In 1930, Edna Ferber wrote Cimarron.  The title comes from the Spanish word “cimarrón,” which has a variety of meanings, but principally that of “wild” and “untamed.”  More specifically, it refers to the parts of Oklahoma that had belonged to the Indians; but upon reflection it was thought better to think of it as being land that had been given to the Indians, owing to the generosity of the white man; and then it was thought better still to rescind that act of generosity and give the land to white people.

And thus it was that in 1889, the Unassigned Lands, consisting of 2,000,000 acres in central Oklahoma, were to be opened up for settlement.  In a rational world, there would have been a lottery, the winners of which would have been given title to the 160 acres that they had won, after which they could then make their way to that plot of land at a leisurely pace, thereby taking possession of it in a civilized manner.  But such thinking on my part betrays a failure to understand the pioneer spirit that made this country great. Instead, there was a free-for-all, every-man-for-himself, pell-mell rush of 50,000 people, in wagons, on horseback, on bicycles, and on foot, unleashed on this territory precisely at noon on April 22.  In the novel, reference is made to men being trampled on by horses or shot by Sooners.  It is with this land run that the 1931 movie based on this novel begins.  If you want to visually represent the idea of Manifest Destiny, you might show covered wagons or railroad trains moving from right to left on the screen, but nothing can compare with such a spectacle as this.

Among this horde is Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), who embodies the pioneer spirit in a big way.  In fact, some people call him “Cim,” indicating that he personifies this wild and untamed land.  On horseback, he is the first to arrive at the plot of land he had already picked out, but Dixie Lee, who pretends to be a damsel in distress, manages to cheat him out of it.  Thus thwarted, he returns to his wife Sabra (Irene Dunn) in Wichita, Kansas, to take her and their son, whom he officially named “Cim,” to Osage, Oklahoma, where he plans to start up a newspaper.

Throughout this movie, I kept wondering if Yancey was supposed to be an admirable character portrayed by a bad actor, or an irritating character excellently portrayed by a good actor. By the time the movie was over, I had concluded that it was the worst of both worlds. Richard Dix gives a hammy performance of a someone we are supposed to like, but who is in fact an insufferable jerk.  And this notwithstanding the fact that the movie won the Oscar for Best Picture and Dix was nominated for Best Actor.

In other words, this movie would not be so bad if it wanted us to regard Yancey as obnoxious, and Richard Dix merely overacted the part as if he were performing on the stage, where a loud, resonating voice and sweeping gestures are needed for the benefit of those sitting in the back rows. But the movie goes to great lengths to get us to admire Yancey, and the dissonance between what the movie expects of us and what we are actually feeling as we behold this preposterous character is grating.

Irene Dunne, who was nominated for Best Actress, does a decent job of playing Sabra, for whom we have some sympathy, given all she has to put up with, even though the movie really does not want us to like her very much, because it is continually showing her as lacking the virtues that Yancey possesses. In reading the novel, too, it does not take long to get tired of how Yancey is always right, and Sabra is always wrong, which is especially exasperating on those occasions when it is clear that Sabra is right, and Yancey is wrong.  At one point in the movie, when she tries to advise him on some matter regarding the newspaper, he tells her, “Don’t you be worrying your pretty head about that.”

In the novel, Yancey lies to some United States marshals.  They are looking for some men that robbed a bank and killed the cashier.  Yancey knows where they are, but pretends he hasn’t seen them.  After they leave, Sabra says that the person that shields a criminal is just as bad as the criminal himself.  The text continues as follows:

Yancey looked back at her….  His smile was mischievous, sparkling, irresistible.  “Don’t be righteous, Sabra.  It’s middle class—and a terrible trait in a woman.”

Apparently, this novel is in the thrall of some romantic notions about outlaws, and we are supposed to like the way Yancey can move freely among such men.  The novel apologizes for outlaws such as these, saying it’s the government’s fault.  It has taken the free range away from the cowboys and given it to the homesteaders, leaving them no option but a life of crime.  If you’re thinking they could have gotten a homestead themselves, or a job in a store, you just aren’t in the spirit of this novel.

