This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
What Goes Around Comes Around.
Plot Overview
The movie is set in Arizona, circa
1880. The railroad is about to displace the Hawk and Hodges
stage line. Indian agent Dr. Alex Favor (Fredric March) with
his wife Audra (Barbara Rush) charter a special run to Bisbee
having absconded with embezzled funds meant to feed the Indians.
Highwaymen in the know waylay the stage but somehow
leave the money behind while taking Audra hostage. This results in
a Mexican standoff in the old San Pete mining camp where a
volunteer is needed to step out in the open to make the exchange.
The husband is not first in line.
Throughout the film a pecking order
is established by words & deeds. In order of value it goes
something like this: houseplant < dog < horse;
bastard < Indian < Mexican < soldier < white man <
educated white man < preacher. Women are in their shadows,
valued more when young. Indians break down into wild Indians (in
the mountains) and caught Indians (on a reservation.) Mexicans are
either docile or vaquero. Whites are bullies or Christians. There
are three examples of women: blond ingénue Doris Blake (Margaret
Blye), brunette “nice little soft” Audra, and “pretty
thorny” redhead Jessie Brown (Diane Cilento.) Sometimes they
appear in the same frame together. How they became attached to their
respective mates is like a chapter from Patrick Hanan:
Arranged marriage … was … the norm in most cultures until modern times.Lawrence Stone, in his study of marriage in England between 1500 and 1800, sets out a scheme of four “basic options” for the choice of marriage partners …. The options may be restated as follows: parental choice without input from the children; parental choice with the children holding a veto; choice by the children with the parents holding a veto; and choice by the children with the parents informed but not consulted. (Intro, ix–x)
The two-striper (Larry Ward) waiting in the station for the stage to take him to his wife-to-be, “all arranged for me and waiting,” is an example of that first kind. He's used to the army arranging his life and expected the station officials to honor his ticket instead of letting a bully bump him. Oh, well.
To avoid her father's veto, Doris eloped with Billy Lee (Peter Lazer) “getting away from a hardscrabble ranch on the Rogue River.”
Jessie married a nice, family favorite from Missouri whom she was sad to lose through western gunfire.
Audra became enamored with Alex her teacher when she was 18. It was a “love match.”
Ideology
The occasional comment on marriage reflects the advice
given by the apostle Paul. Ken Johnson, Th.D. quotes
Mathetes—a.d. 130—who studied under Paul:
“Christians follow the customs of their native lands in
regard to marriage, food, clothing, and conduct. They marry and
have children, but they never have abortions. They obey all the laws of
their country” (86.) In that biblical era, in cosmopolitan
Corinth, the arranged marriage motif would have prevailed.
Paul advises the Corinthians, (1Cor.
7:29-31) “brethren, the time is short: it remaineth,
that both they that have wives be as though they had none; And they
that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as
though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they
possessed not; And they that use this world, as not abusing it: for
the fashion of this world passeth away.” All the drama of
marriage can be distracting to a fellow. A married man must rise
above it. In the movie's conversation:
Jessie: “What did you get married for? So you got the right to sleep in the same bed?”
Billy Lee: “I guess.”
Jessie: “Well, that part of it isn't going to last, believe it or not. She'll get fat and you'll get old. Then what?”
Billy Lee: “I'm not worried about then. I'm worried about now. You try living with the 24-hour bellyaching and see how you like it.”
Jessie: “That's the price you pay if you want it where you can nudge it in the night.”
Women have reciprocal issues. This
shows up in instructions to widows, (1Cor. 7:39) “The wife …
if her husband be dead, … is at liberty to be married to
whom she will; only in the Lord.” “Only in the
Lord” has to do with (1Cor. 7:34) “The …
difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman
careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in
body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things
of the world, how she may please her husband.” Jessie was
shacked up with Sheriff Frank Braden (Cameron Mitchell) and asked
him to make an honest woman out of her. That's not the
permissible way for a widow to court as she's supposed to
“be holy both in body and in spirit,” thus courting
“in the Lord.”
At the station gang leader Cicero Grimes (Richard Boone) picks a fight with the soldier, claiming he called him a dirty name. All he called him was “you,” which would only be a bad word in special circumstances.
In the sacred
dialect of the King James Version (KJV), thee & thou are
second person singular pronouns referring to the one addressed, in
the objective & subjective case respectively. Plural would be
you or ye. Webster defines, “ye
pron you 1 — used orig. only as a plural pronoun of the
second person in the subjective case and now used esp. in ecclesiastical or literary
language and in various English dialects.”
Today's standard English employs you—sometimes you understood—in all 2nd person cases. This is a step down in language refinement. As H.W. Fowler discusses in an article:
Any word that does the work of two or more by packing several notions into one is a gain (the more civilized a language the more such words it possesses), if certain conditions are observed: it must not be cumbersome; it should for choice be correctly formed; & it must express a compound notion that is familiar enough to need a name. (175–76)
Thus actress is an improvement over female actor. Likewise is thee, thou, you, ye more refined than you, you, you, you, the latter four needing context from which to derive its number and case. The objections many Christians in general hold to believers marrying nonbelievers, despite the fact that St. Paul allows it, comes from stretching out his prohibition against mixed congregations of a plural ye, (2Cor. 6:14) “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: ...” way back to singular marriage in his earlier epistle. Marriage, however, is an individual matter, (1Cor. 7:7) “For I would that all men were even as I myself [celibate]. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.” It would require the singular pronoun thee or thou, not plural you or you-understood as modernized Bible versions have it. As George P. Marsh put it in an 1859 postgraduate lecture on the English Bible, (448–9):
the English Bible sustains, and always has sustained to the general English tongue, the position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unprofessional life; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art, all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man thinks of conforming to a standard that, because it is too common, can hardly be other than unclean?
Paul said he hasn't bilked anybody: (2Cor. 7:2) “we have … defrauded no man,”which some fathers back then would undoubtedly take issue with had he put the kibosh on favorable ($) wedding arrangements in the works.
Production Values
“” (1967) was directed by Martin Ritt. It was filmed in Panavision. It was adapted to a screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr from the Elmore Leonard novel. It stars Paul Newman, Richard Boone, Fredric March, Diane Cilento, Cameron Mitchell and Barbara Rush. The acting was excellent. Newman well personified the noble white savage. Cilento sometimes steals the show with her witty remarks.
The film passed certification by the standards back then. It gets wound tight with the action coming at the end. Production values pass muster. Runtime is 1 hour 51 minutes.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
In a tight spot the Americanized Mexican reflects on the fear of God, perhaps learned from a Catholic heritage. The Indian agent is an atheist.
This one is a cut above a mere shoot-'em-up. It's short enough one can appreciate its slow pace.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Well done action flick. Suitability for children: Not rated, passed code. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Fowler, H.W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. USA. Oxford UP. 1926–1946. Print.
Hanan, Patrick. An anthology of Stories From Ming China: Falling in Love. © 2006 University of Hawai'i Press. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. Print.
Marsh, George P. “Formation
of our English sacred dialect.”
Lectures on the English
Language. London: John Murray, 1863. Print.
——available to
read or download at www.bibles.n7nz.org.
Mathetes, Epistle to Diognetus 5. Quoted in Ken Johnson, Ancient Church Fathers. Copyright 2010 by Ken Johnson. San Bernadino, CA, 07 April 2018. Download print.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 270–271
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, Mass.: MERRIAM-WEBSTER. 1984. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org