"The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend" by Glenn Frankel

The subtitle of this book makes it sound like this will be 340 pages about how the 1956 movie The Searchers was made.  But actually, only the last few chapters are about filming the movie.  Instead, the book begins by trying to sort fact from fiction regarding the real-life abduction by Comanche warriors which inspired the book that was in turn made into the film.

On the cover, you see a picture of John Wayne from the movie on the left.  On the right is a photograph of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured by the Comanche as a girl, and who lived with them for more than twenty years, married one of her captors, and bore several children with him.  She was then recaptured by white people and returned to her relatives in Texas, but she was not happy living with them and died a few years later.  One of her uncles tried to find her for many years, which is what eventually inspired a writer named Alan LeMay to write a book about an uncle relentlessly seeking his abducted niece.  And that's the book that John Ford turned into a movie.

I happen to be quite fascinated by stories of people being raised in cultures far different from their own, as well as stories of people trying to survive on the frontier, so the book as a whole kept me quite interested.  If you only want to learn stuff about the movie, then skip to part IV, called "Pappy and the Duke."  You'll learn a ton about the careers and friendship of John Ford and John Wayne, especially how those informed the making of the film.

I learned so much from this book, not just about the making of The Searchers, but about the history of Texas, the endless problems when two disparate cultures rub up against each other, and the way people tell stories to suit their own agendas.

Particularly Good Bits:

Whatever the particular plotline, the Western was grounded in the enduring foundational myth that the American frontier was an untouched, pure new world, and a place to test one's mettle and faith.  The land was a metaphor for the mission:  taming the savage wilderness, after all, meant taming one's own soul (p. 186).

Frank Nugent said he learned a lot from John Ford.  "Character is not shown so much by what is said as by what is done," Nugent wrote when he first started working with Ford.  "Characters must make decisions" (p. 255).

The writer's primary job, he adds, is simple:  "To look long and hard at his story and see whether it can be reduced to terms of the upsetting of the status quo" (p. 256).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  R for many, many discussions of violence and rape, and some language.

This is my second book read and reviewed for the Adventure of Reading Challenge 2017.

"Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western" by Will Wright

Once in a while a book opens your eyes and makes you look in whole new ways at something you thought you knew and understood.  This is such a book, for me.  I have loved western movies since I was about 2, and I have watched hundreds of them over the past thirty-some years.  I've read western novels and nonfiction books, I've written westerns, I've played cowboys for countless hours.  I thought I pretty much understood what westerns were about.

And then I read this book.

Will Wright posits that westerns are America's version of great myths and legends (which I'd heard/read before), and that America's taste in western storytelling changed because American society changed.  It's a cool theory, and he's pretty well convinced me.  But the sociological implications aren't what interested me the most.  

What interested me were the story structure similarities that he pointed out.  I'm not going to delve too deeply into everything he said, simply because there was so much -- I was underlining and making notes like crazy.   Basically, Wright studied the top-grossing western films from every year beginning in 1930 and running through 1972, when he did his study.  That gave him more than 60 films to study, and while he didn't delve into every single one, he did study them all and looked for patterns in the stories they told.

Wright found that the films fell into four plot categories, which he termed Classical, Vengeance Variation, Transition, and Professional.  And I discovered that nearly all my favorite westerns have the Classical or Professional plots.  There are a few that are Vengeance, but most of my favorites are either Classical or Professional.  And not only that, but my own stories tend to be pretty straight-forwardly Classical.  And I realized that I am not really a fan of Vengeance westerns, for the most part.  There were only a few of the Transition westerns that he discussed, and I hadn't seen most of them, so I can't say much one way or the other on that one.

What does that all mean?  Well, I'll share his breakdown for Classical Plots with you to give an idea, and then I'll give you examples of various famous westerns that typify each of those plot categories.

The Classical Plot goes like this:

1.  The hero enters a social group.
2.  The hero is unknown to the society.
3.  The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability.
4.  The society recognizes a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status.
5.  The society does not completely accept the hero.
6.  There is a conflict of interests between the villains and the society.
7.  The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak.
8.  There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain.
9.  The villains threaten the society.
10.  The hero avoids involvement in the conflict.
11.  The villains endanger a friend of the hero.
12.  The hero fights the villains.
13.  The hero defeats the villains.
14.  The society is safe.
15.  The society accepts the hero.
16.  The hero loses or gives up his special status.

So, I don't know -- some of you might read that and go, "Okay, that's nice -- who cares?"  But to me, this was giant lightbulbs going off, flashing lights, sirens, choirs singing the "Hallelujah Chorus," and so on.  Because this kind of story breakdown, and all the great explorations Wright goes into in his book, are exactly what my writing brain needs.  I look at this and go, "Oh my goodness!  Now I can see what my stories have, what they're missing, what beats I've got in the wrong spot, and on and on and on!"  That's what I liked best about this book, how it let me sort of tip movies I know soooo well on their side and peek inside them to see what makes them work.

