Lay Those Pistols Down ...

 

No Guns for Our Home, Sweet Home, Counsels Mrs. Cody

Movies Taming Toxic Males --- Part One

Wasn’t enough teaching us to be civilized, movies had to constantly remind us to stay civilized, responsible moviemaking when such thing prevailed long ago. Violence was abhorred except as a last resort, as in provoked, defending life, so on. Now that we had our empire called America, it was incumbent to keep hearts and prairies pure. Dodge City only half-kidded when Alan Hale, formerly of wild inclination, joins the town’s “Pure Prairie League” to tame his fighting instinct. Gunplay we’d get in films came always with a lecture deploring such conduct. Gary Cooper as The Plainsman kills on behalf of advancing civilization, to make the frontier “safe” as President Lincoln directs in an opening segment. Hollywood agreed that the only way to tame the west was with guns, but never was this to be openly endorsed. Always there had to be spinach with the sweets. Cooper as Wild Bill Hickock, real-life personage of untamed times, is shunned and feared by polite society taking over his former free range, Hickock a bad influence and told so. Lifelong pal Buffalo Bill Cody marries, and a first command from wife Helen Burgess is for him to lose Wild Bill for a friend. Hickock’s counterargument is persuasive but ignored: I never was a murderer. I never did fight unless put upon, to which Mrs. Cody simple-replies, Though shall not kill, putting us all on defense for having enjoyed Cooper/Hickock on kill setting and hopeful he’ll stay there. After all, isn’t this why we pay ways in to see The Plainsman? Put away your guns, Mr. Hickock, she insists, what right have you to judge who is to live or die? Here was cold bath we got for heroes conquering the west. That being done and finished well before 1936 when The Plainsman was made, no more should we view these as figures to emulate. To admire them in hindsight was sentiment to be moderated, The Plainsman careful to collect tolls for each ounce of lead Coop pours into villainy. Today we want and largely get modern “heroes” that massacre willy-nilly (look at John Wick), and ache at old films that preach over each fallen varmint.

Wild Bill Writes His 30's Epitaph with Every Skunk He Shoots

Hickock totes up a body count but knows for each one he’s closer to oblivion that will be his own. The west is gettin’ to be a new kind of place. What room is there goin’ to be for a two-gun plainsman?, admission he makes moments before being shot from behind by town-dressed cowardice that would never take him face-on. The film industry, in fact every sort of industry, had more than vested interest in keeping the west, in fact all points, safe for folk to gather in close quarters and be entertained by right thinkers who’d keep a lid on whatever violent or anti-social impulse might awaken the animal within us. That’s why there needed to be a Helen Burgess/Mrs. Cody to amend applications for manifest destiny, scold and party pooper she’ll invariably be, but along always to remind us that gentle ways are best ways. If killing had to be done in bulk, let it be Indians stood in the way of expanding empire, and so it was that Hickock and Cody spend cartridges countless upon pre-approved targets figured for block to progress. Cecil B. DeMille directed The Plainsman. He believed in big brooms to sweep off frontiers we aimed to cross. Mrs. Cody probably annoyed him much as she does us, but laws of the 1936 west unlike ones of mere sixty years before when real-life Hickock/Cody stories took place had to give voice to those who’d now abhor random gunplay. This I suspect was as much a Production Code provision as anyone’s nod to good citizenship. Orderly systems must prevail in a final analysis, rough roads ultimately paved. To revel in violent means of carving a country was to endorse them, and this was dangerous in a country, any country, where conflicts threatened always to bubble to a surface and find expression in possibly hostile action.

Incorruptible Sheriff Errol Spurns Temptation By Bruce Cabot and Gang

Here was what an Establishment feared most, and why Law and Order as an overriding theme defined most if not all westerns. Dodge City was 1939 recognition of the west as wilderness tamed, a wilderness submitting to man’s control and man’s impulse to harness and control other men. Posters promised what the film could not hope to deliver: West of Chicago There Was No Law! West of Dodge City There Was No God! Neither legend was borne out by content of Dodge City, agents for order constrained from action outside rigid realm of due process, lest vigilantism prevail and “we” become no better than “them.” In this case, we are Errol Flynn and comic cohorts (Alan Hale, Guinn Williams), them being Bruce Cabot and outnumbering horde abiding by his instruction. There is plentiful law west of Chicago, too much in fact if we are to get value for leisure time and money. Villainy is rampant yet protectors in the person of Flynn plus unhelpful help are impotent to stop it, even after “Wade Hatton” is driven by a series of unpunished murders to don a badge and presumably put right to multiple wrongs. First John Litel, then Bobs Watson, then Frank McHugh --- how many must die before Errol straps on sixes? Response goes slow and we are frustrated by grinding wheels of justice amidst wide-open town that is Dodge. Action means suddenness and that is not what due process is about. To sate customer appetite comes a saloon donnybrook that relates in no way to narrative otherwise plodding, even as it would linger as Dodge City’s most memorable highlight. The fight among seeming hundreds begins over nothing, continues over less, and fails to resolve any aspect of conflicts at hand. It is instead fan service as defined for Errol Flynn admirer base as constituted in 1939, a harmless if empty nod to those coming to Dodge City for their fill-up of action.

