Wichita
With Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Walter Coy, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Jack Elam, and Mae Clarke.
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After the opening credits, for instance. They’re accompanied by Tex Ritter belting out the hokey title tune, which seems to recount the entire plot in advance–as good a way as any of making us feel we’re in familiar territory. Then we’re out on the range with the cattlemen, whom we have no reason yet to see as villains. The first glimpse we get of Earp is as a tiny speck on the horizon, immediately seen by them (and therefore us) as an eerie potential menace. But they wind up inviting him to join them for dinner, and later two of the cattlemen–brothers named Gyp (Lloyd Bridges) and Hal (Rayford Barnes)– try to steal his money when they think he’s asleep.
A Goody Two-shoes who’s also a little creepy because he’s an outsider, Earp seems solid only in comparison with the cattlemen, all-too-human louts who can’t help themselves, and with the local businessmen, who change their positions so often we can’t be sure what side they’re on. They’re confused in part because as soon as Earp gives up the idea of starting his own business and becomes marshal, he outlaws all guns in town except his own. This strikes most of the businessmen as too much of a good thing, because they fear the ban on firearms will be bad for trade (one of many details that feel up-to-the-minute). In the end no one’s really in control–not even Earp, who seems trapped in a destiny he’d rather avoid. To confuse matters further, Earp turns out to have a couple of brothers, who enter the film as potential villains before we realize who they are and why they’ve come to town. They create a disturbing rhyme with Gyp and Hal as we gradually discover that the main difference between “good” and “bad” is the direction in which the guns are pointed.
All eight of these films have some noir elements, and the literal as well as metaphysical darkness helps define Tourneur’s stamp. (Chris Fujiwara’s definitive 1998 critical study, one of the best pieces of auteurist criticism I know, is aptly called Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, with reference to the expertly made 1957 thriller Nightfall.) Other defining traits include an insistence on showing realistic light sources in interior scenes; a slightly surreal manner of lighting and filming exteriors that makes them feel like interiors; an emphasis on doorways, windows, and other thresholds in sets that are thoughtfully constructed and furnished; direction of actors that encourages underplaying and generally reflects the nuanced sensibility of an unostentatious humanist; and, more elusively, a preoccupation with death and a general sense that the universe is ruled by irrational elements. Tourneur believed to some extent in the supernatural and the paranormal but was too intelligent to come across as a crank; his interviews suggest he was more interested in the notion of parallel universes than in ghosts.
Tourneur is one of the few important American directors of the 50s who welcomed CinemaScope, arguing that “it reproduces approximately our field of vision,” “obliges the director to work harder,” “makes it possible to create interesting relationships between characters in the foreground and those in the background,” and “makes it necessary to compose.” Wichita, his first film in CinemaScope, is also, as Fujiwara points out, his major work in CinemaScope, though lamentably it’s almost impossible to see the film in that format. Turner Classic Movies, which generally letterboxes all widescreen films, cropped it horribly when screening it in 1999. The closest I’ve ever come to seeing it in the proper ratio was on a copy made from a British TV broadcast that showed the film in wide-screen proportions but trimmed both sides of the frame. I’ve been told that LaSalle Bank is screening a 16-millimeter ‘Scope print, but I don’t know how much of the original format will be visible and undistorted.
