Three American Westerns

In viewing movies from AFI's 100 Movies list, I have found myself in the process of constructing a theory of what makes a movie "great".  I started out by evaluating movies according to certain obvious, discrete elements: direction, performance, screenplay, aesthetics etc., but I lately find myself thinking along different lines.  For better or worse, I've lately been evaluating movies (and tv programs too for that matter) by the presence or absence of three things: character, story and idea.  Let's hold three items that I watched recently up to this candle, and see if it holds up.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

I think it's pretty clear by which of the three criteria this item shines, and by which it suffers.  When I look at the use of character in a movie, I find myself asking, "do the people in this film make decisions in a way that I can understand, or do they seem to make decisions because the plot demands it?"  Wrapped up in this question is, of course, the quality/naturalness of the dialogue and the performances.  Neither the writers nor the actors can solicit a "yes" to this question alone.  In Sierra Madre, everybody does a great job, and both screenwriter John Huston and actor Walter Huston (Son and father, respectively) deserved their Academy Awards that year.

When one looks at the story and the idea of the movie, however (are those two things really separate?), the movie begins to suffer a little.  When I think of story, I ask (among other things), "Does each plot element of the movie need to be there to get us where we are going?" And in the case of Sierra Madre, the answer is a pretty forceful "No."  Many things that happened, from the appearance of the mysterious interloper, to the implausible rescue of a drowned boy, seem to exist merely in order to make some other element of the story make sense, almost as though the story were worked out during filming.  As for the idea, it felt tacked on, and the end result is what we have come to see as an "Academy Award vehicle", namely something that exists to highlight performances, rather than to stand on its own merit.

The Searchers

Where the characters in Sierra Madre seemed to exist outside of the plot, the same cannot be said of this John Wayne vehicle.  The main character especially seems to be completely at the mercy of the script, and make decisions purely because he is told to do so.  Likewise, the various plot developments along the way never seem organic, but rather like the product of a committee filled with people who say things like "Wouldn't it be cool if . . ." and "Hey, is there a way to fit in . . ." as rationale.  All of which is not helped by the fact that the central idea is colored by pretty disgusting racism, to an extent that is difficult to explain away with social context. 

Sadly, looking at the movie through this lens fails to account for the one thing that was enjoyable it: namely that it was quite beautifully shot, and really lovely to watch.  Where do aesthetic elements fit into my little schema?  Not sure yet.

High Noon

All three of these movies are trying to do what Western seem to always do: show what a real man is like.  Of the three, High Noon is far and away the most successful.  "Real", of course, in the Western genre means "admirably masculine", but the sense of "human and believable" also applies here.  Gary Cooper's performance and a watertight script  create a character that manages to embody the ideal American male, while still acting like a human.  The story is similarly focused, driven, and relatively free of ornament.  What I found most enduring, however, was the idea of the movie, which seems to be a variation on Sturgeon's Law: ninety percent of everything is crap.  People suck, they really do, and if you, dear reader, manage to have somebody in your life who does not suck, marry them, throw your tin star in the dust, and take that buckboard as far off into the sunset as you can manage.