Yancey is a lawyer, but the novel is at pains to make us aware, again and again, that Yancey has all the cultural refinement of a professor of literature, so many are his allusions to mythology and quotations of verse, all of which are unrecognized by Sabra, who is portrayed as an ignoramus.  In other words, Yancey excels in masculine virtues, swaggering around like a pirate or a cavalier, while at the same time showing off his brilliant intellect and sophisticated ways, in contrast to little, narrowminded Sabra who hasn’t a spark to her soul.  Given this depiction of Sabra, it is hard to believe this movie was based on a novel written by a woman.

Sabra is a racist who dislikes the “dirty, filthy Indians,” while Yancey is respectful of Indians and regrets the way they have been treated by white men.  In the novel, she thinks it absurd that Yancey regards them as human beings.  There is the suggestion that Yancey is part Indian himself.  In the movie, her mother believes that he is a half-breed.  Speaking of her mother, Sabra is from the Venable family, first introduced to us in the novel with the adjective “inbred.”

Sabra does not, however, express quite as much animosity toward the black race, because, as she puts it in the novel, “Niggers are different.  They know their place.”  As for the movie, it embraces the stereotypes common to when it was made. Unbeknownst to Yancey or Sabra, Isaiah, a black servant, stows away on one of the covered wagons they use on their trip to Osage.  He is a young boy, part coon and part Tom, who loves watermelon.  Yancey does not express the same sympathy for Negroes that he does for Indians, or talk about how they were mistreated by white people.  Edna Ferber says Isaiah has a simian appearance.

In the movie, when some outlaws begin shooting up the town, Isaiah runs out into the street to get little Cim, who is in danger.  He saves Cim’s life, but ends up getting shot and killed in doing so.  In the novel, however, Isaiah is not vouchsafed a hero’s death. Quite the contrary.  When he is a few years older, Isaiah gets an Osage Indian maiden pregnant.  When she has the baby, it is clearly a “negro child.”  The Osage Indians don’t allow this form of miscegenation, so the girl, her baby, and Isaiah are put to death by slow torture, which lasts several days.  That’s right, the baby is tortured for several days right along with his mother and Isaiah.  It’s easy to see why that never made it into the movie.

To round out the prejudices considered here, we now turn to antisemitism.  Sol Levy is the “town Jew.”  He walks down the street leading a mule that carries the merchandise he is selling.  The town’s riffraff start bothering him, finally shooting near his feet to frighten him.  He falls back against a cross-shaped structure, with his hands extended so that they rest on each of the arms of that cross. He is the stereotypical Jew, one who is a helpless victim, which allows Yancey to play the savior, protecting him from the bad guys.

And this is ironic, since Ferber was a Jew herself.  In describing the incident where the ruffians are shooting at Sol’s feet and other parts of his body, often missing him by only a fraction of an inch, she says:

He had no weapon.  He would not have known how to use it if he had possessed one.  He was not of a race of fighters.

Come again?  Did she never read the Tanakh, more commonly known as the Old Testament, about the massacres of the Amalekites, the Amorites, and the Midianites, culminating in  Joshua’s genocidal slaughter of the Canaanites, followed by years of warfare where the Hebrews vanquished the Philistines, the Moabites, the Aramaeans, the Edomites, and any other tribe that happened to be in their vicinity?

Anyway, Yancey comes to Sol’s rescue:

At that first instant of seeing him as he rushed out of his office, Yancey thought, subconsciously, “He looks like—like—“  But the resemblance eluded him then.  It was only later, after the sickening incident had ended, that he realized of Whom it was that the Jew had reminded him as he stood there, crucified against the scale.

This image of Sol and the cross, establishing a connection between him and Jesus, puzzled me.  Later in the movie, when Yancey is giving an ecumenical sermon inclusive of all varieties of Christianity, Sol asks, with a pitiful look in his eyes, if it is all right for him to be there.  Yancey assures him that it is. Further on in the movie, Yancey defends Dixie Lee at her trial. At the moment where Yancey is quoting Jesus, the camera focuses on Sol.

