There have been A-movie Westerns ever since the silent era — that is, prestige pictures meant to appeal to a wider audience than the usual one for Westerns, which consisted mainly of kids and grown-up males outside the big urban areas.  The prestige Westerns were usually epics, like The Iron House, or The Covered Wagon or The Big Trail — films whose very size and scope branded them as out of the ordinary, worthy of consideration by all.

John Ford's Stagecoach, from 1939, was something else again.  Neither a routine oater nor an epic, it was instead a drama set in the Old West with an unusual and compelling story, or series of interlocking stories, and complex, well-developed characters.  It was a medium-scale Western for the mainstream audience.

The success of Stagecoach inaugurated a new phase in John Ford's career as a director of Westerns and spawned more films like it — more medium-scale A-Movie Westerns . . . Westerns for everybody.  One of the first of these to appear, just a year later, was William Wyler's The Westerner.

Swerling and Busch dance a fine line between serious frontier drama, pitting cattlemen and farmers against each other in a classic conflict, and colorful character exposition, with the sort of laconic, rustic humor one finds in the best of Mark Twain.  Bean, played masterfully by Walter Brennan in one of his finest performances, is a truly complicated villain — vicious, ruthless, funny and touching in an almost childlike way.  Harden, played by Gary Cooper, is complicated as well, with a childlike quality, too, balanced by the iconic virility of his physical person.

These two men amuse each other, delight in outwitting each other, getting the jump on each other — they were born to be the best of pals . . . until Bean's sheer cussedness and meanness prompt a showdown.  There's something tragic about the inevitability of this — it has the quality of a love story gone horribly wrong.

Like Stagecoach, The Westerner has long interior scenes in which displays of character take center stage.  After an action opening, the film stays put for almost half an hour in Judge Bean's combination courthouse/saloon, as Harden tries to con his way out of getting hanged for stealing a horse.  It's terrifically engaging stuff, because of the actors' magical incarnation of their roles and because of the genuine homespun wit of their dialogue.

Wyler gives the traditional Western audience its thrills, too.  The film has some of the most beautiful running inserts of galloping horses ever filmed — and a big part of the thrill of them is just watching Cooper ride.  Cooper had worked as a cowboy and he knew how to sit a horse at a dead run with an uncanny grace few actors in the history of movies have ever matched.

There's a love interest for Cooper, of course, with one of the women of the farm community, which helps motivate his conflict with Bean, who's on the side of the cattlemen, but it doesn't ignite many sparks.  Cooper's winsome shyness with the lady gets stretched pretty thin by the final clinch, until it almost seems fey.

The film does make a stab at an epic dimension, presenting the feud between the pioneer groups as an episode in the making of Texas, and the nation — something the studio drew special attention to in the advertising.  There's a big set-piece sequence showing the burning of the farmers' fields and homes that seems to have been meant to evoke the burning of Atlanta from Gone With the Wind, released the previous year.  But much of the fire is done with process work, and Wyler doesn't appear to have had his heart in this part of the movie.  He knew that the best thing he had to work with was the relationship between Bean and Harden.

If one wanted to deconstruct this film visually, the task would not be hard — it practically deconstructs itself while you're watching it.

There are six types of images in the film, all radically different from each other in terms of how they were created:

1) Location shots, with unmanipulated images, including shots inside sets built on location in which you can see the actual location outside the doors and windows:

2) Studio interiors in which you can't see outside the door and windows, and which thus don't require false exteriors:

3) Studio exteriors, with artificially constructed “natural” settings:

5) POV location images looking forward from the moving raft shot on smaller-format cameras than the ones used for the rest of the film and blown up to fill the Cinemascope screen.  (These are identifiable by their strikingly different grain structure from the other shots in the film.)

6) One single shot from a location on the river with a town on the shore of the river matted optically into the frame.

It's extraordinary that audiences of the time processed these disparate types of images as a coherent visual whole, but they clearly did.  Contemporary reviewers of River Of No Return remarked on the spectacular location scenery and the exciting action scenes on the river without noting that the former were unmanipulated images and the latter tricked up in a studio.

What makes the contrasts between these disparate types of images starker than they might be is the stunning nature of the location shots.  They are beautifully composed, give an impression of deep space, and often go on for considerable amounts of time in which complex and difficult actions occur on screen and which not infrequently involve elaborate camera moves.

All of these aspects of the shots made on location were characteristic of the director Otto Preminger's mature style and made him a darling of the Cahiers du Cinema set in the Fifties, influenced as it was by André Bazin's celebration of long takes and deep focus, as opposed to montage, as the primary and most potent tools of cinema.

Quite apart from theoretical considerations, Preminger's location images in River Of No Return are among the most beautiful and exhilarating in the whole history of Westerns.  They are images that drawn you into the spaces of the scenes, imparting a sense of actually inhabiting them.

Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe, the stars of the film, don't have a lot of screen chemistry, and Monroe delivers one of the stiffest and most awkward performances of her career, but when the two have a long magic-hour conversation by a campfire with a river rushing behind them, filmed in a single long take, performance hardly seems to matter.

The sheer cinematic beauty of the shot infuses itself into the actors, the dialogue, the narrative moment, the whole story of the film, so that we can accept these characters as people fated to become lovers, simply because they have inhabited this passage of sublime cinema.  Aesthetic excitement is transmuted into emotional power.  We believe that the characters will remember this moment forever, simply because we will.

Nana tries to talk to her friend about her philosophy of life, her idea that we are responsible for everything we do but also that life is what it is and there's not much we can do about it.

Towards the end of the scene, when Nana is left alone for a moment, Karina re-emerges from the character and stares directly at the camera in silence.  It takes a moment to readjust our attention from the character she's playing to the actress, to the star.

Suddenly there is machine-gun fire from the street.  Outside the windows of the café we see a shootout in progress, though we can't tell who's fighting whom.  A wounded man staggers into the café.  Nana for some reason runs outside into the danger zone in order to escape, and the tableau ends with an image of her fleeing, as the police arrive.

Earlier, in the story the friend told about being abandoned, she added a postscript — she saw her husband later acting in an American movie. . . co-opted as it were, seduced from his responsibilities, by Hollywood.  Now, as elements of B-movie violence and suspense enter Vivre Sa Vie, a new tension arises.  Still wondering what kind of a movie this is going to be — an essay on cinema, a sociological drama about prostitution? — we are given a third possibility, pulp crime thriller.  Or all three, perhaps?

Previously:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 5