Farber on Film by Farber Manny

Author:Farber, Manny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2015-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

A 1961 cavalry film that is like an endless frontier-day pageant, Two Rode Together has the discombobulated effect of a Western dreamt by a kid snoozing in an Esso station in Linden, New Jersey. Two wrangling friends, a money-grubbing marshal (Jimmy Stewart) and a cavalry captain (Richard Widmark, who has the look of a ham that has been smoked, cured, and then coated with honey-colored shellac), seek out a Comanche named Parker and trade him a stunningly new arsenal of guns and knives for a screaming little Bowery Boy with braids who’s only bearable in the last shot when the camera just shows his legs hanging limply from a lynching tree.

The movie’s mentally retarded quality comes from the discordancy and quality of the parts: it’s not only that they don’t go together, they’re crazy to start with. Each woman and Indian is from a different age in operetta and a different part of the globe. The Indians include an overdeveloped weight-lifter, a sad Pagliacci trying hard not to let his flabby stomach show, plus the above Leo Gorcey tough with his histrionic impression of a monkey on hot coals. The movie wobbles most with Widmark, embarrassed but strangely submitting to courting scenes with Shirley Jones that are filled with temerity and wide-eyed hopefulness. His tomboy sweetheart, a fraulein out of The Student Prince with two thick long yellow braids and enough make-up to equal Widmark’s, has a fixation on a music box and runs to it at every chance.

The movie is a curious blend of modern blat and a senile impression of frontier culture that derives from the cheapest and oldest movies about prerailroad days in Indian territory. There is a wild, non sequitur quality about the courtship, frontier dialogue, and spitting, thin-skinned, stupidly stubborn Indians taking place in a free-for-all atmosphere in which not one detail or scene goes with another. In general, it is Widmark and Stewart, like two Pinter characters, separated out from a stiff (despite the yelling and flouncing), corny TV-styled production going on behind them. Throughout, these actors barely listen to each other, and, affecting a curious, dragged out, folksy dialect, they take up great amounts of space with words that are from Dimwit’s Land. “No! She didn’t kill herself, ladies and gentlemen. Not because she was a coward, but because her religion forbade her. Sometimes, it takes more courage to live than to die.” Facetiously delivering this speech, Stewart is operating here in a feeble, tensionless mock-up of an officers’ cotillion at the local fort. (I kept wondering, Why are they dragging in a dance? Could it be to squeeze that white hypocrisy speech into the remains of a script previously taken up with removing the normal skin tone, stealth, dignity, and clothes sense from Indians?)

It is filled with cliché conceptions: of an Indian camp, a Texas Guinan seenioreeta who owns the saloon and the town, slow-witted people, an innocent tomboy heroine throwing a barrel of flour over the two Cleggs who come courting her, country bumpkins having a fight in the woods.

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