DVR Diary: THE OKLAHOMA KID (1939)

People will still tell you that John Ford's Stagecoach revived the western as an "A" genre in the golden year of 1939, but they're mistaking a symptom for the cause. The Ford film was just one of a bunch of westerns released in the first half of the golden year alone, the trail being blazed by Twentieth Century-Fox's Jesse James, a film which, unlike Stagecoach, got a sequel one year later. The mere existence of Stagecoach reflects decisions already made by Hollywood to boom the genre after the tentative efforts of 1936 (De Mille's The Plainsman, King Vidor's The Texas Rangers, etc.) What had happened in the intervening years? The main thing seems to be that the big studios realized how much money Republic was making off Gene Autry, who by one measure of fan mail had become the most popular star in movies by 1939. The other studios didn't have to have singing cowboys, though the Warner Bros. B unit did have one in Dick Foran, but they had to have cowboys to tap into the Autry market. So why not cast your top studio stars in westerns? Fox put two of their hottest young actors, Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda, in Jesse James, Warners was putting Errol Flynn into Dodge City, and Ford did finally make a star of John Wayne in Stagecoach. So why not put your established tough guys in westerns? Why not Cagney in a western? Yet people will still tell you that Cagney in The Oklahoma Kid, not to mention Bogart as the villain, is something akin to The Terror of Tiny Town. That verdict, which finds Cagney somewhat preposterous in cowboy garb, was slow in coming, since Warners saw fit to re-release Lloyd Bacon's oater on occasion in the years following its initial release. The contemporary audience may have assumed, as Warners wished, that Cagney's tough-guy persona translated into all eras, as 1935's Frisco Kid had seemingly proved. And he doesn't really seem implausible, now that I've seen this infamous film, unless his type doesn't fit your stereotype of the western hero. It may not have been until Fifties westerns made a fetish of height that Cagney became less convincing -- though he made two more westerns in that very decade. Look at him confront Ward Bond, playing one of Bogart's minions in this picture; Bond towers over our hero, and while 1939 audiences took it for granted that Cagney could tear apart this bit player, later generations may have grown less certain. Cagney is no John Wayne or Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott, but what more do you really need to be a western hero than plausible toughness, which Cagney had in spades? I didn't find him preposterous at all, especially if you accept Oklahoma Kid as a Cagney vehicle first and a western second.

 

A certain irreverence toward the western may have hurt Cagney with contemporary audiences

As a western, it's an archetypal town-tamer story that looks forward to the sort of reluctant-hero roles Bogart would play when he got the chance. Here Bogart (as the purply-named Whip McCord) leads a gang of gamblers and bandits who are robbed by Cagney after they rob a stage. The Oklahoma Kid -- no one knows him by any other name -- has returned to his native ground to witness the famous Land Rush. Like both versions of Cimarron, Kid makes the blunder of staging this tremendous action scene -- though the action here admittedly isn't so tremendous -- very early in the picture. Bogart's gang are "Sooners" who've jumped the claim of the patriarchal John Kincaid, who'd planned to build a town there. Bogart promptly surrenders his claim, however, on the condition that Kincaid cede him exclusive gambling rights in the new town. Meanwhile, the Kid has sat out the land rush in a saloon, explaining to whoever has time to listen that the whole enterprise is futile. Those who play by the rules now will lose out to the strong, he says, and the strong will lose out to the clever in the end. He has to flee to Mexico after killing one of Bogart's men, and once he returns the town is booming but in ways Kincaid never wanted. The old man's accommodation with Whip McCord can't last much longer, despite the good faith efforts of Judge Hardwick (Donald Crisp), his daughter Jane (Rosemary Lane) and Hardwick's law partner Alec Martin (Charles Middleton in a good-guy role). Bogart concocts a plan to frame Kincaid for murder, trick Hardwick into leaving town, and have his judicial pawn railroad Kincaid to the gallows. Despite the efforts of Jane and the Kid, who has finally let on that he's John Kincaid's black-sheep son, the old man is lynched, hung from a second-story porch. This would seem to prove the Kid's earlier point, but now that it's personal he's not so complacent.

