Tales From the Warner Archives #4: "Gold of the Seven Saints" (Douglas, 1961)

You can learn a lot from reading any given comments thread over at Dave Kehr's website. Granted, the place is sometimes a nesting space for overly-vigorous haters of the Coen brothers, and there are one or two participants who seem largely consumed with the sound of their own virtual voices, but on the whole I'd say it's a paradise of erudition, passion, and information. Much of it courtesy of the host himself, who posted the following observation a couple of weeks back:

I saw a good movie last night: “Gold of the Seven Saints,” an obscure Gordon Douglas picture from 1961 that has surfaced in the Warner Archive Collection. It’s a micro-budgeted, black-and-white western (surely, one of the last of its kind), starring two of Warner’s up-and-coming television stars, Clint Walker and Roger Moore, as a pair of trappers who find a vein of gold, and then have to get their haul back to civilization by going through an outlaw gang led by Gene Evans and a private army led by a Mexican warlord (over)played by Robert Middleton. The excellent script, by Leigh Brackett and Leonard Freeman, has a Boetticher flavor to it, with its emphasis on psychological sussing-out, bluffs and betrayals (the two leads love but instinctively distrust each other, which they don’t see as a contradiction). But Douglas, with his bracing sobriety and unflinching apprehension of violence, pushes the action a bit further toward what would become Peckinpah-Leone territory. There’s an ending borrowed from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” but Douglas plays it quite differently, and I think more effectively, than Huston does, with a quiet, sensible stoicism rather than reaching for a grand cosmic statement. Visually, the film displays all of Douglas’s fondness for darkness and deep-focus space, and manages the rare feat of making Monument Valley look very different than it does in Ford’s work — desolate and threatening rather than mythic and grand. Very nice work from a filmmaker who always brought a high degree of care and commitment to whatever unlikely project he was assigned to — be it giant ants, FBI infiltrators or Liberace.

Well, that was enough to sell me on parting with a few bucks in order to get the Warner Archives disc of the film, and I'm pretty happy I did. I don't have much to add to what Dave said: I heartily ditto his appraisal of the script, for instance. I was most blown away, though, by the aforementioned depiction of Monument Valley. A fair number, alas, of know-somethingish, self-styled cinephiles out there like to rehearse their "takedowns" of something like The Searchers by beginning, "And who could actually live in Monument Valley, anyway? It's a freaking desert." Or some such other equally obvious observation. In any case, Douglas and cinematographer Joseph Biroc give the terrain a more "realistic" treatment and place in the story; it is a threatening environment. Aside from a brief prologue that sets the story in motion, the entire first third of the film is pretty much just Walker and Moore's characters dealing with the desert, and the oft-faraway newfound foes now coming after the duo and their gold.  It's terse, almost minimalist filmmaking of the highest order.

Near the end of their desert sojourn the duo find themselves literally walled in. It's going to take some kind of deus ex machina to deliver them from the band of bad guys led by a particularly slimy and sadistic Gene Evans. I don't think it's spoiling all too much to reveal that said deus ex machina arrives in the form of, yes, Chill Wills. 

Once Walker and Moore return to some semblance of "normal" society, the picture has a more conventional feel, but fortunately Evans isn't too far behind and the villain devises some pretty nasty tactics in order to persuade the duo to reveal the location of their gold.

Which leads to the Sierra Madre-derived finale. Dave's assertion that it's done more effectively here than in Huston's film is just the sort of thing that drives the know-somethingish types cited above to freak out over "dweeby" or "monkish" "ultra-auteurists." Kind of like if you remark to one of them that To Have and Have Not is a better film than Casablanca. How can anything be "more effective" than Walter Huston stomping his feet and laughing, they sputter; why, it's an iconic moment. So it is, and there's nothing that's going to make it any less iconic, just as "Put your lips together and blow" is never going to supplant "Here's looking at you, kid" in the lingua franca. Such assertions as ours are never made in the belief, or the desire for that matter, that such things will or even ought to occur. In any event, in terms of dramatic practice, the ending of Seven Saints is in fact terrifically handled, and unselfconsciously, at that.

Devotees of Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema may recall the critic's assertion that Douglas "could be dismissed as an efficient technician without too noticeable a personal style" and commendation that Douglas "didn't shirk his job despite the utmost provocation" when assigned to direct Liberace (the film was 1955's staggering Sincerely Yours). Dave's estimation which as we see also takes in I Was A Communist For The FBI and Them!, is more generous. For my money, Seven Saints combined with the aforementioned pictures, and the Frank Sinatra Tony Rome flicks of the '60s, move Douglas out of Sarris' "MIscellany" category and very nearly into "Expressive Esoterica."

Comments

[Asher]

"A fair number, alas, of know-somethingish, self-styled cinephiles out there like to rehearse their "takedowns" of something like The Searchers by beginning, "And who could actually live in Monument Valley, anyway? It's a freaking desert.""

