Then and now 6/20

Friday, June 20, 2003

A head-cold doomed me to several desperate television evenings, rewatching old movies and reflecting that they don't make 'em like they used to. Even the "Grade B" efforts shine alongside what surrounds them, the "wasteland" of regular television fare and the newer movies: mindless concoctions, with a few exceptions, of glitzy "special effects," gratuitous sex and violence, and "political correctness." "The Unforgiven," from the late 1940s (not to be confused with Clint Eastwood' s film of the same name), is a classic Western, telling the story as it was always told before the coming of "deconstructionism." (Though why not just say "destruction?") The heroes are the settlers, fighting to bring civilization to the Texas frontier; the villains are the Indians, the Kiowas, referred to in every other line by a curse or slur and twice in the film called "G-- Red N --" which was a new one on me. Clearly the purveyors didn't put themselves out trying to pretty the picture up to "politically correct" standards! The heroine (Audrey Hepburn) is an adopted daughter reportedly found in the wagon of a settler couple massacred by the Indians. A religious nut claims she's really an Indian (she's darkhaired, high-cheekboned, etc.) A Kiowa claims she's his sister and demands they hand her over. The girl herself is torn, half willing to go. But the family boss (Burt Lancaster), seconded by the girl's adoptive mother, says Nothing doing! Your parentage, he implies, doesn't matter. You're one of us: civilized, not a savage. So they're besieged by the Kiowas. At the crux, the would-be Kiowa brother breaks into the house. The girl, still torn, agonizing, makes her choice and shoots him! She and Burt, who've loved each other as brother and sister, now recognize they love each other the other way too. So savagery's been routed, civilization saved, not merely in the outward battle with the Indians but in the harder battle within the girl's heart. They not only don't make 'em like that any more, they couldn't. "Civilization bad! Stone Age good!" That's the new, upside-down mantra. The Indians dashed out babies' brains, scalped the living or buried them in anthills, cut off their cheatin' women's noses and practised conservation by driving buffalo herds over cliffs. Oh, but it's "racist" to say so! "Racist" is just what the film is not. Audrey's an Indian by blood, but Lancaster shows it doesn't matter. What matters are the values by which she was raised: civilized values. The misleadingly titled "Santa Fe Trail" (1940) in fact is a fairly truthful and unflattering telling of the story of John Brown (Raymond Massey), and his crossings of paths with Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn), first in Kansas, then at the door of the Harper's Ferry arsenal. In this telling, Brown's a murderous crackbrain. Abolitionists like him are the villains of the Kansas piece. We see him leave freed slaves to burn in a barn, thinking Stuart's inside. The ex-slaves are disillusioned. "If this-here's freedom, we don't want it!" The film starts at West Point where, very politically incorrectly, Superintendent Robert E. Lee introduces Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to address the cadets. And Davis sends Lee and Stuart to Harper's Ferry to capture Brown. It's left to Stuart's friend George Custer (Ronald Reagan) to mumble halfheartedly that Brown just might have a bit of a point. Needless to say we'd now get a stridently different "take" on this one too. A sermon, say, like the imaginary one against slavery put in Joshua Chamberlain's mouth in "Gettysburg." And the new-model villain (Stuart) wouldn't be played by Errol Flynn. He plays another hero-become-villain in "They Died With Their Boots On" (1941). This is the old, "undeconstructed" Custer, dashingly civilizing the West while fighting bad-guy whites harder than the Indians, facing court-martial, deliberately making Little Big Horn a Thermopylae: all inconvenient truths now vanished down some politically-correct memory hole. Flynn's Custer gets off a good line to one of the villains. He proposes a toast, "To glory!" The villain sneers, and proposes a toast to "what really matters: money!" "All right: To money! But there's a small difference: You can take the glory with you when you go." And he did. For as long as men still believed in ideals, like glory, and before Custer had been made over into the bad guy, his name taken off the field where he and 225 other white men died, and a monument to their slaughterers now overshadows their graves. History, of course, is neither as simple as the oldtime glorifying of the deeds of American settlers and soldiers, nor as that of their recent fashionable "deconstruction" and damnation. The rights and wrongs of any bit of history are hard to disentangle. But a movie or other popular tale requires simplifying. You pick the simplemindedness that best grinds your axe. Till only a few decades ago, Americans (like every other people) unapologetically picked the mythos, the story, and its heroes, that glorified their culture, in which they firmly believed, as every culture must do, if it's to survive and flourish. They believed the ways of life they brought into the land, both material and moral, were superior, an advance, a triumph over wilderness and savagely. One pitied the "savages," but they could adapt; and many did indeed, as the backward have always adapted to the more advanced, or faced extinction. Americans also believed in an underlying solidarity among those who briefly parted company in 1861. Early in "They Died With Their Boots On," an official tells the West Point cadets of the firing on Ft. Sumter, and invites them to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union. Any who can't are bidden muster to one side, and they do, led by Fitzhugh Lee. The official says he hopes and prays both groups will fight (each other) each as his conscience tells him, with all the mutual respect and chivalry that West Point has tried to instill in them. Then the Southerners are told march past and the band to strike up "Dixie." As they pass their late Yankee comrades, the latter dip colors and "Present arms!" That's how it often was in those idealistic days, even in the midst of the bitter war. Only briefly, in Reconstruction, did hatred of fellow-countrymen of differing political opinions prevail. Until the 1960s, that is, when in the hypocritical name of "tolerance" the old ways were no more to be tolerated, and 1860s malice resurrected. This time, it seems, to stay. That's why those old, "politically-incorrect" movies matter, why sometimes they attain to true art. History is an art, and "truth" in both art and history isn't just "the facts" but rather what people choose to make of them, whether ideals to bind themselves together as a nation, a culture, or cynical, nihilistic "deconstructions" that can only tear it apart.

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