“I dreamed of my dog. That is, the dog of my kid days. The dog of my life. The president was then Mr. Taft, so we called the pup Taffy. Mother gave it to us both on Christmas Day. A round furred bundle of black and white. He was just about everything. A little spitz, a dash of Eskimo, and a touch of collie; with brains and guts and a love for me that was eternal.” -
William A. Wellman, “A Short Time for Insanity”
“I am going to end with the beginning, which is really a beginning and an ending.” William A. Wellman “A Short Time For Insanity”
PROLOGUE
The title of William A. Wellman’s 1956 effort, Good-Bye, My Lady, is one that presumably takes the ending as a given: Lady will be going away. And not just Lady, but someone’s Lady. And not just going away, but leaving, and leaving — according both to both the opening sequence and the 2010 DVD menu — an adorable blond boy. But Wild Bill, as they called Wellman, defied the demands of his predetermined destination. The Lady in question, a basenji — an African dog all the way from England, was to be given to Brandon de Wilde, the adorable blond boy playing the adorable blond boy, at the end of the shoot. The the dog’s, the boy’s, and the audience’s tears all for show, or, simply, part of the show.
Earlier, in 1942, when Wellman was commissioned to make a movie about Buffalo Bill in return for a green-light to make his dream project The Ox-Bow Incident, he got together with Gene Fowler, an avid researcher of, as he called him, “the fakiest man ever to live.” Over the period of a few months Fowler and Wellman wrote a script, but when Fowler got tanked one night, he and Wellman came to the conclusion that they couldn’t destroy a man that was a hero to so many Americans, particularly the children, and they burned the script. In other words, they decided, the myth must live on.
But outcome and plot was never the priority for Wellman. Even in his tight, action packed pre-code days, the packing would be done with plotless moments of leisure, labor, and other bits of business. The detailed opening of Frisco Jenny (1932), a long tracking shot through a saloon, where multiple characters and stories are introduced, is obliterated moments later by an earthquake. His mid-period movies would combine the compact nature of his early work with a more expansive look at America. A result of changing times, but also of a changing man, family priorities and arthritis shifting his productivity and areas of focus. As the 1950s approached, his movies continued to expand even as the actual stories contracted to became more focused and singular.
Instead of a constant march forward, one foot in front of the other over and over again, Wellman’s movies function as one giant step stretched out over the course of the movie. And while that leg slowly moves, foot risen and knee bent forward, a woman sings, a nose itches, a band plays, someone takes a bite of a chicken leg, and a girl passes by on a bicycle.
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
“The swamp shook some of her leaves from her back and dressed down for the winter. And then the trees were naked and stark and waved their hard bare arms towards the river that was belly-full and swelling yellow.� narration from Good-Bye, My Lady, spoken by William A. Wellman
CHAPTER 9
C H A P T E R 10
EPILOGUE Wellman’s Heroes for Sale (1933) opens a lot like Frisco Jenny, except instead of in a saloon, the action starts on a battlefield and, one could argue, despite a constant change of setting throughout the picture, it never leaves. The characters may quickly depart from World War I, but their search for work, shelter, food, health, and support quickly proves just as treacherous. Time and time again Richard Barthelmess’ Tom Holmes is cast out, by circumstance, by the law, by society, by death — by anything and everything. It’s hard to know just where in particular Holmes will end up next, but after the first 10 minutes of the movie, it’s clear that no matter how bad things get along the way, he’ll keep moving forward and working hard for the things that he thinks are right.
The men of 1958’s Darby’s Rangers, Wellman’s last cinematic effort, are constantly bounced back and forth between the brutal horrors of the battlefield and the pleasures of the opposite sex. A particularly charming soldier engages in lustful hijinks with the housewife whose house he has been assigned to stay at during his training period, but soon after, he meets a rather gruesome ending. Both scenes are genuine in their sentiment — sex is fun, war is hell.
Glenn Ford plays real life hero Johnny Montgomery in Wellman’s 1946, sentimental nightmare, Gallant Journey. Montgomery was the first man to put a glider in the air but he also had a debilitating condition that would make his every attempt at flight equally an attempt at death. But for Montgomery, there was no alternative, no other life that could be. His head was in the clouds, and even as Wellman planted his feet firmly on the ground, he kept determined to fly.
The frontier man that Clark Gable plays in Wellman’s 1935 Call of the Wild (and later on in 1951’s Across the Wide Missouri) operates on the fringes of society. His Jack Thornton is not unlike Tom Holmes, but the open air gives him a freedom not had by Wellman’s city men. For Thornton, survival is an adventure, a game to be played between drinks, with his only family: the dogs and fellow frontiersmen who help him along the way. Like many of Wellman’s heroes, love comes and goes, though here Loretta Young fares better with Gable than with Barthelmess (who wouldn’t?). Neither man gets her in the end but the whole thing isn't really about Young anyway, nor about the woman. It’s about his dog, a loyal companion and courageous St. Bernard named Buck, who runs off to be with an old flame in the movie’s final moments. When all is said and done, Jack Thornton is left alone with only his work — and another yet-to-bedetermined adventure.
Stills are from the following films: Lafayette Escadrille (Wellman, 1958) Beau Geste (Wellman, 1939) The Great Man’s Lady (Wellman, 1942) Wild Boys of the Road (Wellman, 1933) The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman, 1943) Yellow Sky (Wellman, 1948) Other Men’s Women (Wellman, 1931) Buffalo Bill (Wellman, 1944) Thunder Birds (Wellman, 1942) Maybe It’s Love (Wellman, 1930) Track of the Cat (Wellman, 1954) Battleground (Wellman, 1949) Across the Wide Missouri (Wellman, 1951) The Story of G.I. Joe (Wellman, 1954) Good-Bye, My Lady (Wellman, 1956) Heroes For Sale (Wellman, 1933) Darby’s Rangers (Wellman, 1958) Gallant Journey (Wellman, 1946) Call of the Wild (Wellman, 1945)
*** Thanks to Bruce Goldstein and everyone at Film Forum for screening 39 of Wellman’s films on 35mm this past Winter.
*** Telaroli | October 2012