Seriously? I always thought the obvious takedown of The Searchers, besides that it's not quite the unbridled depiction of a bigoted homicidal maniac that it's often described as, and is arguably a little more restrained than one would like, is that it's a film of brilliant parts and some really mediocre ones (the comic interludes, casting Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles and her whole subplot, some of the early scenes with Ward Bond). But the parts of the film that I used to think were pure dross have grown on me, and I'm not sure the movie would work without them. Perhaps the only real criticism you can level at The Searchers is that it's pitched on a rather epic and depersonalized scale and at times suffers a bit from the lack of a more distinctively Fordian touch.

[Tony Dayoub]

You had me at Clint Walker. Did you ever see CHEYENNE as a kid? He was a very magnetic lead on TV, and I'm surprised he never made it big in the movies (except for his appearance in THE DIRTY DOZEN).

[jwarthen]

Am surprised at how few of Douglas' films I've seen, but Dave K.'s "unflinching apprehension of violence" is a perfect capture of why RIO CONCHOS has stayed with me since I was 14: the usual fractious mismatched set of killers sent on a mission of extermination, and by the end, they plausibly sacrifice themselves to complete it. Anthony Mann always treated killing with gravity (the gut-shot deaf mute staggering down a ghost-town street to die in MAN OF THE WEST); the conclusion of Douglas' CONCHOS has the same endgame severity-- no zingers or gung ho.

[Paul]

"A fair number, alas, of know-somethingish, self-styled cinephiles out there like to rehearse their "takedowns" of something like The Searchers by beginning, "And who could actually live in Monument Valley, anyway? It's a freaking desert." Or some such other equally obvious observation. "
Seriously? In the parlance of my hometown of Dublin, Ireland anyone who starts up with that deserves the Seven Shades of Shite kicked out of them.

[Peter Nellhaus]

It's been years since I saw this on television on late night. I've been thinking a bit more about Leigh Brackett lately because of the brouhaha over Kathryn Bigelow's filmmaking, and Brackett's initial notice as a woman who "wrote like a man".

As for Douglas, I've come to appreciate his solid craftsmanship, most recently with a viewing of "Fortunes of Captain Blood".

[Michael Adams]

While Rio Conchos may very well be Douglas' masterpiece, lots of his lesser films are worth seeing, too. The Iron Mistress, also available from the Warner Archive, has its moments. Many of his low-budget efforts are quite good, especially San Quentin. The Falcon in Hollywood is one of the best in that series.

[James Russell]

The funny thing about freaking deserts is that people actually do live in them, sometimes even thrive in them. I know, I've seen them do it. High time I watched The Searchers again.

Out of interest, I know the Warner Archive releases are bare bones DVDRs, but do they at least do anamorphic transfers for widescreen films? I'd hope they put at least that much effort in.

[Glenn Kenny]

@ James: Yes, they do. In the case of "Seven Saints," my illustrations are pulled straight from the disc, which is anamorphic and very handsome overall.

[The Siren]

Re: The Searchers; as I recall Olive Carey makes a remark about how inhospitable the country is, a nod to those wondering how on earth anyone is farming in Monument Valley.

I Was a Communist for the FBI was easily my least favorite Shadows of Russia entry; I could not get into it, despite the fine camerawork. But now I definitely want to see Seven Saints.

About the Sierra Madre--I can't speak to the merits of this particular comparison since I haven't seen Seven Saints. I don't doubt the sincerity of Dave Kehr's reaction, nor yours, for a single second. But is it possible that the freshness of an unsung movie like the Douglas influences the viewpoint? Walter Huston's dance and Bogart's agonized face, as well as the Casablanca fadeout, have been so mythologized that they lose impact. It's like trying to look at "The Last Supper" with new eyes. I know that it helps me immensely to just stay away from a beloved movie for a while, lest familiarity breed, if not contempt, then fatigue.

[Escher]

ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY, man! Plus, you know, if you lived in Paris, back in January-February, you'd've had a chance to see a fairly complete Douglas retro at the Cinematheque Française: http://tinyurl.com/yce65nm

[jbryant]

Was looking forward to seeing this several months back on Encore Westerns, but they panned-and-scanned it (as usual). I think I mentioned this at Dave's place, but Netflix has a number of Douglas films for instant viewing, including THEM!, RIO CONCHOS and another Clint Walker vehicle, FORT DOBBS.

[Duggan]

Wasn't this supposed to be a followup to Rio Bravo with Hawks directing?
I thought I read that in Todd McCarthy's biography on him.

[Glenn Kenny]

Duggan, I just happen to have Todd's Hawks biography at my elbow, and you are more or less correct. In the wake of "Rio Bravo" Warners had set the film up for Hawks, but Hawks didn't want to do it, insisting on going forward with an Africa-set adventure picture...hey, weren't we just talking about "Hatari?" The resulting conflict severed relations between Hawks and the studio for good, and McCarthy relates the incident as an example of how ruthless and single-minded Hawks could be in following his own path. After letting Hawks keep the 80 grand they'd given him to prepare the script, "Warner quickly put the film into production," McCarthy wrote, in 1997. "[D]irected by Gordon Douglas[...]" he continued, "it is a film of no reputation, not even available on videotape."