by Jeffrey and Wagstaff
How better to follow upon the heels of an all-"Deadwood" week than with an ode to the western towns that preceded the title locale? There are many, to be sure, starting in literature: Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," for instance, about a town still in its adolescence, not used to the presence of a lady who represents the ever encroaching sense of civilization; or E.L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, set in a barren settlement on flat Dakota plains, destroyed once, but trying to sprout up again from a mere seedling. Western towns generally speak to the passing of the west or the ephemeral nature of the frontier. Like Deadwood, these places start out as rough camps and quickly attract development until fully settled. Those that don't develop will die out.
A standard -
1. Bottleneck (Destry Rides Again) is essentially the same town as the one in Dripalong Daffy. The opening crane shots of Bottleneck show the standard storefronts that western audiences are accustomed to seeing - feed stores, general stores, the jail, the Last Chance Saloon. As the camera moves along the street, we see just about every possible vice 
happening all at once with bullets whizzing about the crowded streets - all the while, Frank Skinner's intense score adds to the feeling of utter lawlessness. Every stereotype of the wild western town is represented here: crooked gambling above the saloon, land-hungry town bosses, a hot dancing girl named Frenchy who can douse the fires of her rowdy fans with a shot of whisky, and killin'. Lots of killin'. Back when the western was really coming into its own in 1939, the genre had already been around long enough to warrant this satire. Bottleneck is a parody of the western town.
Frozen in time -
2. San Miguel (A Fistful of Dollars) is not a dead town, but one in the deathlike grip of warlord-ism, sucked dry by twin evils: the gun and liquor trades. Killing got to be such a problem that the inn keeper had to shut down the roulette wheel; in other words, it became too violent to gamble. On one side of the town are the Rojos, with their large 
stucco ranch house, on the other, the Baxters, with their wood sided ranch house. About the only activity in town emanates from these two houses. The stuff in between is a no man's land, literally. As the inn keeper points out, all the women are widows. The streets are desolate. Occasionally, you might see nervous eyes behind a window. Who knows how long this town has gone on this way, or how long it would last. It seems to have been removed from time - stuck in bad state - trapped in an artificial stability of two bosses. That crazy bell ringer was right. Leone's immaculate detail makes this town seem as hot and sweaty as hell itself.
Rebirth -
3. Crescent City (Winds of the Wasteland) was all but gone when John Blaire (Wayne) was tricked into buying a stage route. The pamphlet said: population 3,500; water, excellent; school and church. But that was a few years ago. Nowadays, with a population of 2, the mayor is just as likely to also be the village idiot. John Blair and his partner soon figure that out when they ride into the town shooting into the air to get the attention of the locals.
Partner - Quiet little place, isn't it?
John - Yeah, 3,500 people don't make much noise.
That doesn't stop the townfolk -- now four, according to the census chalkboard -- from trying to make Crescent City a spot on the map once again. Winds of the Wasteland is little more than a mediocre b-movie, but it's a pleasant depiction of the nation-building spirit of the west. Crescent City starts out looking like an abandoned movie town set, but as the film progresses, it turns into an fully inhabited movie town set.
A Town on the move -
4. Yellow Mountain (The Man from Colorado) is ready to prosper after the war. More than any of the other towns on the list, this one is most similar to Deadwood in that you see a wide cross-section of people. The town may be growing, but it isn't necessarily healing after the war. Problems arise when Yankee soldiers return to the mining town to find their claims ceded to big business. The town fathers are looking to maintain security and a business friendly environment that will encourage further growth and eventually statehood. The worst that could happen is if they hired a sick violent prone ex-cavalry colonel to serve as judge. Of course that's what they do.