My guess is that this all this is a way of apologizing for Jews, saying that deep down they are really Christians.  They just don’t realize it yet. So, we should forgive them.  Perhaps this is what Ferber had in mind when she said Sol was not of a race of fighters:  she was not thinking of a Jew like Joshua or David, but rather a Jew like Jesus.

In the 1930s, Richard C. Kahn directed a lot of B Westerns with an all-black cast, but other than that, African Americans were not featured in Westerns as gun-toting cowboys.  Starting in the 1960s, however, perhaps as an effort on the part of Hollywood to make amends, African Americans began showing up in mainstream Westerns as men that were good with a gun.  But have you ever seen a Western in which a Jew strapped on a gun, killed the bad guy, and then got the girl?  There were a lot of Jews in the Old West, many of whom, I have no doubt, were good with a gun and fully capable of defending themselves.  But you would never know it from watching the movies.

There was one movie, The Frisco Kid (1979), a silly comedy, where Gene Wilder plays a dimwitted Polish rabbi in the Old West.  He does manage at one point to shoot and kill a bad guy, after which he does get married.  But he mostly has to be protected by Harrison Ford, the real Western hero, while the movie makes Wilder’s character the butt of its dumb jokes.

Getting back to the movie Cimarron, in 1893 the Cherokee Strip was to be opened up, which would be even bigger than the land run of 1889.  In the novel, Yancey argues that if they participate in the run for the Cherokee Strip, they can get 160 acres and start a ranch.  Sabra points out that if it’s a ranch he wants, he can just buy a plot of land right near Osage.  Leave it to a woman to take all the fun out of something.  But we know what his real problem is:  Yancey is bored with the newspaper he started, and he is bored with Sabra.  Early in the novel, Ferber mentions that there were not only rumors that Yancey had Indian blood in him, but also that he had a squaw and lots of papooses somewhere that he had abandoned.  That being the case, it should come as no surprise that he is willing to abandon Sabra and their two children as well, just so he can have some fun pioneering again.  The movie, however, wants us to think it is Sabra’s fault for not being willing to go with him.

Five years later, he shows back up, wearing a Rough Rider uniform.  In the novel, he is on his way to fight in the Spanish American War; in the movie, he just got back from the fighting.  The reason for the difference is simplification, often necessary when bringing a book to the big screen.  In this way, Yancey abandons Sabra only twice in the movie, whereas he deserted her three times in the novel.  In any event, his interest in getting some land in the Cherokee Strip so he could start a ranch must have quickly lost its appeal, for we never hear another thing about it.  In the novel, Sabra falls into his arms, unable to resist the charms of the man she so dearly loves.  When Yancey has a look as his son, who essentially has feminine features, he is disappointed.  “’Gods!  How the son degenerates from the sire!’’’ Yancey says to him in exasperation, while no doubt pleased at being able to cite that line from The Iliad, once more showing off his impossible erudition.

But he’s not through doing that.  When Sabra recovers from her thrill at seeing Yancey again, she remembers that he had deserted her.  When she expresses her anger at the thought of this, he responds by referring to her as Penelope.

“Who?” she asks.

He then quotes from The Odyssey:

“Strange lady, surely to thee above all womankind the Olympians have given a heart that cannot be softened.  No other woman in the world would harden her heart to stand thus aloof from her husband, who after travail and sore had come to her … to his own country.”

“You and your miserable Milton,” she replies.

You see, once while they were walking down the street, he started reciting the poem “Delilah,” which sounded to her like a bunch of nonsense, and then heard him refer to Milton, it’s author.  So, she figured this must be another quotation from that same guy.

A few pages later, Ferber refers to Yancey as Odysseus.  The comparison is not only absurdly romantic, but completely inappropriate.  Yancy can’t wait to go fight in the Spanish American War, but Odysseus was the world’s first draft dodger.  When Palamedes came to get him to fight in the Trojan War, Odysseus pretended to be crazy, hoping to get out of it.  The ruse didn’t work, but the point is that unlike Yancey, Odysseus did not want to leave his wife and son to go fight in some pointless war.

