This is a reply to Zach's of January 18th. I'm just going to have to
"do" our group at my own pace!

Zach, you make a really good argument for the film and its style. (I
also thought your Tourneur post was excellent, by the way.) And I
certainly agree that "emotional identification" is a part of most
Hollywood films one way or another, and that in some directors
(Hitchcock, as Robin Wood argued quite well, for example) the way the
audience is asked to identify with characters can also be a pathway to
the art.

I just didn't feel the things you describe in the film were being
articulated in an interesting way, though I can see why you would say
that they are there.

For me, the images never make a spatial world; the lines and depth
effects never combine to make an architectural statement. It just looks
like a bunch of shots to me. I'd say the same, by the way, about another
classic Western, "High Noon," which I resaw not long ago. I'm not sorry
I saw either of these; they're useful as reference points, and to some
extent I was engaged, or at least enjoyed them, on a
narrative-identification level.

There's no particular reason that a film should have to pass the
"silent" test to be good, but I wonder if it would cohere for you as a
silent film -- or dubbed into a language you didn't understand. I still
remember seeing "Mouchette" for the first time in French without
subtitles, not getting much of the dialogue, and still being
overwhelmed, and overwhelmed in a way consistent with my later viewings.
Sometimes, reading defenses of Hollywood films, I wonder if the writer
isn't just appreciating a well-told story with some effective acting or
nice stylistic "touches" that are really just stylish embellishments
that don't do anything more than provide an appealing container for the
narrative. But your posts on Daves and Tourneur make me suspect you
aren't responding to their films in that way.

- Fred