Track of the Cat

Robert Mitchum in Track of the Cat (dir. William A. Wellman, 1954).



The death bed.



Tab Hunter and Beulah Bondi.



Some "moonin'" by Keats.



Beulah Bondi, Carl Switzer (Alfalfa!), Tab Hunter, and Diana Lynn.

Wellman shot this film using as much black and white as he could. A few colorful objects take on added emphasis as a result: a red coat, a roaring fire, a bottle of whiskey. He manages to make the wide open Northern California wilderness look like a small, crowded cemetery (it helps that much of the action is shot on an obvious set). Mitchum plays an elemental jerk, a cynical bullying brother whose lack of empathy and imagination makes him oddly sympathetic, or at least reliable, like winter cold itself. Everyone is brimming over with resentment and contempt, certainly Beulah Bondi as the bitter and twisted matriarch, and Teresa Russell as the disillusioned spinster sister, but even fresh-faced Tab Hunter and Diana Lynn, the young lovers who have to get out somehow from under the tyranny of family dysfunction. Philip Tonge plays the father as comic relief, but it's grim relief: his drunkenness and smarmy lechery are a kind of grotesque affront to human dignity. Carl Switzer's corpse-like Joe Sam, the hundred-year-old Indian lackey, is so thoroughly defeated by life he can barely stand up. He seems fashioned after Beckett's Lucky in Waiting for Godot. William Hopper as brother Art is the only well-adjusted figure among all the anxiety and dread. Early in the film, when he's alone in the wilderness, he watches a young deer bounding through the snow, and his face lights up like an ecstatic mystic ... right before he gets killed by a panther. From then on it's up to everyone else to try to restore the balance that is lost at his death. They don't do a very good job. By the time it's all over (though there isn't really a true ending), the welcoming fires of home look like flames awaiting tired moths.

Yellow Sky

Henry Morgan in Yellow Sky (dir. William A. Wellman, 1948)



Audacious "impossible shot": rifle-barrel view of Gregory Peck



Anne Baxter and Gregory Peck



Richard Widmark

I'd always heard that Pursued is as close as Hollywood ever came to a true noir western, but Yellow Sky is even closer in many ways. There's the theme of criminal camaraderie that threatens constantly to devolve into betrayal and violence. There's the snappy tough-guy dialogue: "You gotta hit some people with an axe." And there's the rich high-contrast black-and-white photography full of skewed angles and obliquely framed spaces. At one point I swear you even see venetian blind shadows. Highly recommended.

The Ox-Bow Incident

Almira Sessions (left) and Mary Beth Hughes in The Ox-Bow Incident (dir. William A. Wellman, 1942).

The Ox-Bow Incident is a short film (75 minutes) with a spare, streamlined plot consisting in a few rudimentary actions: a rancher is reported murdered; a lynch mob forms despite the protests of a small handful of reasonable men; three suspects are found and hanged; it is revealed that the suspects were innocent. A familiar enough morality play, and very affecting. What makes the whole thing feel like much more than the sum of its parts, however, is its unusual density of backstory, a backstory that is never fully elaborated, only meted out in brief, elliptical mini-arcs. Henry Fonda's character is essentially a bystander throughout; it's the tangential information about his past, as spare as that information is, which makes it seem natural that he gets top billing. The woman in his life, played by Mary Beth Hughes, appears for less than five minutes in the middle of the film, and she has nothing to do with the main plot, but she manages to make the weight of her appearance felt as somehow central: she rides in and out on a stagecoach, as though dropping in for a visit from another film in which she is the star. Anthony Quinn's character, similarly, is a story all on his own, albeit a story told only in shadowy fragments. Based on the amount of actual information given about them, virtually all the characters in the film are "flat," but even the most minor supporting characters somehow come off as somewhat "round." The movie is a small masterpiece of tip-of-the-iceberg storytelling.