Shortly after his reunion with Sabra, Yancey finds out that Dixie Lee is about to go on trial for being a public nuisance (i.e., a prostitute).  Sabra, it seems, is a heartless prude, who wants to run her out of town.  Yancey realizes that Dixie Lee is more to be pitied than censured, and successfully defends her in court against the legal action brought against her by Sabra, thereby humiliating his own wife.

The misogyny in this movie is recapitulated in their children. Their daughter Donna is a shrew.  She is fed up with the way everyone else is oil rich, while her family is just getting by on what comes in from the newspaper.  She declares she is going to find a rich man and marry him.  Apparently, she does, since we later see her with a man old enough to be her grandfather. Their son Cim, on the other hand, is such a nice guy that he even intends to marry an Indian. But why stop there? The whole town is like that. With the exception of a few scoundrels, the men are genuine and likable, while the decent women of the community are snobs and prudes.

When Yancey abandons Sabra again, the movie sees no need to belabor this second desertion of her, but merely mentions it in an intertitle. Many years go by, during which time Sabra becomes a United States Representative, her reward, presumably, for finally realizing how enlightened her husband had been all along. At a political banquet in her honor, she gives credit to the contribution women have made in civilizing Oklahoma. Given all the sexism we have seen up to this point, this belated tribute to women sounds like an apologetic afterthought.

Sabra barely manages to fight back the tears as she tries to tell herself that Yancey is still alive somewhere. But then it turns out that some old roughneck working on an oil rig nearby has been severely injured because he used his body to shield the rest of the crew from some exploding nitroglycerin; and Sabra, hearing that the man’s name is Yancey, rushes to him, where he dies in her arms while blathering about what a loving wife and mother she is. Of course, we cannot help but think that even though he was working right there in the local oil fields, he apparently did not want to have anything to do with her, because he never even let her know he was in town.

And then the cover is removed from an obscenely huge statue of Yancey in honor of the pioneers who made Oklahoma what it is. There is another figure, somewhat smaller in stature, standing behind him, but it is not Sabra. It is a generic Indian.

The run for the Unassigned Lands in 1889 is just the sort of spectacle that begged to be filmed in a big way, in Cinemascope and in color, and with more carnage.  But that is about the only justification for the 1960 remake.  Characters in this movie have different relationships with one another, and events that take place are changed around a bit, but none of it seems to matter one way or the other.  Glenn Ford, who plays Yancey in this version, is a better actor, but the character he plays is just as irritating as ever, if not more so.

Some of the misogyny is expunged by simply eliminating Yancey’s bigoted daughter and by eliminating the persecution and trial of Dixie Lee (Anne Baxter) by the women of Osage, although we are still expected to think Sabra (Maria Schell) is to blame whenever Yancey deserts her.  The African American stereotype is avoided by eliminating Isaiah.  However, Sol Levy is still depicted as the helpless victim, placed in a crucified posture.  In that way, Yancey can once again be seen coming to the rescue of this Jesus avatar.

As the movie Unforgiven opens, we see a man digging a hole near a medium-sized tree, while we hear “Claudia’s Song,” a nice piece of sentimental music.  From the written prologue, we gather that the man is William Munny (Clint Eastwood), burying his wife Claudia, who died of smallpox, leaving him to raise two young children.  Munny used to be an outlaw, but Claudia got him to quit drinking and give up his wicked ways. Whenever we hear her eponymous melody, we know that Munny is still under her influence.

The scene shifts to the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, and to Greely’s Beer Garden and Billiard Parlor in particular, which is really just a saloon and a whorehouse.  One of the whores named Delilah giggles when she sees the small penis of one of her customers, a man named Mike, and he gets out his knife and starts trying to cut her up.  His friend Davey is in the next room, humping on Strawberry Alice, and the two of them hear Delilah’s screams and come running.  Mike yells at Davey to hold Delilah. It’s a little hard to see what is going on because the room is dark, and so, just from watching the movie, I never thought that Davey did anything.  However, in the “Original Screenplay,” it says that Davey reluctantly holds Delilah while Mike slashes her face.