The other three plot variations have breakdowns like that too, but I can't just share the whole book with you here, though I'd like to.  But in case you're interested, here are some of the more famous films he discussed, based on their plots:

Classical:  Destry Rides Again (1940), Whispering Smith (1949), Shane (1953), Cat Ballou (1965), Support Your Local Sheriff (1969)

Vengeance:  Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1949), Winchester '73 (1950), The Naked Spur (1952), The Searchers (1956)

Transition:  Broken Arrow (1950), High Noon (1952)

Professional:  Rio Bravo (1959), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), The Professionals (1966), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1970)

(EDIT:  I've linked the titles of some of those to my reviews of those films over on my blogs.)

If you write westerns, study films for fun, or just love lots and lots of westerns, you will probably find this book fascinating.  But if you were bored reading this review, then you're not going to care much for the book either.

I wrote this review especially for Legends of Western Cinema Week, which is a shindig hosted all week long by Emma at A Lantern in Her Hand and Olivia at Meanwhile, in Rivendell....  Please visit their blogs for lots of western fun.  And I'm hosting a giveaway on Hamlette's Soliloquy all week for this event, giving away five great western TV shows on DVD, so check that out if you haven't already.

Particularly Good Bits:  

Violence in a myth is generally concerned with opposing or reconciling principles, while in literature violence truly exists between people and is consequently more convincing and more deeply felt (p. 149).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for non-graphic mentions of violence, rape, and other non-child-friendly themes.

A Literary Collage of Sorts

You remember that I posted last month about my blogging friend Jamie opening a new literature-oriented shop?  The Books and Beverages Shoppe, to be precise.  I liked the postcards she sent me for a preview item so much, I bought a whole set.  I thought you might like to see what I've done with my three favorites:

This hangs beside our front door now, kind of a daily reminder for me to think about whatever my current writing WIP is.  And also an excuse to display some other postcards I've owned for close to twenty years now and never really done anything with.  The top one is John Wayne and his youngest son on the set of True Grit, the middle one is Montgomery Clift on the set of The Misfits, and the bottom is two actual cowgirls from back when the west was truly wild.  

Anyway, I'd said in my earlier post that I meant to hang up some of these to inspire myself, and thought you might like seeing what I ended up doing with them.  Though, now Jamie has added already-matted 5"x7" versions of these same quotes to her shop here, which makes me kind of wish I'd waited on framing these, hee!  Still, I like how it turned out overall.

"Hondo" by Louis L'Amour

I'd only read this once before, maybe eight or ten years ago, but I've seen the John Wayne movie based on it probably close on a dozen times.  Its screenplay takes most of the dialog straight from the book, so reading this is like watching an expanded version of the movie in some ways.  The movie also sticks very faithfully to the book, except there's a bit that happens at the end of the book that I think comes along earlier in the movie.  Minor, though.  I can read this book and see and hear the actors very clearly, especially Geraldine Page as Mrs. Angie Lowe.

Okay, so the story is about a guy named Hondo Lane who lives in the southwest.  He rides dispatch for the cavalry sometimes, he once lived with the Comanche and had a Comanche wife, and he travels with a dog named Sam.  It's also about a rancher named Angie Lowe, her son Johnny, and her no-good husband Ed.  The Comanches are preparing to go to war against the whites, and one day Hondo stumbles on the Lowe ranch while making his way back to the fort with some messages for the cavalry commander.  He and Angie are drawn toward each other -- her husband left her several months ago and she doubts he'll be back, but she doesn't know for sure that he's dead, so she makes it clear to Hondo that she's unavailable.  He rides on out after borrowing a horse, but he can't get her out of his head.  And then he meets up with her husband at the fort, and... okay, I'll stop there :-)  Read or watch it yourself!

L'Amour's writing is spare and lean, and bit philosophical at times, but always so grounded and concrete that everything he writes about seems tangible.  I love the way the landscape and characters are drawn to complement each other -- Hondo Lane is hard and dry like the desert, while Angie Lowe is vigorous and resilient like the little ranch she owns.  

Particularly Good Bits:

Under a quiet sky the planet turned, and horses ate, and men slept, and death waited for morning (p. 97).

For months now he had seemed like somebody who had never really been.  Like someone who had walked across the page of her life and left no tracks (p. 119).

When they were the age of this boy it was an awful thing to see a friend ride off.  Later you became used to it.  Later you learned that nothing was for long.  It was a pity you had to learn that (p. 149).

If this was a movie, I would rate it:  PG for western violence.

"The Abracadabra Kid" by Sid Fleischman

I can't remember which Sid Fleischman book I read first.  I think it was probably By the Great Horn Spoon.  But it might have been Humbug or Jingo Django.  Or even The Whipping Boy, which I didn't actually realize was written by the same guy until I started reading this book.  I associated his name with the off-kilter humor of his children's books set in the west, like the first two I mentioned.  A few months ago, I stumbled across SidFleischman.com, which features a page of tips for writers drawn from his autobiography, aka this book.

