Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project - Posts Tagged "john-wayne"
The Searchers
The end of the television’s night-owl show came on, a movie with John Wayne, a rocking chair, horses, and a pretty young woman who had gotten herself raped; Bell drank more liquor, and he closed his eyes.
So John Ford’s film actually appears in SPLIT THIRTY; Bell watches it from his room at the Mayflower Hotel. By then, however, it has already served its real purpose in this narrative: as a patent influence on Bertie Kahn, who is nothing if not aware of Walton’s predilections (“Nixon as cowboy. Bell finally smiled...”). Anybody wishing to film SPLIT THIRTY might therefore start with Monument Valley.
Besides which, there’s plenty of common ground: three men in search of a woman; one of them fickle, one of them a war veteran, and one of them a half-breed. A story that opens with a door to the horizon; a story that closes with that same door closing. A question of who remains and who must leave. And violence as the thread that holds it all together… (“Frontier mother rescued all before the carnage could get started, though; calico-skirted, fringe-booted, her hair in a shining braid.”)
Which is not to maintain that this story is a western; nor Henry Bell any sort of cowboy (“A man can’t live in this country, without being haunted. Right exactly where we’re standing, this very place, an Iroquois brave shot an arrow into a big buck, and he spilled its soul all over this floor.” “What did you do, Henry?” “Do about what. When I shot that arrow?”). So readers might want to keep in mind Kahn’s second source of visual inspiration, too: Michelangelo Antonioni, whose brooding blondes were spending summers by the seashore ten years before this story opens.
So John Ford’s film actually appears in SPLIT THIRTY; Bell watches it from his room at the Mayflower Hotel. By then, however, it has already served its real purpose in this narrative: as a patent influence on Bertie Kahn, who is nothing if not aware of Walton’s predilections (“Nixon as cowboy. Bell finally smiled...”). Anybody wishing to film SPLIT THIRTY might therefore start with Monument Valley.
Besides which, there’s plenty of common ground: three men in search of a woman; one of them fickle, one of them a war veteran, and one of them a half-breed. A story that opens with a door to the horizon; a story that closes with that same door closing. A question of who remains and who must leave. And violence as the thread that holds it all together… (“Frontier mother rescued all before the carnage could get started, though; calico-skirted, fringe-booted, her hair in a shining braid.”)
Which is not to maintain that this story is a western; nor Henry Bell any sort of cowboy (“A man can’t live in this country, without being haunted. Right exactly where we’re standing, this very place, an Iroquois brave shot an arrow into a big buck, and he spilled its soul all over this floor.” “What did you do, Henry?” “Do about what. When I shot that arrow?”). So readers might want to keep in mind Kahn’s second source of visual inspiration, too: Michelangelo Antonioni, whose brooding blondes were spending summers by the seashore ten years before this story opens.