The present owner of Greely’s, a guy named Skinny, breaks it up by putting a gun to Mike’s head. Someone fetches Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman), the sheriff.  He decides that Delilah is essentially the property of Skinny.  As a result, Little Bill merely fines Mike and Davey for cutting Delilah’s face up.  They are told to bring Skinny seven horses in compensation for the damage to his property.

The whore with a heart of gold is a Western cliché, but in this movie, we have six whores with six hearts of gold.  They are outraged by the way Little Bill let Mike and Davey off with just a fine. They put their savings together and put out the word to their customers that they are willing to pay a thousand dollars to anyone that kills the two men that cut up Delilah.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas, we see that Munny is a pig farmer, which makes me think of Shane (1953).  In that movie, Alan Ladd, as the title character, walks into a bar to get some soda pop for Joey (Brandon De Wilde), a young boy, not old enough to enter the bar himself.  Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson) is sitting at a table with some other cowpokes.  When he sees Shane, he says to the bartender, “Will!  Let’s keep the smell of pigs out from where we’re drinking.”  Chris works for Rufus Riker (Emile Meyer), who owns a ranch. We know they are real men because they herd cattle. Homesteaders, on the other hand, may have a single dairy cow, but they typically own pigs.

And so, we see that Munny has sunk pretty low.  To make matters worse, we see him falling down in the mud trying to move the pigs around, mud that is probably mixed with feces.  While this is going on, a young man rides up, calling himself the “Schofield Kid.”  He’s heard about Munny’s reputation for being a killer, and he wants him for a partner to help collect the bounty of a thousand dollars for killing the two men that cut up Delilah.  Except that the story, as he relates it, has grown some.  He says that the two men not only cut up the face of a “lady,” but they also cut her eyes out, cut off her ears, and cut off her teats. This is the first indication we have that the stories about the Old West were exaggerations, which suggests that this is a revisionist Western.

At first, Munny declines the offer to be the Schofield Kid’s partner, saying he’s not like that anymore.  However, he soon decides to go for the bounty.  He is no longer good with a pistol, but he decides he can make do with his shotgun.  And his horse is not used to be ridden on, so he has trouble mounting her.  But he eventually manages to ride over to the farm of his old partner, Ned (Morgan Freeman), and talk him into going along with him.  Ned agrees, grabs his Spencer rifle, and they set out to catch up with the Schofield Kid.

Munny keeps talking about how his wife Claudia got him to quit drinking and killing. Another Western cliché is the gunfighter with a guilty past, and he has the guiltiest past of them all.  He thinks back on some of the men he killed, men that he admits didn’t even deserve it.  Later we find out that he was responsible for setting off some dynamite that killed women and children.  But Munny keeps saying, as a kind of mantra, that Claudia changed him, that he’s not like that anymore.  It’s just that he needs the money for a new start for him and his children.

Meanwhile, another man is on a train heading to Big Whiskey to collect the bounty.  He is English Bob (Richard Harris), accompanied by W.W. Beauchamp, his biographer, who has written about English Bob’s exploits in his book The Duke of Death.  There is a discussion on the train about the recent shooting of President Garfield.  English Bob says that’s why it would be better if America were ruled by a monarch, since people are intimidated by majesty and are less likely to assassinate a king or a queen.  Not only does he have the effrontery to come over here and tell us how to run our country, but he doesn’t seem to realize that being a gunfighter is an American preserve.  We know things are not going to end well for English Bob.

As English Bob and Beauchamp arrive in Big Whiskey in a mud wagon, they pass a sign that says firearms are not allowed in town and must be deposited in the county office. When they get off the mud wagon, a deputy politely informs them that they must surrender their sidearms for the duration of their visit. Although there is a pistol in full view on English Bob’s hip, he denies that he or his companion have any sidearms.

Now, if I rode into town hoping to collect a bounty and was told that guns had to be turned in to the sheriff, I would have turned in my gun.  Then I would have looked around town, talked to the whores, and reflected on this unexpected turn of events. Once I decided what I was going to do, whether to give up on the bounty altogether or try to collect it by other means, I would have told the sheriff I was leaving, received back my gun, and ridden out of town, intent of leaving for good or executing Plan B.

