City and I’m now surrounded by Anglo-Catholics. I was rewatching Foyle’s War the other day and saw him recommend Graham Greene. Foyle does strike me as the sort to enjoy theologically serious works, though I think you’re right that he’d more likely remain CoE than embrace the drama of Anglo-Catholic ritual.

murderorriblemurder

’[I]t’s easy to see which side of the family has the detective instinct.’

‘My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I’m an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it’s so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.’

-Clouds of Witness

idlesuperstar

where ‘in the next life’ is actually ‘six months down the line when Jonathan drops by Jack’s coffee shop to be sarcastic and doom-laden about Jack’s business sense as a cover for offering to be his partner because every business needs a good accountant’

longishthoughts

Head canon accepted. I badly need to know that Jon drops by Jack’s coffee shop at some point. Even if it’s in 2019, and he leaves an extremely persnickety Yelp review.

earendil-was-a-mariner

Mouth of Sauron: So you want me to go tell them that we’re torturing Frodo?

Sauron: Yeah

Mouth of Sauron: Do we actually have him?

Sauron: No, but we’re looking.

Mouth of Sauron:

Mouth of Sauron: If they find out I’m bluffing, I’m gonna look really stupid.

Sauron: They’re going to believe you. You’re very scary looking, Greg.

Mouth of Sauron: Thanks. That means a lot.

granada-brett-crumbs

“As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last…” —The Copper Beeches