Cagney is Cagney here, and if you can't see him as a westerner I can't help you with this film. There are plenty of characteristic moments, from his forcing a saloon pianist to play "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard" at gunpoint to his showoff singing of "Rockabye Baby" in Spanish. Oklahoma Kid isn't a great western by any stretch, but it's no more a category error than Frisco Kid was, and as a Cagney vehicle it's perfectly acceptable. Bogart gives his stock 1938-40 villain performance and if you've seen one of those you've really seen them all. He'd return to westerns well before Cagney did, stuck between Flynn and Randolph Scott in Virginia City, but the closest he came to the genre after achieving real stardom was the modern-dress Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Bacon directs competently but you can't quite shake a feeling that, despite Cagney, Warners considered this a second-class project compared to Dodge City, the latter getting Technicolor while Kid goes without. The idea that Kid is a second-class western, at most, may have started right there, but while it really is a second-class western, it could be a lot worse, and it's actually a lot better than its dire reputation -- built perhaps on sight-unseen judgments --  would suggest.

TO HAVE (Howard Hawks) AND HAVE (Hemingway) NOT (1944)

 

Last weekend wasn't the first time I'd watched Howard Hawks's version of To Have and Have Not, but it was the first time since I'd read the actual novel by Ernest Hemingway. As I noted when I reviewed The Gun Runners, Don Siegel's partial adaptation of the same source material, Hemingway's novel describes the downward spiral of an otherwise typical two-fisted lone-wolf hero who trusts the wrong people and takes too many risks out of Depression desperation for money. It may have been the last time Hemingway wrote a hero who wasn't just a version of himself, and it's an expansive attempt to draw a broader picture of society from a variety of perspectives, particularly in the final section, and in a variety of literary styles. The novel is more ambitious than its reputation suggests and seems to have set the tone for Hemingway's later incomplete experiments in fiction. Hawks's movie had a different kind of ambition, which was to exploit the blockbuster success of the movie adaptation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. That meant selling To Have and Have Not as "Ernest Hemingway's most daring man-woman story," when the novel was nothing of the sort. Hemingway's Harry Morgan is married with children, concern for whose future drives him to increasingly desperate and ultimately fatal schemes. Hawks's Harry, as conceived by Jules Furthman and Hemingway rival William Faulkner, is unattached, unless you count his loyalty to his rummy sidekick Eddie. In the novel, Harry contemplates murdering Harry to take the heat off himself in the first episode, but spares him thanks to a lucky bookkeeping break. Nothing close to that happens in the movie, but the overall compassion the movie Harry has for Eddie is typical of the book. In the book, however, Eddie disappears after the first episode, and in a later chapter Harry has a different rummy sidekick who gets killed in cold blood by the bank robbers Harry has agreed to transport in a getaway boat. That's the sort of detail that got the novel its bad name and the movie its repute for having "cleaned up" Hemingway's story.

Drastic literary adaptations like this one raise questions of aesthetic ethics. Hawks's movie is regarded as a classic and beloved for introducing Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart and the world. On the other hand, it's a travesty of Hemingway and has threatened since its release to take the novel's place in the pop-culture consciousness.  Can it be "wrong" and "right" at the same time? That's hard to say when you watch a movie adaptation of a novel after reading the novel. My feeling tends to be that the filmmakers owe some fidelity to the novel, and owe the public a reasonably accurate representation of the novel. But I'm not going to say that an unfaithful adaptation can't be a good movie. I recently read T. T. Flynn's novel The Man From Laramie, which was made into an Anthony Mann - Jimmy Stewart western not long after publication. Mann took liberties with the story, but I can say unhesitantly that the film was better than the book, which was little more than a page-turner burdened with purplish prose. The story was improved by the adaptation, but should that be our only standard of judgement? Approaching the matter from the other side, To Have and Have Not may be one of the most flagrant travesties of a novel, but it's far from being the worst literary adaptation. Compared to such things as Roland Joffe's The Scarlet Letter or Brian de Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities, Hawks's film isn't even a bad movie. But is it good enough that its merits outweigh its injustice to Hemingway?