Anyway, after refusing to hand the deputy his pistols, English Bob gets himself a shave. When he comes out of the barbershop, he is surrounded by Little Bill and his deputies. Little Bill takes two guns away from English Bob, and proceeds to knock him down in the street and then repeatedly kick him, to serve as a warning to anyone else who might be thinking about collecting that bounty.  He then throws both English Bob and Beauchamp in jail.

Meanwhile, Munny and Ned finally catch up with the Schofield Kid.  But just before they do, Ned gets curious about Munny’s sex life.  Ned is so needy sexually that he hated the idea of leaving his wife, an Indian named Sally Two Trees, even for just a couple of weeks.  So, he wonders if Munny ever goes to town to have sex with a whore. Munny says Claudia wouldn’t want him doing that.

And then Ned asks him if he masturbates.  That qualifies this movie as a modern Western, suitable for the 1990s.  Of course, if the movie had been made ten years later, Ned and Munny would have pulled a Brokeback Mountain (2005).  And if made ten years after that, around the time that The Shape of Water (2017) was receiving the Academy Award for Best Picture, I suppose Munny would have found a deep, meaningful relationship with one of those pigs he had.  It’s important for a movie to stay up with the times.

Back at the sheriff’s office, Little Bill is reading The Duke of Death, only he insists on calling it “The Duck of Death” instead.  He is especially interested in this one part of the book, telling how English Bob protected a lady by killing seven men with two pistols.  It turns out that Little Bill was there that night, and he proceeds to tell Beauchamp how it really was.  And how it really was turns out to be a sorry mess.

Beauchamp becomes so interested that Little Bill lets him out of his cell so that he can start writing stuff down.  Little Bill revels in his revisionism, and Beauchamp becomes more interested in that than in the romanticized stories he has been writing about English Bob.  The next day, Little Bill runs English Bob out of town, but Beauchamp stays behind.  They end up at Little Bill’s house, which he has been building himself. It’s a running joke among the deputies that Little Bill is no carpenter, one of them saying there is not one straight angle in the whole house.

That night, while Beauchamp is writing down more of Little Bill’s revisionist tales, it starts raining, and the roof starts leaking in several places.  Beauchamp jokes that Little Bill should hang the carpenter, not realizing who the carpenter was.  The joke does not go over well with Little Bill.  The house is symbolic of his revisionism, in that it is as ugly and deformed as the stories he tells.

Back out on the prairie, the Schofield Kid asks Munny if that story is true about how two deputies had rifles pointed at him, and he drew his gun and killed both of them. Munny says he doesn’t “recollect,” either because he really forgot, on account of being drunk at the time, or because he feels guilty about his past and doesn’t want to talk about it.  The Kid then claims he has killed five men, although Ned and Munny don’t believe him, and, as we later learn, it turns out he’s never killed anyone at all. Once again, the movie is saying that stories of the Old West were exaggerations, if not complete fabrications, as when men like English Bob and the Schofield Kid brag about their fictitious exploits.

But later on, Ned says to Munny that the way he remembered it, there were three deputies that had the drop on him, not just two, and Munny killed all three of them. Munny says he’s not like that anymore.  This is the opposite what we have seen up till now.  The true story about Munny killing three deputies changed over the years to just two deputies in order to make the story more believable.  And whereas English Bob and the Schofield Kid made up stories about themselves, Munny refuses to acknowledge the stories about him that really happened.  This is the first instance of anti-revisionism in this movie, a counterpoint that gets stronger as we go along.

Eventually they arrive in the town of Big Whiskey and go into Skinny’s saloon.  Munny has become ill, owing to the cold rain they have been riding in.  While the Kid and Ned go upstairs to discuss the bounty and get a little advance on it by having sex with a couple of whores, Munny remains seated at a table, shivering. Word has gotten out about their arrival, and soon Little Bill and his deputies show up, surrounding Munny, as Little Bill asks him if he or his friends are carrying any guns.  Munny says he is not armed, and his friends don’t have guns either.