There's actually two towns in the film. The first is Yellow Mountain, a place that offers civilized things like social balls and a courtroom. Here, we see nice houses with all the trappings of high society - good furniture, waiting rooms, and ornate wallpaper. The other is an offshoot of Yellow Mountain, nestled in a small rocky valley with only one way in and one way out. This portion of Yellow Mountain houses, for lack of a better term, the lower classes - immigrants and ex-rebels and ex-Yanks. The housing here is closer to shanties, providing only the unpainted necessities of life. The rivalry between golden boy William-Holden and flaming haired Glenn Ford propels the story to its inferno climax, where the shanty camp is smited because it resists the ever increasing (tyrannical) law and order (if not justice) of Yellow Mountain.
Engines of industry -
5. Machine (Dead Man) is located at the end of the line. That's a long locomotive ride way out west, past rolling hills, past the buffalo cleared plains, over and through the Great Rocky Mountains, through deserts of cactus and dried bones. Not many people go to the end of the line, hence the surprised looks when you tell them. Jarmusch knows you've seen western towns before, but he wants you to look at this one with fresh eyes and think, "Maybe this is the way it really was." Step off the train and walk through town. The camera gazes at everything in slow tracking shots. 
Carcasses and dried antlers. A mule pissing. Ignore the man receiving fellatio, in fact it'd be best if you didn't look at anybody cross ways. Avoid the mud. Find the Dickinson Metalworks, which is impossible to miss, seeing as how it looms at the end of town, clanking noisily and belching huge ominous plumes of black smoke. Talk to the man with a bear. Don't get lost.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
5 for the day: Western Towns
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18 comments:
Just wanted to say that you guys did a real great job with "Deadweek." It's hard to find intelligent and thorough television criticism, so it's wonderful when a great show like "Deadwood" gets the treatment it deserves.
My top five would be:
1. Presbyterian Church in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." A thoroughly unglamorous but beautiful place, wreathed in a dirty yellow haze.
2. Carbon Valley in "Pale Rider." It's not a great western, by any stretch -- basically a ripoff of "Shane" by way of "High Plains Drifter," with a splash of "Terminator" absurdity. But Bruce Surtees' prairie Rembrandt photography, and Clint Eastwood's eerily attenuated direction, give the whole movie a sense of menace. That final long shot of the hero riding off toward a mountain whose top is shrouded in fog never fails to give me the chills.
3. Machine in "Dead Man." Well covered by Wagstaff and Jeffrey. I second their emotions.
4. The town in "Shane." Wish I could recall the name and I am fading too fast to Google it tonight. But it's certainly a lovely place (exteriors were shot in Jackson Hole, Wyoming), a harsh paradise that lends workaday reality to a story that was conceived as parable from the get-go.
5. Hadleyville in "High Noon." An unsurpassed arena for testing one's mettle. But when you look back on the plot in retrospect, and consider the furtive spinelessness of Will Kane's fellow citizens, you have to ask if it was worth saving.
Also, thanks for the kind words, Tom E. We aims to please.
Re: Shane, I don't know the name of the town either, but it is interesting that George Stevens wanted a town that was built on only one side of the street. Maybe you need both sides before you get named.
Technically I shouldn't be mentioning it, because it's a hideaway ranch full of outlaws rather than town per se, but I've got to give a shout-out to Chuck-a-Luck from Fritz Lang's "Rancho Notorious," a name worthy of Looney Tunes.
I haven't seen it in at least 15 years, but I still can't the damned theme song out of my head.
"Now where and what is Chuck-a-Luck?
Nobody knows and the dead won't tell.
So on and on relentlessly
this man pursues his quest.
And deep within him grows the beast of haaaaate, murder and revenge."
Gotta second the Presbyterian Church vote and give big ups to Machine as well.
I thought Big Whiskey (from 'Unforgiven') is a particularly good Western town. A lot of it comes from Gene Hackman's Little Bill character/performance, but it's still got all the great necessities of a classic Western town. And the name kicks butt.
Most Pekinpah films, "Westerns" or not, have destinct locales, too. I was mostly thinking about Cornwall from 'Straw Dogs' cuz it kind of works with Big Whiskey; or maybe it's just the plot parallels.