Like The Gun Runners, Furthman and Faulkner's script works mostly with the first section of the novel, which is based on the short story "One Trip Across." In the story, Harry Morgan turns down a group of Cuban revolutionaries who want him to do some smuggling for them because it's too great a risk to his livelihood. Harry's main trade is taking tourists out fishing. He takes a Mr. Johnson out and patiently endures the man's failure to learn anything about the sport after days at sea until Johnson's incompetence costs Harry a rod and reel. Johnson decides to leave Cuba the next day and promises to meet Harry at the bank the next morning to square up with him. After Harry learns that Johnson left early, leaving Harry about $800 in the hole, our hero is more willing to take on risky work. Instead of helping the revolutionaries, who've been shot up anyway, he gets involved with a Chinese people-smuggling ring in the full expectation that he might get killed in the process. Harry pre-emptively bumps off the Chinese boss, dumps the illegals within wading distance of shore, and faces the dilemma of what to do about Eddie that I mentioned earlier.

In Hawks's movie, the setting has shifted to French-ruled Martinique, with Free French patriots taking the place of Cuban rebels. The business with Johnson on the boat is much as in the novel, but the movie takes pains to minimize the extent to which the Bogart character is shown as a sucker. Before Johnson can abscond, the pretty drifter Slim (Bacall) picks his pocket. Harry discovers the theft, takes the wallet from Slim, and finds that Johnson had plenty of traveler's checks that he could have made out to Harry on the spot. Harry and Slim confront Johnson, and Harry compels Johnson to make the checks payable to him. Before Johnson can sign, however, he's killed in a crossfire between Free French and Vichy forces, and Harry is SOL. That makes him more amenable to doing things for the Free French, and from that point Hawks's more-or-less original romance begins.

What does that leave us with? Apart from some cosmetic details -- a Gestapo officer is nicknamed "Bee-Lips" like a fixer from the novel -- there's nothing more of Hemingway in the movie. The personality of Eddie, tailored to Walter Brennan's screen persona and enhanced with allegedly comic business like his constant inquiry, "Was you ever bitten by a dead bee?" is almost entirely made up for the film, as is the whole character of Slim. The notion that Slim is "all right" because she answers the dead-bee query correctly -- "Why, have you?" -- would probably have made Hemingway puke. On that note, I was intrigued by the scene where the Gestapo man is plying Eddie with booze in order to loosen his tongue about the whereabouts of Harry's passengers. Impressed by the fat spy's slimy politeness, Eddie declares him "all right" and starts to ask the bee question when Harry abruptly changes the subject. Was Harry afraid that the Nazi would give the correct answer? Was this moment Hawks's own unconscious confession that the whole dead-bee idea was garbage? Perhaps.

Subtract Hemingway and Hawks's To Have and Have Not is self-evidently a Casablanca ripoff, with Bogart reprising his reluctant-hero act, Hoagy Carmichael sitting in at the piano for Dooley Wilson, and Dan Seymour (in the Gestapo role) as a substitute fat man for Sidney Greenstreet. The big difference is that the Bogart character doesn't romance the noble Free French woman whose husband lies wounded, but the charismatically insolent Slim. From Warner Bros.'s standpoint, an important purpose of the picture is to put over Lauren Bacall, particularly as a singer -- though that thread of her career wasn't really picked up again for another quarter-century, until Bacall starred in a Broadway musical. If you dig the stars you'll dig the film. The chemistry is there. Bacall earned her spot. But otherwise, with the arguable exception of Brennan, Bogart's surrounded by a B-team cast by Casablanca standards -- and I'd be willing to argue against Brennan in this picture. Bogart himself is coasting. Harry Morgan should be a more desperate character, almost like Bogart's Roy Earle from High Sierra in his fatedness and compromised ruthlessness, but once you give the character partners (the Free French) who are certain not to betray him, the noirish edge is largely gone from his one trip across, leaving behind little more than a likable lark that becomes a little less likable, fairly or not, when you learn what To Have and Have Not was and could have been. No one who likes the Hawks movie without having read the book should like it less, and those who've done both and like the film better should stick to their guns, since we'd presumably disagree on the book more than on the movie. All I know is that I can't look at this picture the same way I used to. I suppose that's too bad, but on the other hand I'm glad I read the real thing.