I knew at once that I wanted to read that autobiography, but my library didn't have it, so I put it on my Christmas list and, lucky me, my mom got it for me!  Of the five books I got for Christmas, this is the one I chose to read first, and I'm so glad I did, as it's loads of fun.  

Fleischman begins with his childhood, particularly his love of doing magic tricks.  He had quite some success as a magician, and the first book he ever published, Between Cocktails, was a collection of simple tricks for amazing your friends.  While detailing his youthful exploits, he points on what events, people, and places would later inspire some of his books.  He infuses his narrative with humor and snappy descriptions, as anyone familiar with his novels might expect.

I think the biggest surprise I got while reading this is that Sid Fleischman wrote a novel named Blood Alley, which he then turned into a screenplay at the behest of none other than my beloved John Wayne -- Wayne starred in the movie version, along with Lauren Bacall.  I actually have Blood Alley (1955) as part of a collection of John Wayne films, but I haven't seen it yet -- I plan to watch it very soon.  

If you're a fan of his novels, or are looking for a good book about what it's like to be a writer, you can't go wrong here!

"By Myself" by Lauren Bacall

I've been a fan of Lauren Bacall since the first time I saw her in a movie, which was To Have and Have Not (1944). I saw it in high school, when I was probably seventeen or eighteen -- only a year or two younger than Bacall was when she made that film. I've seen her in nine or ten other films since then, and my admiration has grown with each viewing. Her characters are cool, sophisticated... and yet, they always have a sweet vulnerability that keeps me from getting annoyed by her.

So when I found her autobiography, By Myself, at a used bookstore, I couldn't resist it. And I'm happy to report that it has enhanced my admiration of her, not tarnished it. The book traces her life from growing up in a single-parent family in New York City during the 1930s through her fantastic burst on the Hollywood scene, her marriage to Humphrey Bogart, and her life post-Bogie as she struggled through other relationships, raised her three children, and made a place for herself on Broadway.

Bogart and Bacall in "To Have and Have Not"

This is a poignant, honest book, with a measure of soul-searching that I'm not accustomed to in autobiographies. As she says toward the end of it, "When I plunge I do plunge; halfway is not my way." (pg. 358). Throughout this book, she shows how throwing herself wholeheartedly into everything, be it a film or stage role or a personal relationship, has both its advantages and disadvantages.

My only disappointment with this book is that it ends before Bacall makes The Shootist (1976) with John Wayne -- I would love to have heard her thoughts on an older, ailing Duke, as she had some kind things to say about him when she discussed making Blood Alley with him in the '50s. But Bacall has written two more autobiographies, and I'm sure she covers the making of The Shootist in one of them.

If you're a fan of Bacall's, or simply of classic Hollywood, this book is an enjoyable read that feels like a chat with a friend over a cup of coffee or two. Thoroughly engaging, even in the sad parts.

(Originally posted on The Huggermugger Blog on Jan. 11, 2010.)

"John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth" by Michael Munn

Tonight I finished reading John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth by Michael Munn. It's the first biography of John Wayne I've ever managed to finish reading. I don't usually read biographies of celebrities that I admire, because too often they end up ruining my idolization by waving all sorts of dirty laundry in my face. In fact, up to this point, the only celebrity biography I'd made it through is Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee by their son, Dodd Darin. (I own that particular book, and now also this one about the Duke.)

I think the difference between these two books and the other celebrity biographies I've tried--and failed--to read is that these are written with real love and/or respect for the people they're describing. Michael Munn actually met John Wayne in the 70's, and his description of the time he spent in the Duke's company is especially touching. The book basically details John Wayne's whole life, from birth in Winterset, IA, to his death in CA. Munn discusses every movie the Duke made, and makes extensive use of interviews with others that worked on those films, letting them tell the story for him. Through these first-person reminiscences, we get to see different sides of John Wayne's personality down through the years.

For instance, here's something Lee Marvin told the author about a conversation he had with John Wayne on the set of The Commancheros:

"Duke said to me, 'I think there's a great part for you in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.' I said, 'Which part would that be?' He said, 'Liberty Valance.' I said, 'Who's the man who shot him?' He said, 'Me.' I said, 'Duke, if anyone's gonna shoot me, I can't think of anyone I'd rather be shot by.' And he was as good as his word." (pg 231)

Munn also writes about the Communist plot to assassinate John Wayne, which I hadn't heard about before. It seems pretty credible, and although I can't link you to any text from the book concerning it, here's something in another bookthat gives you a general idea. I was anti-Communist before, but now...whooo, they tried to kill John Wayne! At least three times! Yeeeeahhhhh. I think I'm gonna go burn anything remotely red-colored in my closet...

Anyway, it's a great book, and I kinda want to just start reading it over again right away. I enjoyed it that much!

(Originally posted on Hamlette's Soliloquy on Aug 2, 2005.)