Also, Shinbone is a great town name. You could write a whole blog about great Western town names, it seems.
Thirding Presbyterian Church and seconding the Peckinpah towns. Of those, the best is Coarsegold in Ride The High Country, the introduction of which is the first really visceral clue that we are well out of the traditional Western and well into the bestial West. Coarsegold, which is more tent-city than town (except for the well-built whorehouse, naturally) seems to be a great cinematic forebearer of first season Deadwood.
Stretching those two out to five, I'd add Machine, Agry in Budd Boettischer's Buchanan Rides Alone (which has a fantastic sense of place, more so than the town in For a Few Dollars More, I think), and Rio Bravo (from Rio Bravo, y'know). That last one may be the right-wing (or, at least, authoritarian) response to High Noon, but the town itself has the perfect Hollywood Western ability to be completely artificial on the outside (or, at least, the exterior shots) and worn and rather lived-in on the inside.
Bonus Western town! Rock Ridge of Blazing Saddles. You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the New West. You know, morons.
Well, shoot. I meant to write A Fistful of Dollars instead of For A Few Dollars More in that last post.
"You could write a whole blog about great Western town names..." and still have separate blogs for mining camps and saloon names.
I had a feeling Presbyterian Church would (rightfully) get much love in this thread.
Rock Ridge was a good call. Reminds me of the town(s) in Support Your Local Gunfighter/Sheriff.
I'll venture to say that the town in Shane was never mentioned by name....
Lo and behold:
I went down into the basement and dug up my dog-eared, yellowed paperback of SHANE, by Jack Schaefer, assigned reading in the sixth grade. Cursory perusal suggests the town is not named, though there are specific references to Cheyenne, the Big Horn Mining Association, and the nearby town of "Sheridan, nearly a full day's ride away." Schaefer was intentionally writing a quasi-mythological story, like THE VIRGINIAN meets ANTHEM, so it wouldn't surprise me if the book never hung a label on the town. But I'll do a quick read over the weekend and see if I remembered wrong. In the meantime, SHANE aficionados are encouraged to chime in and settle this and save me a couple of hours.
I echo the previous choices, beginning with Matt’s, for Presbyterian Church as the premier cinematic western town, as real and biting as the wind howling down the mountains but enough of a dreamscape to have sleepy-voiced Leonard Cohen as its balladeer. All the best towns in western movies seem suspended between harsh reality and fever dream. Maybe the West was, as well.
A two-fer: Skagway and Dawson in “The Far Country”. I’ve always figured (without any evidence to back up the claim, mind you) that just as Hawks fashioned “Rio Bravo” as a rebuke to “High Noon”, Mann intended “The Far Country” as a flinty, clear-eyed corrective to Ford’s sentimental, self-conscious myth-spinning on the founding of civilization in the West. Skagway is as clean a town as you could hope, all gleaming signs and right angles, but (because?) it’s still a petty fiefdom with a brand-new gallows as town square. While Dawson’s muddy, cluttered promise of rough-scrabble individualism breeds callousness (“I want that coffee ground”) as much as community.
Silver Lode in “Silver Lode”. There’s a charming air of middle-class propriety to Silver Lode, with its picket fences and picnic tables and good neighbors. Hitchcock’s small towns, too, had the same queasy cheer. For every polite citizen there is willing to toss over their well-earned respect for John Payne based on the word of a stranger in town. A stranger played by Dan Duryea, no less. Ah well, at least the picnic tables come in handy during a shoot-out.
Tombstone in “The Spectre of the Gun”. Yes, the old Star Trek episode with Kirk, Spock, et al. playing out the gunfight at the OK Corral. Sure, those Starfleet uniforms look even more ridiculous in this context, and the expressionistic sets owe less to Caligari than the contemporaneous, and similarly minimalist, Batman TV series. But the strikingly unfinished sets—bare twigs thrust in the earth as a parody of a tree, windows and saloon doors hanging against a blood-red sky low enough to touch—are not only unsettling, they also vividly demonstrate how much the West remains a landscape of the imagination. And the floridly artificial visuals help emphasize how subversive a portrait of a central western mythos this is; or have I forgotten another of the endless retellings of this tale that takes the side of the Clantons and McLaurys while finding genuine menace in the implacable visages of Earp and Holliday.
