How The North Was Won

The Coen brothers turned this taut screenplay-in-waiting into a glorious film, both faithful to the original and uniquely frightening. As Roger Deakins’s camera scans the Texas landscape, the film replaces McCarthy’s lost metaphors with an almost effortless evocation of the history and mythology of the movies. The drug dealers’ vehicles in the valley purposely recall scenes of the aftermath of Indian massacres; the violent confrontation between the hunted Moss and Chigurh summons up the shootout between Sheriff Kane and the Miller gang in High Noon, or a hundred similar movie battles fought between wagon wheels and whinnying horses.

While No Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood are not strictly westerns, the scope and romanticism of both films owe much to the genre. In a way, both are odes to the antagonists of the classic western, the avaricious railroad boss, the arrogant ranch owner, and the killers hired to carry out their will. Both films sweep over the barren landscape, seeking metaphors of masculinity that permit the actors to blaze into dramatic life in their frantic search.

No wonder modern stars still love the genre and push reluctant studios to bankroll their dreams. Westerns are made for the camera. Where novels hope to persuade, these films hurry to reveal. Pure narrative rushes past at twenty-four frames a second, more interested in emotions than thought, creating a nostalgic world that needs no context or exposition but possessing a physical beauty that elevates even the tawdriest dilemma. The anguished face of Gary Cooper, the strength of John Wayne, and the stubborn idealism of Henry Fonda are as much iconic images as Monument Valley, a horseman riding through the landscape, or an outstretched arm holding a pistol. The greatest westerns have always possessed the capacity to reveal true tragedy in their taciturn heroes’ inability to change with the times, an artistic reach almost unheard of in popular entertainment.

The western film is back in fashion, and for once Canada has a contender. In March, cbc aired John N. Smith’s filmed version of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy.

A young Canadian drifter, Harry Vincent, is attracted to early Hollywood, where he is persuaded by studio boss Ira Chance to turn the story of an old-time cowboy, Shorty McAdoo, into a saga that will tell the “true story” of how the West was won — even if his particular West happens to be in Canada. The writer’s quest and subsequent betrayal of McAdoo mirror the cowboy’s tragic youth as the Englishman’s boy.

Working from a screenplay by Vanderhaeghe, the two-part TV movie concentrates on McAdoo’s journey into adulthood. Unfortunately, we are rarely given the cowboy’s point of view. Instead, the tale is told by other voices, as Harry’s dishonest artist vies with the honestly megalomaniac studio head for the right to exploit the truth.

The film starts when the protector of young McAdoo dies and the cowboy joins a gang of trappers, led by violent Tom Hardwick, to hunt down the Indians who have stolen their horses and pelts. As the murderous band moves through the landscape, beautifully captured by cinematographer Pierre Letarte, the central story sometimes takes on the weight it demands. But there are also too many fireside moments when the cowboys, or the filmmakers, sit around attempting to justify acts of self-preservation.

Smith is a fine director of actors, and his 1992 The Boys of St. Vincent remains the high watermark of cbc drama, but it is doubtful his heart is up for the bloody mayhem that this story requires. The exhilaration and blood lust of the hunt, which should have swept us up in its excitement, is drained of momentum by the constant interference of ironic commentary. The Cypress Hills massacre is handled truthfully but without passion for either the Indians or the trappers, while the scenes of the final, homicidal rape are equally remote, as if the film is careful to side with the documentarian Harry rather than the exploitative Chance. The series is always vivid but rarely dramatic.

Westerns have always both pandered to and chided their audience’s fondness for violent catharsis. The greatest of them have understood this in becoming sly morality plays. More than any other genre, the western is an exploration of human nature in terms of its strengths, physical as well as moral; and the great western directors, such as Ford, Mann, and Howard Hawks, insist on exploring the physicality of human experience. The Englishman’s Boy tells us that the horrors in the Cypress Hills permanently damaged McAdoo, but to believe this we need to be forced to be involved. The film should have risked that its viewers would be thrilled by the violence of the racist chase and aroused by the naked, helpless girl, just as was Shorty McAdoo.

It is not enough merely to oppose Hollywood’s mendacity. Whatever Ira Chance’s dishonest version of the events may have been, this film of Shorty’s adventure is a trek toward a heart that is weak and ignoble. It is hard to care about the cowboy’s self-pity, or Harry’s lazy betrayal and equally vapid defence of the man. Hedged around by excuses and regrets, this is still a saga of cowardice.