Friends First to the Hoosegow, While Baddies Still Run Loose

The brawl is a nervous substitute for facing up to threat Bruce Cabot and his gang represent. They are by this point responsible for much carnage and unimpeded from starting more. We begin to wonder what outrage must ensue till finally they are subdued. Flynn’s is a relaxed authority, forbidding firearms on streets and arresting his friends first for violating it. We could wonder if Sheriff Wade is on the take, an offer Cabot’s “Jeff Surrett” extends but Hatton rejects, at least initially. Did small-part Ann Sheridan initially play a larger role and tempt the sheriff to turn corrupt? Something seems to slow him down. A fiery finish, too long delayed, sees nature more/less dispose of threats, good folk escaping fire that will engulf evildoers. At no time does Flynn go head-to-head with criminals as Walter Huston startlingly did in Beast of the City made seven years earlier but a seeming century before in terms of resolution it proposes to crime problems. 1932 was far more disordered than 1939, at least on a domestic front, Beast of the City and similar ones proposing swift and wholesale disposal of civic disorder. That would not do for stabler environment that was 1939, Dodge City upholding the new creed by never shooting first, but asking questions, endless questions, toward tie-up both tepid and frustrating. For gloss and Techicolorful entertainment, Dodge City succeeds brilliantly. Audiences loved it and would remember it. Warners staged a rail junket to the actual Dodge City, packed with stars for a world premiere. The trip was itself a model of precision and orderly demonstration, nothing whatever left to chance or possibility of objection … casts, guests, hosting dignitaries all models of good citizenship and beacons for American yesterdays and even better tomorrows.

It's easy to forget that the production Code was as much for curbing violent expression as it was for containing sex content. What loosed hounds for a couple years, primarily 1943, was urgency of war and necessity of our winning it. 1942 was for finding the formula, 1944-45 easing off in slight because by then overseers figured we’d prevail. 1943 however gave way to rage, this for a home front and public far removed from combat. The why was pressing need to sell bonds, see that civilians buy them, simplify same going in and out of theatres that would offer bonds through days and nights. China was designed to stoke domestic fires. We needed to know barbarism our enemies were capable of. The Japanese especially, them more so “other” than Germans. They could be made to look dangerous and jabber like monkeys. Americans wouldn’t realize until years after how they were understood by the Japanese. US soldiers were madmen, murderers gathered out of prisons and asylums loosed upon a civilized people who saw their country under siege now that Yanks was retaking islands and advancing toward the homeland. Japan’s conception of us was every bit as horrific as ours of them. Propaganda saw to that, as aggressively expressed as what US movies propagated. China was a Paramount A picture starring Loretta Young and Alan Ladd. Ladd is a trucker prior to the war selling oil to whichever side will pay, China to him an ongoing cash register. Like Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, he must be brought into the fight by events that will enrage and motivate him. Worst of these is rape of a young Chinese woman by “rapacious Japs,” a term I looked up when first I saw an ad for China in a book published years ago. “Rapacious” means “aggressively greedy or grasping,” which I’d guess would define most in times of war, but hanged if I’ve accused anyone in civilian life of being rapacious. Should I float the word next time I get annoyed? 

Hands Up, Guns Down, but They Forget It's No Longer a Code-Compliant War Ladd is Fighting

Such graphic was sugar water beside what else merchandisers resorted to in selling China. Sample ads are here to tell the tale. Ever seen any raw as these? One proposes China as “The Picture to Make You Fighting Mad.” So how well might that have worked? Civilians could do little more than buy bonds, save scrap, tires, bacon grease. Getting mad enough might lead to a bad day at Black Rock, for real rather than fictionalized like by 1954 when such possibility could be openly addressed. A shirtless Ladd “Turns the Heat on Hirohito” while sporting a body that looks borrowed from Gordon Scott, him vowing that for “every girl trapped, a thousand Japs die,” this then-expected of breathless promotion. China came close to promise of such ads with what ranks among steeliest of get-even moments in movies made during the war. Here was where Code counsel against excess violence was suspended, due process of Dodge City and restraint for Wild Bill Hickock shelved for emergency conditions. Ladd, a civilian as noted, stands Japanese soldiers against a wall and shoots all three in cold blood for committing the brutal and offscreen rape. This was shocking in 1943, the more so now as we assume such extreme never got into films far back as China. Well, they did, and follow-up discussion by Ladd with Loretta Young is every bit as serrated. “Just shot three Japs. Blew them to bits against a wall and I’ve got no more feelings about them that if they were flies on a manure heap. As a matter of fact, I kind of enjoyed it.” Now keep in mind, Laddie was the hero, not a heavy. Not even an “anti-hero.” His action and talk to follows makes Henry Hull’s Objective Burma speech sound like an address to Rotarians.