Harmonville in “Open Range”. A little too movie-movie in the final analysis—when the street fills with water it’s the contained torrents of an offscreen hydrant, not the scurrying rage of a flash flood—but that actually makes the film’s marvelous ending shoot-out all the more effective. The geometry of the town has been laid out expressly to facilitate low-crouch waddling beneath windows, furtive peeks round corners, and cross-street rifle blasts. Part of the appeal of the Western is the spatial potentiality of all those dusty main streets with their creaking duckboards, squat stores whose rooftop signs prove just the right height to take aim behind, glass windows just waiting for a body (or a potted plant) to be sent smashing through. The movie as tin-soldier playset? Perhaps, but this is a sterling example.
No idea on "Shane", sorry. A nameless town seems logical to me.
Bruce: Thanks for the "Star Trek" memory jog. Tombstone in "Spectre of the Gun" is truly an astonishing creation, with window frames hanging in space, facades highlighted as mere facades -- a place of the imagination, as you say, and also a reminder of cinema and television's debt to the theater. The finale brings it all back home: Spock readying his mates for the big gundown, mind melding the reminder that "the bullets are not real." Great pick.
Bruce and Matt, you guys beat me to it! I was just coming in to mention Spectre of the Gun so we could get one of the countless depictions of Tombstone on our map. Bruce's description was great. That set sure leaves an impression!
What? No "Hell"? As a kid, I watched "High Plains Drifter" and when they painted the town red and wrote "Hell" over the town sign I was both awed and scared witless. Even as an adult, I still wistfully admire their attempt at psyching-out their foes and that's why I keep a can of red paint in the garage. One of these days my husband is going stay out too late one too many times and then all "Hell" really will break loose.
How about the town of Lago in Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, and its counterpart in Eastwood's more angelic flip side, Pale Rider? In the former, Eastwood makes them paint the town red ("especially the church," says Clint) and rechristens it Hell. The latter is essentially the same movie, with its seemingly supernatural Eastwood character in a more "heavenly" guise. Both towns also seem essentially the same, but I don't recall Pale Rider's town having a pistol packing angry hooker out for revenge.
I read Shane in 9th grade, and I recall the teacher pointing out that the town did not have a name. And I love the lines in Blazing Saddles that describe Rock Ridge's buildings, especially "the orange roof on Howard Johnson's outhouse." What a stickler for details that Mel Brooks is.
I think the town in Ray's "Johnny Guitar" (of which I don't know the name) is also quite astonishing; everything from the opening dust storm to the ending. Mann's "The Naked Spur" may be worth noting because it doesn't have a western town but instead takes place entirely outdoors.
Johnny Guitar definitely had an atmospheric bar - plus it ties into Odie's apparent Joan Crawford fetish (per his Shameful post).
So far as Hell is concerned: great town, worthy of the list, though I was never that warm to the movie. The contest was rigged.
A few others:
Warlock- the course of the story follows the needs of the town. At first, they hire the illegitimate enforcer, Henry Fonda, to establish order. Later, he's replaced with the real law, Richard Widmark. Incidentally, though Fonda wasn't a bad guy, his characters still gave me chills.
3:10 to Yuma - doesn't spend a great deal of time on the streets of Yuma, but you get a good sense of it outside the hotel window.
I would second Rio Bravo as well. I'm not sure how many times I've patrol the mainstreet with Wayne and Dean - but it's been a lot.
The town in Posse was pretty humorous. It's cynical look at politics makes it a distinctly 70s germ. It reminded me a little bit of the Warner Bros. cartoon where Bugs runs against Yosemite.
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