Here we go again!  At first, I thought English Bob was just being foolish in denying he had a couple of pistols on him, as another way of saying that British immigrants have no business being in a Western, especially in the role of a gunslinger.  But now we have Munny doing the same thing.  And so, once again, Little Bill finds that Munny does have a pistol, and once again, he starts kicking him just as he did English Bob, after which he throws Munny out into the street.  Strawberry Alice tells the Kid and Ned where they can hide out, somewhere outside of town. They find Munny, now barely on his horse, and they head on out to the place Alice told them about.

This is exactly where they could have ended up without any trouble.  Munny could have admitted that they didn’t see the sign, apologized while handing over his gun, and admitted his friends had guns too.  Then, the next day, they could have told Little Bill they were leaving town, collected their weapons, and ridden out to the house Alice told them about. Instead, Munny has not only been beaten severely, but he no longer has his pistol anymore either.

In expressing my dismay at the way these two men, English Bob and William Munny, refuse to hand over their guns, I am not saying that this movie is being unrealistic in this regard.  It reminds me of those stories we see on the news where some guy is pulled over by the police and asked to show his drivers license, and instead of simply complying with that request, he wants to argue about it.  Some people are like that, stubbornly resistant to authority, even when it is likely to cause them grief.

The fact that some people are like that does not answer the question, why are English Bob and William Munny like that?  That is to say, the mere fact that there are people like that in real life does not, by itself, warrant their being in a movie.  It has to be justified dramatically as well.  The only thing I can figure is that having Little Bill kick Munny all around the barroom floor makes the revenge Munny gets on Little Bill later on all the sweeter.  And then, having English Bob do the same thing previously, only to get kicked around in the street, normalizes their behavior.  If Munny had been the only one to do this, we might have said to ourselves, “Boy, that guy sure is dumb!”  But having had English Bob do it as well is intended to make us believe that gunslingers in the Old West, who went around killing people on a regular basis, would have been strongly averse to handing over their firearms.

After three days, Munny recovers.  He and his two companions find out where Davey is with some other cowboys herding cattle.  Ned shoots at him with his Spencer rifle, hitting his horse instead, which falls on Davey, breaking his leg.  As he tries to crawl away, Ned can’t bring himself to finish him off.  Munny takes the rifle and finally hits Davey in the gut.  He is dying, but slowly and in much pain.

This is not the kind of kill we usually see in a classical Western, where men die immediately, unless their death is delayed for just a moment in order to allow for some final bit of dialogue.  The ugliness of Davey’s death brings us back to the revisionist mode.  After it’s over, Ned says he can’t do it anymore, and he leaves to go back home.

Later, Munny and the Kid find out where Mike, the other man with the reward on his head, is holed up. When Mike comes out of the cabin to use the outhouse, the Kid sneaks up on him, opens the outhouse door, and shoots him right in the middle of his bowel movement.  And this leads to a fundamental principle:  if you want to make a movie that the audience will regard as revisionist, it helps to have an outhouse scene. Outhouses in Westerns were frowned upon while the Production Code was still in force, and a classical Western would have eschewed them in any event.  But once the Production Code was replaced by the ratings system in 1968, outhouses started showing up regularly.  Making sure that bowel movements are given their due lends a Western an aura of authenticity.  At first, we only saw them from the outside, but in 1972, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid moved us right into the outhouse, where we found Robert Duvall and another man sitting side by side, discussing their next robbery, while they each were taking a dump.  If only that movie had been filmed in Smell-O-Vision. That would have really have been revisionist!

So, if Davey’s death was unromantic on account of being drawn out and miserable, Mike’s death in the outhouse is downright ignominious, and the Kid can take no glory in it.  In short, the deaths of these two men seem to confirm Little Bill’s account of how messy and unpleasant things really were in the Old West.

Unfortunately for Ned, some cowboys from the same ranch where Davey and Mike worked catch up with him as he tries to make it back home.  After working him over, they bring him to Little Bill, who proceeds to interrogate him with a bullwhip, trying to find out who his friends are and where they are hiding out.  But Ned won’t talk, so Bill tortures him even more, so much so that Ned dies.

