A fan of your music and of westerns, especially, perhaps, later more revisionist westerns (e.g. Anthony Mann’s excellent Jimmy Stewart westerns). But I also do love more classic westerns, including John Ford’s films. As a dual US/UK national, who grew up and lived and worked mainly in the UK, I have a great love for US history and culture, but also likely a skeptical eye for its own myth-making.
On the strength of your recommendation, I checked out The Big Trail (1930).
It is certainly worth watching but is a mixture of good and bad things. Directed by Raoul Walsh, the great film noir / gangster film director, the film relatively faithfully shows the long journey of a wagon train of white settlers to the northeast of the USA during the era of western expansion.
Great documentary-style scenes documenting typical lives for these settlers and also the hardships of crossing rivers, of transporting wagons, livestock and families down cliff faces, and battling blizzards and deluges of rain. Despite the use of real native Americans to play the roles of their ancestors and the notional comradeship of the wagon train’s scout with local native Americans, the awful exceptionalism of the settlers is not only plain to see, but actually championed, in a kind of homage to US “manifest destiny” of expansionism. At one point, a query about the ownership of the land to which they are headed is answered by ignoring the rights of the native Americans whose homeland it is and saying the land belongs to a recent arrival, a non-native trapper. When local resistance armed with bows and arrows is defeated by hugely superior guns and bullets, the many many native Americans we have seen slaughtered are unacknowledged as the settlers mourn their dead in a relatively small number of graves – shades of the current genocide in Gaza?
Another problem is sexism. Of course, it is the women who are shown as doing all the hard daily domestic chores, with the men (presumably) left to the heavier chores, as well as manly tasks like hunting (and killing native Americans). John Wayne, in his first leading role, is young and fit, but his character clearly has not had the concept of consensual kissing impressed on him, more than once sneaking up behind a young woman he has not seen in years and in a surprise stealth attack, snatching her up, pinioning her arms so she can’t resist and kissing her, unasked for, on the lips. In another scene, a young woman whose mental faculties have perhaps been whistleblown by her limited mode of expression (giggling) is being married off to a man in a trailside ceremony.
Thanks, Rayna and Kieran, and yes, we do need to have a national discussion/reckoning about how Covid affected and changed us as a society. We really can't "move on" until we do.
Great clip of the Dixie Hummingbirds. When I think of the Dixie Hummingbirds, I think of
"Love Me Like a Rock" on Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjFzw8AxSBA
A fan of your music and of westerns, especially, perhaps, later more revisionist westerns (e.g. Anthony Mann’s excellent Jimmy Stewart westerns). But I also do love more classic westerns, including John Ford’s films. As a dual US/UK national, who grew up and lived and worked mainly in the UK, I have a great love for US history and culture, but also likely a skeptical eye for its own myth-making.
On the strength of your recommendation, I checked out The Big Trail (1930).
It is certainly worth watching but is a mixture of good and bad things. Directed by Raoul Walsh, the great film noir / gangster film director, the film relatively faithfully shows the long journey of a wagon train of white settlers to the northeast of the USA during the era of western expansion.
Great documentary-style scenes documenting typical lives for these settlers and also the hardships of crossing rivers, of transporting wagons, livestock and families down cliff faces, and battling blizzards and deluges of rain. Despite the use of real native Americans to play the roles of their ancestors and the notional comradeship of the wagon train’s scout with local native Americans, the awful exceptionalism of the settlers is not only plain to see, but actually championed, in a kind of homage to US “manifest destiny” of expansionism. At one point, a query about the ownership of the land to which they are headed is answered by ignoring the rights of the native Americans whose homeland it is and saying the land belongs to a recent arrival, a non-native trapper. When local resistance armed with bows and arrows is defeated by hugely superior guns and bullets, the many many native Americans we have seen slaughtered are unacknowledged as the settlers mourn their dead in a relatively small number of graves – shades of the current genocide in Gaza?
Another problem is sexism. Of course, it is the women who are shown as doing all the hard daily domestic chores, with the men (presumably) left to the heavier chores, as well as manly tasks like hunting (and killing native Americans). John Wayne, in his first leading role, is young and fit, but his character clearly has not had the concept of consensual kissing impressed on him, more than once sneaking up behind a young woman he has not seen in years and in a surprise stealth attack, snatching her up, pinioning her arms so she can’t resist and kissing her, unasked for, on the lips. In another scene, a young woman whose mental faculties have perhaps been whistleblown by her limited mode of expression (giggling) is being married off to a man in a trailside ceremony.
Thanks, Rayna and Kieran, and yes, we do need to have a national discussion/reckoning about how Covid affected and changed us as a society. We really can't "move on" until we do.