Unaware of Ned’s death, the Kid sits under a tree, drinking whiskey out of a bottle, while Munny watches Kate, one of the whores, riding up from town in the distance. The Kid admits that Mike was the first man he ever killed, and it is clear that it bothers him. At this point, Munny begins delivering some heavy lines.  “It’s a hell of thing killing a man,” he says.  “You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever going to have.”  The Kid looks for reassurance, saying they had it coming, hoping Munny will agree with him. Munny replies, “We’ve all got it coming, Kid.”  No one in a revisionist Western ever said anything like that.

They find out from Kate that Ned died, and that before he did, he told Little Bill that his partner was William Munny, the man who killed women and children when he dynamited the Rock Island and Pacific in ’69, and who killed a U.S. Marshall in ’73.  After Ned died from the beating, Skinny propped him up in an open coffin outside his saloon, and put a sign on him saying that this is what happens to assassins.  While Kate tells them this, Munny takes the whiskey bottle from the Kid and starts drinking from it.

That night, a storm comes up.  Munny gives the Kid the money to take out his cut and then see to it that the rest is split between his kids and Sally Two Trees, in case he doesn’t make it back.  He takes the Kid’s Schofield pistol, which the Kid says he is never going to use again anyway, and then Munny rides into town. Just before he reaches Greely’s, he throws the empty whiskey bottle on the ground, and we know he is now the killer he used to be.

In the saloon, plans are being made to ride after Munny and the Kid, but then Munny steps in through the door, holding a shotgun, just as we hear a crash of thunder.  It’s real wrath-of-God stuff. We see the look on Beauchamp’s face, as the camera slowly moves in on him, and it is clear that he is spellbound.  All that revisionist stuff is gone from his head, as he realizes he is about to witness something more glorious than anything he ever wrote about.

After finding out that Skinny owns the place, Munny shoots him for decorating his place with Ned’s body. He starts to shoot Little Bill, but the shotgun misfires.  He draws his pistol, and what follows is reminiscent of the story Little Bill made fun of when he was reading from The Duke of Death, only this time it’s real. Munny shoots Little Bill and then one deputy after another.  And except for Little Bill, who is still alive, the death of each of the deputies is quick and clean, not slow, painful, and ugly, like that of Davey and Mike.

In the “Original Script,” Munny says to those still in the room, “Every asshole that doesn’t want to get shot best clear out the back quick.”  But in the movie, he says, “Any man don’t want to get killed better clear on out the back.”  Now, I’m no expert on prosody, but this version strikes me as poetic, as having the kind of meter one might find in a ballad that tells a tale like this.  And it is fitting that such a line be spoken by this man at this moment, as he undoes all the revisionism that has come before.

Little Bill is still alive, and he makes a feeble effort to shoot Munny, but Munny knocks the pistol aside and points Ned’s Spencer rifle, which he retrieved from where it was in the room, at Little Bill’s head.  Little Bill says, “I don’t deserve this.  To die like this.  I was building a house.”

His reference to the house is fitting.  Munny is about to put an end to Little Bill’s life, and that will mean the end of that ugly house he was working on, which is a metaphor for the way Munny is putting an end to the ugly revisionism that Little Bill and his house represent.

Munny delivers another heavy line, saying, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”  That sounds good, but I’m not sure what it means.  After all, it would seem that Little Bill does deserve to die for all that he has done. Perhaps this refers back to Munny’s earlier remark.  If “we’ve all got it coming,” then it is not a question of who deserves to be killed, but rather who it is that gets to do the killing.

Before he leaves, Munny threatens the whole town, telling them that they had better not shoot at him as he is leaving, or he’ll not only kill any man that does so, but he’ll kill his wife and burn his house down. Now we know why there has been so much emphasis on the fact that Munny once killed women and children, for the townsfolk know that he means what he says about killing wives.

Munny further threatens them, telling them to bury Ned right and not to bother the whores, or he’ll come back and kill everyone in the town.  Then he rides away, leaving behind the fearful citizens of Big Whiskey and an awestruck W.W. Beauchamp, already envisioning his next book, which will surpass everything he has ever written.

The epilogue tells us that Munny used his share of the bounty to move to San Francisco, where he became a successful dry-goods merchant.  In short, the movie has a happy ending, as every classical Western should.